The wife is likely to be young, sophisticated, smart as a whip -- often a girl who has sacrificed a promising career for marriage. She knows the power of the sex urge and how to use it to manipulate her husband.

The husband is usually a well-educated professional, preoccupied with his job -- often an organization man whose motto for getting ahead is: ``Don't rock the boat.''

Sometimes this leads to his becoming demandingly dominant in marriage. Hemmed in on the job and unable to assert himself, he uses the sex act so he can be supreme in at least one area.

More often, though, he is so accustomed to submitting to authority on the job without argument that he lives by the same rule at home.

Some psychologists, in fact, suggest that career bound husbands often are more to blame for topsy-turvy marriages than their wives. The wife's attempt at control, these psychologists contend, is sometimes merely a pathetic effort to compel her husband to pay as much attention to her as he does to his job.

Naturally no woman can ever completely monopolize the sexual initiative. Unless her husband also desires sex, the act cannot be consummated. Generally, however, in such marriages as those cited, the husband is at his wife's mercy.

``The pattern,'' says Dr. Morton Schillinger, psychologist at New York's Lincoln Institute for Psychotherapy, ``is for the husband to hover about anxiously and eagerly, virtually trembling in his hope that she will flash him the signal that tonight is the night.''