§ 69
The love drama is the term that applies to the relations of one man and one woman for the time when they devote themselves to each other. It may be an hour or a lifetime, but the hour-long period surely is a pitiful experience, a one-act farce, compared with the grandeur of the lifelong relation. A man who thinks he prefers a succession of short periods with different women condemns himself unnecessarily to a course of action which resembles the career of a tea-tester. He may become a connoisseur in various flavours but he cannot learn much about women. He is a narrow specialist with really no wide knowledge. Moreover such a man almost never tests his own effect on women, but merely the different effects of women on himself; and is therefore merely autoerotic, merely playing with himself; and his various instruments are virtually impersonal.