§ 80
“Dear, why has it taken us twenty years to love each other as we do now?”
“It was our ignorance, which was so dense that it did not know it was ignorant. That’s the blackest kind. What we knew was that we had affection for each other, and for our children, but the lack of passion was not clearly sensed, because there was no article in our creed of love that declared passion to be a necessary factor in our marriage. We knew the phrase ‘all in all to each other’; we identified ourselves in countless superficial ways in addition to the really solid identification represented in our children, but while we did it with our intellects we really did not do it with our hearts. We have not been truly united, truly fused, until this day.
“It needn’t have taken us twenty years, or even one year, for there are people who instinctively soar in the same ecstatic flight in their honeymoon, that we achieved only after twenty years of external devotion and watchfulness. But those whose early married life is instantly complete in total physical and emotional fusion think everyone else is the same as they are and they don’t know what they have any more than we did not know what we did not have. A colour-blind man in a world of people all colour-blind would not suspect his affliction. Possibly it wouldn’t be an affliction. He might only laugh at the extraordinary persons who say they can see colours in things visible, just as we now consider people freaks who say they can see colour in sounds.”
“Do you think, dear, that most people are blind to the kind of love we see now?”
“I do, for the vision of the circular rainbow on top of the cloud is something that really requires a certain fine sensitivity that is the product of civilization, and depends on the many factors of civilized life. I could not, as my remote ancestors could, carry you off your feet in a literal sense, and dominate you by sheer physical strength, which would have been the only earthbound flight possible with men of that age. Civilization has transmuted physical strength into mental, moral and spiritual strength. And just as physical strength was sensibly evident in every action and motion of the body, so now, in our present state of civilization, it is obscured or obliterated and every mental reaction to our environment is taking its place. To some women the strength of this mental reaction is invisible, and even today they can love with passion only the physically perfect man. But the majority of women now have been educated to the point of realizing that physical strength may be present in men whose mental and moral development is very small and that mental and moral strength may exist even in the men whose physique is slight and even frail.”
“Do you think you’re so much stronger mentally, morally and spiritually than you were? Did you cultivate that strength consciously? Could you tell others how to do it?”
“Yes, dear one, to all three questions, and so are you. The thing that finally touched off this day’s passionate union was our realization, helped by the increasing frankness forced by modern science on all vital matters, that sex life is a part of the love life, and that not only is sex not exclusively physical, but it is more mental than physical. Men as ancient as Ovid knew that love is an art, but they did not know it as well as we do today. If it is an art, it can be taught, it must be taught. The reason it has not been taught is the taboo on sex. But that is being lifted gradually and people are beginning to realize that sexless love is as impossible as birth is impossible without the fusion of male and female germ cells. The ancient love manuals were all composed by men to enable men to get greater physical pleasure out of what they called love. The modern idea is that man and woman together are each to contribute an equal and complementary part to a spiritual fusion comparable to the fusion of two human germ cells, and that as the male cell causes a reaction on the entirety of the female cell, so the female cell causes a total reaction on the entirety of the male cell. To say that either absorbs the other is quite misleading. They stand side by side and merely melt together, forming another different cell which is the combination of all the properties of the two. This idea of love implies that the two lovers be equally frank and open in every way, concealing nothing of their own feelings from each other.”
“But, dearest, some women, I’m sure, are unable to express themselves, and others instinctively avoid revealing their true feelings, fearing perhaps to reveal because they may be giving away something it might be to their advantage to keep. They think that if they let any man, even their newly married husband, know how much they love him, they will cheapen themselves in their husband’s eyes, where they desire to be valued the most.”
“Do you think you would love me less if you felt you owned me less? If you did, your love has possibly too much of ownership in it. Love is not possession, any more than it is the inability to possess.”