This is the meaning of love plus continence. In the majority of cases its damage stops there. In a few cases, however, especially when the sex cravings of one of the mates have been so successfully repressed that they are no longer experienced consciously, symbolical nightmares of the most exhausting kind, hysterical disturbances during the waking hours, compulsions and obsessions of all sorts, reveal to the psychoanalyst that lava is boiling under the apparently extinct cone of a safe volcano.
The platonic individual, like the puritan, is either oversexed or undersexed.
The oversexed must surround themselves with protective measures lest their violent cravings may lead them into socially punishable acts. The simplest neurotic expedient is to utter a complete denial, whenever possible a public one, of the existence of sexual cravings, and then to be forced by one's statements into living up to an absurd self-imposed standard.
Utterances and Conduct. This at times results in most grotesque conflicts between utterance and conduct. We see for instance the much married Mrs. Eddy who as the witty Theodore Schroeder remarked, had many more husbands than children, stating that the pleasures of the flesh "are always wrong unless the physiologic factor can be excluded from consciousness" (a rather cryptic sentence) and also that "generation rests on no sexual basis."
Thy hysteric whose volcanic outbursts supply her with a morbid sexual relief for which she rejects all responsibility, for she is unconscious at the time is generally in her private and public life a woman of great repressions and perfect behavior, likely to sneer at every mention of a sex urge.
In other cases, platonic love is an attempt at creating an artificial value thru destroying a natural, biological human function.
Oracles and Prophecies. In ancient times it was observed that people deprived of any sexual gratification made at times mysterious utterances which were considered as an emanation of some divine intelligence.
Those utterances were nothing but hysterical ravings, accepted as oracles, prophecies, etc.
Our praise of continence, practiced even when it is unnecessary, (as in the case of lawfully married mates), is, after all, a survival of such superstitious beliefs based on misunderstood morbid phenomena.
Modern science, especially the new science of endocrinology, has shown that to every display of sexual activity corresponds an outpouring of hormonic secretions which benefits the entire system.