In marriage, more than one husband thinks he ought to be separated from his wife and children so as not to spoil them. There is no need of a long explanation to show the fallacy of this idea. To be complete, love should be reciprocal, and to remain mutual it requires mutual education in marriage. Every husband should above all be separated from himself, and not from his wife. If each one did all in his power to promote the happiness of the other, this altruistic effort would strengthen his own sentiments of sympathy. This requires a constant and loyal effort on each side, but it avoids the illusion of a false love, provoked by the senses, vanishing like smoke or becoming changed to hatred. Without being blind to the weaknesses of his partner he must learn to like them as forming part of the person to whom he has devoted his heart, and employ all his skill in correcting them by affection, instead of increasing his own weakness by leaning on them. It is necessary, therefore, neither to admire nor to dislike the defects of the loved one, but to try and attenuate them by aid of integral love.
Love has been defined as "dual egoism." The reciprocal adulation of two human beings easily degenerates into egoistic enmity toward the rest of the human race, and this often reacts harmfully on the quality of love. Human solidarity is too great, especially at the present day, for such exclusivism in love not to suffer.
I would define ideal love as follows: After mature consideration, a man and a woman are led by sexual attraction, combined with harmony of character, to form a union in which they stimulate each other to social work, commencing this work with their mutual education and that of their children.
Such a conception of love refines this sentiment and purifies it to such an extent that it loses all its pettiness, and it is pettiness which so often causes it to degenerate, even in its most loyal forms. The social work in common of a man and woman united by true affection, full of tenderness and devotion for one another, mutually encouraging each other to perseverance and to action, will easily triumph over petty jealousies and all other instinctive reactions of the phylogenetic exclusiveness of natural love. The sentiments of love will thus become ever more ideal, and will no longer provide egoism with the soil of idleness and comfort on which it grows like a weed.
Inconvenience of Abstinence from Sexual Connection Between Married Couples by Medical Orders.—It is a matter of common observation that in marriage, at least during mature life, sexual connection strengthens and maintains love, even when it only constitutes part of that which cements tenderness and affection. In many cases I have observed that medical orders, given no doubt with good intentions, and forbidding sexual connection, on account of certain morbid conditions, have had the effect of cooling the sentiments of love and sympathy and producing indifference which soon becomes incurable. Physicians should always bear this in mind in their prescriptions, of which they too often see the immediate object only. The medical prohibition of sexual connection in marriage should be reserved for cases of absolute necessity. For example: A virtuous and capable man marries for love an intelligent but somewhat ill-developed girl. The marriage is happy and they have several children. But after a time certain local disorders in the woman induce the medical man to forbid sexual connection with her husband. They begin to sleep in separate rooms, and little by little intimate love becomes so far cooled that the renewal of sexual relations later on becomes impossible. The husband's sentiments are so much affected as to render him unfaithful to his moral principles, and to lead him occasionally to visit prostitutes. Although they have become essentially strangers to each other, the husband and wife continue to live together an apparently happy life; but this is far from always the case.
Durable Love.—It may be stated as a principle that true and elevated love is durable, and that the sudden passion which lets loose the sexual appetite toward an individual of the opposite sex, hitherto a stranger, in no way represents the measure of true love. Passion warps the judgment, conceals the most evident faults, colors everything in celestial purple, renders the lovers blind, and veils the true character of each from the other. We are only speaking here of cases where each is loyal and where the sexual appetite is not associated with the cold calculations of egoism. Reason only returns when the first tempest of a passion which seemed insatiable has subsided, when the honeymoon of marriage, or of a free union, has passed. Then only is it possible to see if what remains is true love, indifference, hatred or a mixture of these three sentiments, capable or not of becoming more or less adaptable and tolerable. This is why sudden amours are always dangerous, and why only long and profound mutual acquaintance before marriage can lead to a happy and lasting union.
Even in this case the unforseen is not absent, for it is very rarely that one knows a man and his ancestry; moreover, acquired diseases or mental anomalies may cause his character to degenerate later on.
Let us now examine some psychic phenomena more or less connected with love. For reasons which we have mentioned the irradiations of sexual love are on the whole less developed in man than in woman.
PSYCHIC IRRADIATIONS OF LOVE IN MAN
Masculine Audacity.—In the normal male the sentiment of sexual power favors self-exaltation, while the contrary sentiment of impotence, or even that of mediocre sexual power, depresses this sentiment of exaltation. Yet, in reality, the sexual power of man has not the capital importance for a normal and virgin woman that men imagine, influenced as they are by self-exaltation; what imposes on women is especially masculine audacity, and in sexual matters this increases with experience and practice. The company of prostitutes often renders men incapable of understanding feminine psychology, for prostitutes are hardly more than automata trained for the use of male sensuality. When men look among these for the sexual psychology of woman they only find their own mirror.