According to Westermark elderly men generally fall more easily in love with middle-aged women than with young girls. No doubt this is often the case when reason and love predominate, but it is necessary to avoid generalization, and it is curious to observe how often very old men become enamored of quite young girls, as the latter may fall in love with old men. It is common knowledge that young girls do not marry old graybeards solely for their money or their name. No doubt this is not uncommon, but I have often seen girls of eighteen or twenty fall in love with old roués, when money, name and position were theirs and not the man's. However, in such cases it is most often the old man who is amorous. Westermark maintains that this condition is not normal, and we shall see that very often it is a case of commencing senile dementia, a pathological cerebral condition in which the sexual appetite becomes suddenly revived.
The love of a young girl for an old man may be explained by the intellectual superiority of the old man or by the absence of another object for love. It is often also due to hysteria and consequently pathological.
In old age, when the sexual life of two conjoints is extinguished, there remains a purified love which colors the evening of their life with autumn tints. The modern detractors of marriage too often forget this phenomenon. No doubt the evening of conjugal life is often troubled with discord and sorrow, but then it is usually a question of "mariage de convenance," marriage for money or position, mutual misunderstanding, or irreflective amorous intoxication. Quarrels may also arise when pathological conditions become introduced into marriage.
In woman, sexual ontogeny is not the same as in man. She matures earlier and more rapidly. In our race, a woman at eighteen is sexually mature; between eighteen and twenty-five she is in the best condition for sexual life; toward fifty the menopause occurs, and with it cessation of fecundity. Hence the period during which a woman is fecund is much shorter than in man and terminates much earlier.
Owing to this, the development of the intellectual and sentimental irradiations of the sexual appetite in woman is more rapid than in man. A young girl is much more mature and full grown as regards her reproductive power than a young man. These phenomena extend to the whole mental life of woman, who is less capable of an ulterior development in old age than man, because she generally becomes settled and automatic much more rapidly than the latter. No doubt these phenomena are partly due to the defective mental education of women, but this explanation is insufficient. Here again we must distinguish the phylogenetic disposition of woman from the effects of education during her ontogenetic development.
The sexual appetite of woman manifests itself at first in vague desires, in a want of love, and does not as a rule develop locally till after coitus. It often follows that in ontogenetic evolution the sexual appetite of women increases at a more advanced age (between thirty and forty). At this age women often become enamored with young boys, whom they seduce easily. Widows are especially disposed to form unions with men younger than themselves; these unions are rarely happy, for the woman who is older than her husband easily becomes jealous, and the husband soon becomes tired of a woman whose charms have faded. We can therefore affirm that, as a rule, in order to be both normal and lasting, a monogamous union requires that the husband should be from six to twelve years older than his wife, and that the latter should marry as young as possible.
In the sexual ontogeny of normal woman, pregnancies, childbirth, the nursing and education of children play an infinitely greater role than the sexual appetite. These important events in woman's life, together with affection for her husband occupy a great part of the cerebral activity of every woman, and are at the same time the conditions for her true happiness.
We should expect the sexual appetite in woman to diminish or cease at the menopause; but this is not usually the case, and elderly women are sometimes tormented by the sexual appetite, which is all the more painful because men are not attracted by them. Such hyperæsthesia cannot, however, be considered as normal; most often the sexual appetite diminishes with age and is replaced, as in man, by the tranquil love of old age, of which we have spoken.
Old women are often spoken of with contempt. No doubt, unsatisfied passions and wounded feelings of all kinds, want of intellectual culture and high ideals, and especially a pathological condition of the brain, make many old women anything but amiable. I am, however, convinced that the elevation of woman's social position, and greater care in her education, will considerably facilitate the development of her faculties. Education should not develop mundane qualities in women, but depth of sentiment. There are many aged women who can be cited as examples of activity and perseverance, for their sound and clear judgment, as well as for their affability and simplicity of manners. Although their intellectual productiveness ceases earlier than that of man, this in no way excludes an excellent and persevering activity of mind, combined with much judgment and sentimental qualities. A woman who is growing old and has lost the members of her family, especially her husband, requires some object to replace them in her affection. To devote herself to social activity will be the best antidote against the peevish, querulous or sorrowful moods which so easily take possession of the aged woman. It appears that love, which is a phylogenetic derivative of the sexual appetite, and which in middle life is intimately associated with this appetite, becomes afterwards more and more independent of it and then requires more compensation. There is here a great adaptation of love to life, an adaptation which it is necessary to bear in mind.
In infancy the individual is naturally egoistic; his appetites all tend to self-preservation. There are even then, however, great individual differences, and we meet with children who are endowed with a remarkable sentiment of duty and a great sensibility to the troubles of others. After puberty man's sexual desire leads him to love, toward dual egoism, and this desire becomes the principal factor in the reproduction of the species. In old age the individual has no reproductive aims to fulfill; his life is only a burden on society, if it is not directed with a view to benefit others and society in general. By expansion and purification love, at first sexual, is gradually transformed into purely humanitarian love, i.e., altruistic or social. At least this is what it should be, and then the fundamental biogenetic law of Haeckel (ontogeny is an abridged repetition of phylogeny) will receive an ultimate confirmation. Our primitive unicellular animal ancestor lived for itself alone; later on sexual reproduction without love was established; then conjugal and family love appeared (birds, monkeys, mammals, etc.), finally social love or altruism was produced, i.e., the sense of social solidarity based on the sentiment of duty.