Among intellectual persons mere instinct becomes more and more powerless until it is almost totally extinguished. True love among them is, then, a voluntary act. The plans for its accomplishment are elaborated in the mind slowly and intelligently. It has then all the qualities of true friendship, combined with an affection in which sensual desire is working to a greater or less extent only unconsciously. As fusing body and mind it may become one of the strongest, deepest and most influential of the passions of our nature. It opens up horizons above and beyond the earth so vast that this mundane sphere dwindles into insignificance.
Woman’s love.—In emotional natures love exerts a predominant and frequently even supreme influence upon the whole consciousness of the individual. It produces effects upon his judgment, his fantasy and his will. It excites conceptions borrowed from the domain of sex and gives to all the work of the brain an erotic tendency and a sexual polarity.
Now, the woman lives more by her emotions than the man. The part she plays in the propagation of the kind is also by far the more important one. She has to supply the whole material for the formation of the new being; the man only supplies the stimulation to this heroic work. The woman’s centre of sexual activity is, therefore, more developed. The activity of the generative centres occupies an important position in the activity of her brain as a whole. Sexual life concerns her more nearly, more deeply and more lastingly than the man. She is able to do nothing else but love. Sexual matters imperiously mingle with all her motives and influence all her aims. To her love is life. Marriage is her highest ideal, and domestic happiness is and ever will be her ultimate aim.[AL]
Women, even maidens, says Hume, take more offence at satires upon matrimony than taunts upon their sex. Woman knows the attraction her sex has upon the other, and smiles at the insincerity of sex-criticism. But matrimony is holy to her. She has a natural tendency to regard wedded love as the single aim and substance of the life of human beings. Sexual consciousness is stronger in her than in man, and her need of true love is greater. She lives largely in her affections, and her constant desire is to attract and please.
In her natural state the woman, therefore, possesses a more distinctly developed ideal. On dissecting and analyzing the female heart at any age, and however married, we should probably find that the original ideal is still lingering there. Woman is constantly groping and making experiments, whereby she attempts to realize the ideal of her dreams in the actual men of her acquaintance. The instinct of selection is very important to her. By it she recognizes her affinity, the man best fitted by nature to father her children. She unconsciously feels the need of a partner who will organically compliment her. She possesses an instinctive sensation of what is organically necessary to her for the continuation and intensification of her qualities in the offspring.
For the woman the step of choosing a partner is the most important act of her life. She has an instinctive sensation that she ought not to make a mistake, and is extremely careful to avoid the least likelihood of error. She instinctively feels that her mistakes cannot be corrected. She is monoandric in character. She is aware that purely sensual love cannot last. Hence she looks more for mental merits, and has a high appreciation of a fine character. She is looking for qualities that will outlive the freshness of physical charms. Her innate solicitude is to continue the love-charm all through married life. Hence she is governed by ideas of the sublime and the beautiful. Only a man endowed with such qualities can inspire in her true love and its unsurpassed pleasure and joy in life. When so inspired, she surrounds the object of her love with the halo of perfection.
The man, says Dessoir, is able to accomplish and find pleasure in sex activity without his soul partaking in it, but the woman does not find gratification in this activity if the soul has not been first excited by the beauty, strength and personality of her partner.
Love to a woman is an exalted and noble thing; she stakes her life upon it. She has, therefore, to be more fastidious in her choice of a consort than the man. This partly explains the mystery of modesty and coyness. She remains passive while she is wooed for her favor. Love, says Walker, is the empire of woman. The consciousness of weakness in woman leads her instinctively to her dissimulation, her finesse, her little contrivances, her manners, her graces and her coquetry. By these means she simultaneously endeavors to create love, and not to show what she feels, while by means of modesty she feigns to refuse what she desires to grant.
By an imperious power and charming tyranny she tries to prevent the man she loves from stirring from her side. She is ever desirous to fascinate and bewitch him. She feels herself to be a powerful centre of love and attraction around which everything ought to revolve. The woman, says Kant, has from early girlhood the confidence in her ability to please; the youth, the fear to displease. He is, therefore, shy in the presence of women. His desire is to be governed—before marriage—hence the chivalry of youth, while the woman’s desire is to rule. She wants man to surround her with an insatiable desire. She wishes to be loved and yearns to evoke man’s admiration for her by all her womanly qualities. She gives herself up entirely and irrevocably and never forgives the chosen possessor for examining too little the value of his treasure.
Obstructions of love’s development.—Healthy and natural love is always clearly conscious of its purpose, the ideal is always in existence, waiting for the opportunity to meet the materialized duplicate. Men and women have an unconscious sensation of the qualities of their ideals of the other sex, that by their union their respective qualities may be transmitted in an intensified degree to their offspring. Hence if the instinct has not become dulled by monetary considerations, if social reasons, religious prejudices or customs do not rise to confuse and pervert the instinct, men and women will, should there be many from whom to choose, select with unerring certainty the one who most closely approximates the psychic ideal which they have elaborated within themselves at the moment of sexual maturity.