This will give the motive power for the attainment of ever higher forms of erotic organisation a power which the Buddha-like calm of indissoluble marriage has left unused.
It is sad that this truth—which was already clear to the noble minds of the Courts of Love—should still need proclaiming; for one of the reasons given in these Courts for love being impossible in marriage is this: that woman cannot expect from her husband the delicate conduct that a lover must show, since the latter only receives by favour what the husband takes as his right.
When divorce becomes free, the attention to each other’s emotions, the delicacy of conduct and the desire to captivate by being always new, which belong to the period of engagement, will be continued in married life. As in the early days of love, each will allow the other full freedom in all essential manifestations of life, but will exercise control over his own casual moods, whereas marriage now as a rule reverses this happy state of things.
The security of possession now puts to sleep the eagerness of acquisition; the compulsion to win anew will brace the energy in this as in every other connection.
A fidelity thus won will be the only sort that will be thought worth having in the future. A craving for happiness more sensitive than the present may one day marvel at the legally insured fidelity of our time, as at its inheritance of wealth. In both cases it will have been seen that only one’s exertion of force brings happiness and gives that felicity of victory before which hands stretched out to steal shrink back.
The believers in Life are everywhere distinguished by their determination to give to every relation the value of the unique, the stamp of the exceptional, that which has never been before and will never come again. Like the worshippers of Life of the Renaissance, those of our time have begun to recover the power of strong enjoyment and strong suffering which is always the sign of increasing spiritual unity, a new gathering of force through a new religious feeling.
To this view of life the permanence of happiness will be less important than its completeness while it lasts.
Spinoza, who described jealousy as no one else has done, has also uttered this deep saying of love: The greater the emotion we hope that the loved one will experience through us, and the more the loved one is moved by joy in his relation to us, the greater also will be our own happiness in love.
People of the present day have begun to distinguish the idea of this “greatest joy” from lifelong proprietorship; and therewith jealousy in its lower form has begun to disappear.