... unmake him from a common man
But not complete him to an uncommon one....
It was no organic growth of the personality, but only a straining of self that love called forth.
But she who loved him will watch till her eyes are weary for what she has seen but once!
Those who have loved them deeply learn from these, in one way or another, inadequate persons the most dearly-bought truth in the knowledge of human nature, a truth that the heart acknowledges last of all: that even if we poured out our own blood in streams for any one—we could not thereby give him a drop of richer or more noble blood than is found in his own heart.
Many have learned this secret in that kind of marriage, where secure friendship and faithful comradeship abounded; just those feelings, in fact, which are recommended as the infallible remedy for love’s mistakes.
How often has not one of these married people active for and with the other, found out that they never bring their mate into spiritual activity, that the soul of one has never reached the soul of the other? Outside observers think them suited like “hand in glove.” The image is significant, for a glove is empty and meaningless when it does not enclose a hand. But like hand to hand they are not suited! Therefore it not unfrequently occurs that some day one of them is seized by a passionate longing to meet with another hand, which shall be strongly and quietly grasped in his own and thus double its power; that the voice, which has continually spoken into empty space—whence a faithful echo has unfailingly answered—will finally be dumb from the longing to receive an answer from another voice, in words that were never heard before.
Not a few marriages include men who have had such fine thoughts, dreamed such fair dreams of woman, that they have desired to win her senses only through her soul and have disdained to offer her other than their best, the richest treasures of their personality. But perhaps such a man has a wife who understands only money-making and desires only the pleasures of love. If he offers all the glories of his soul, she does not even suspect when a mood is at its height; for her silence is never eloquent; she is incapable of waiting for another’s thought; has no patience with what is difficult of comprehension, and will always receive the unusual with dull misunderstanding or gay superiority.
The gulf perhaps began to open between them when one became aware of the other’s absence at a moment when he himself was most present; or when one felt that their bodies stood between their souls, the other that their souls stood between their bodies; or when one felt a restriction of liberty from the other’s superior spiritual or sensual force; or when one found that he could never show his innermost being without its putting the other out of humour. Thus two persons, each one innocent, may make each other profoundly solitary while sharing the same bed and board. Neither receives from the other what his innermost nature needs—and what one gives is only a constraint upon the other’s nature. Not a note in the soul of one is tuned to the same pitch as the other’s; not a movement in the blood of one is capable of enrapturing the other’s. Now it is unbearable dissimilarities, now unbearable similarities, that cause the trouble; each finds in the other “all the virtues he detests but none of the faults he loves.” With all this, perfect outward peace may prevail; nay, respect and devotion in a certain sense. That this is the fortune of innumerable marriages is overlooked in general, since married life usually continues—unless a third appears.