Another keen observer, Kierkegaard, in his “Diary of a Seducer,” says:
“Love has many mysteries, and this first love is also a mystery, if not the greatest. Most men in their ardent passion are as if insane; they become engaged or commit some other stupidity, and in a moment it is all over, and they know once more what it has cost them, what they have lost.”
And, finally, a third eminent writer on eroticism, Rétif de la Bretonne, says:
“It is a folly of the same kind to trust the constancy of a young man of twenty years of age. At this age it is less a woman that one loves than women; one is intoxicated rather by sensual phenomena than by the individual, however lovable that individual may be.”
But to youth love is almost always no more than a beautiful memory, a vanishing paradise. There clings to it something imperishable, which has, however, no binding force.
And just as to every man the love of youth appears ideal in character, precisely because it is not subjected to the rude considerations of reality, so also in every subsequent love it is almost always the first beginnings only in which true beauty and deep perception are experienced.
“A thousand years of tears and pains,” Goethe makes his Stella say, “could not counterpoise the happiness of the first glance, the trembling, the stammering, the approach and the withdrawal, the self-forgetfulness, the first fugitive ardent kiss, and the first gently breathing embrace.”
The eternal duration of such feelings is contradicted by an anthropologico-biological phenomenon of human sexuality, which I have described as “the need for sexual variety.”[169] Human love, as a whole and in its individual manifestations, is dominated and influenced by the need for change and variety. Schopenhauer drew attention to this primordial and fundamental phenomenon of human love; he was wrong, however, in limiting it to the male sex.[170] As I have already insisted, this general human need for variety in sexual relationships is to be regarded rather as a general principle of explanation of admitted facts, than as a desirable ideal. On the contrary, in my opinion, faithfulness, constancy, and durability in love, bring under control and diminish this need for sexual variety, through the recognition of the eminent advances in civilization by means of which the human amatory life will be further developed and perfected in a higher sense. But the facts of daily observation are not to be shuffled out of existence by any kind of hypocrisy or prudery. They must be faced and dealt with.
First, it is an incontestable fact that the so-called “only” love is one of the greatest rarities; that, on the contrary, in the life of the majority of men and women a frequent repetition and renewal of love-sentiments and love-relationships occurs. For the most part these loves occur at successive intervals. Stiedenroth, in his admirable “Psychology,” makes the following remarks regarding these successive outbursts of passion and the transitory character of the feeling of love:
“Since no two human beings are precisely alike, one will at one time love passionately one only; in succession, however, several can be loved, and the opinion that one person only can be loved in a lifetime originates in rare dreams regarding the ideal, of which a quite false representation is made. An object can indeed appear which transcends the ideal hitherto conceived; but passion does not need a fully developed ideal for its first foundation; it needs merely that which in the theory of the feelings has been found to be a necessary condition of love. That every love gladly thinks itself immortal, lies in the nature of the case, for on account of the overwhelming character of the sensations of love, it is impossible to understand how they can ever come to an end. Experience, however, teaches us the contrary, and insight enables us to recognize the reason.”[171]