The egoistic-social instinct then regards the world from a demi-human standpoint, looking for self-aggrandizement unconsciously, inevitably. The erotic instinct alone takes in the aspect of the world as affecting one other person too, and their children when they come along.
The love instinct seeks gratification through the gratifications of one member of the opposite sex; and fails to find the first except through the second.
It is impossible, from the viewpoint of this book, to love more than one member of the opposite sex at once. Men or women who think they do this are deceiving themselves. It is impossible to call that feeling love which has in it any reservations whatever. Every thought, every feeling, every act that could not be communicated to the mate, diminishes by so much the integrity of the personality in whom it originates and initiates an inceptive disintegration of personality.
By this denial that love at first sight is a fact is meant that either of two things is more likely than anything else to happen in the cases where men and women fall thus instantaneously in love with each other and the union is continued through life, which is indeed comparatively rare.
Either the pair are utterly ignorant of what true love really implies and maintain for years a passionless mariage de convenance; or one of the pair, realizing the emptiness of joy that marks their marital existence, is too proud to acknowledge failure. It is conceivable that the woman may realize how unerotic her husband is, and feeling unable, as most women are indeed, to change her husband’s ideas, to supply him with the ideal he should have had himself, naturally gives up what is essentially for her a hopeless struggle.
§ 47
It is also conceivable that the man, profoundly ignorant as many men are of the erotic needs of women, may utterly fail, in his behaviour towards his wife, to avail himself of the inestimable privilege he has of making himself complete man in the only way possible for a man to do. Through his entire married life he may suppose, in his ignorance, that his wife is by nature cold, unsympathetic and unresponsive. He is unlikely to find by accident the magic key to unlock the treasure of her passion, yet it exists, and he may, though he has fallen in love with her at first sight and she with him, be and remain the rest of his life blind to the possibilities quite within his reach.
In either of these cases love at first sight is as helpless as any other love. The term has no very deep meaning except in so far as all love is love at first sight.
In the majority of people true passionate love can never be experienced at first. Therefore no marriage is ever complete in the sense of ended, as far as possibilities of further development are concerned, until the death of one of the partners. If this is the case, then, it constitutes the unanswerable argument for indissoluble marriage, monogamy, not only with one partner but with that partner for life, providing, of course (an exceedingly rare combination), that it has not been actually demonstrated that there are real and insuperable incompatibilities. No marriage except a life marriage can be complete any more than a single demi-human existence can be complete until death has rendered any further development impossible.
Just as a man can never know till the end of his life all the possibilities his life held for him, and should endeavour in every way to develop to its fullest every potentiality of expression of his personality, so no pair can ever know until the end of their joint life all the potentialities of the different ages of married life; for each age has its own.