§ 70
Man is instinctively embarrassed upon rousing a woman to full passion, and finding it plays so much greater a part in her life than in his, and that it requires so much more attention on his part than he feels he has time to give.
That may explain why some men are so easily satisfied with a woman’s half love and shy from it when it begins fully to develop. They run from one woman to another, shirking the labour of drinking because they have not the stomach to drink love to the lees.
“Sippers,” they might be called, or “tea-testers.” The tester is doomed to a sample. He not only never consumes a full cup but never swallows a drop. He has not the power to hold out. No man could drink a hundred cups of different consignments of tea. Nor can one man thoroughly experience more than one woman. The sippers of women would be as disconcerted as a tea-tester who should be ordered to drink full cups of tea to report on a hundred samples, if they were expected really to know the women they sample. Their disconcertment would amount to an actual impotence.
§ 71
The essential unsatisfactoriness of the promiscuous sex life is experienced poignantly by most men who attempt it. One wealthy man who kept numerous mistresses, seventeen at one time, to be exact, came to an analyst to see if he could not get some help in unifying his life. It was not that he had any troubles coming from any acts on the part of the women. Most of them knew of his relations with the others, and professed, at any rate, to be free from jealousy. This is enough to show that he did not love any of them.
Half consciously he realized that he had lost or never learned the truly erotic art and though he attended to the large businesses he owned, he felt a complete dissatisfaction with his own life not because it was sinful and criminal but because it did not give him any real sense of accomplishment. He was unmarried and among his large acquaintance of marriageable young women there was one, whose femininity, he recognized, was so rich that while, for many reasons he would have liked to propose marriage to her, he knew he would be unable to control her erotism.
Knowing full well that he controlled the erotism of not a single one of his seventeen mistresses, he correctly inferred that his methods were faulty, and sought confidential help from the analyst to bring into full consciousness the reasons for his attempting in the future to cultivate a true and deep love for one woman.
His methods were shown to be faulty because of the fact that his clandestine relations with the numerous women were on a plane exclusively or too predominantly physical. He was made to realize that love is not love that does not include the entire personality of the lover, physical, mental and spiritual.