Possibly getting all of her at one stroke may be the root thought in Don Juanism. Jus primæ noctis may have originated from the idea that the noble lord should get all there was in the vicinity to get; and he was exercising his right to own and get everything in sight. The men who cool in their affections (or whose passions cool) immediately after the possession of the persons of their love objects may be inspired by exactly this egoistic-social thought, that there is a possession that may be acquired by means of one love episode, after which the woman has no more to give.
§ 86
In phantasying, in his own ecstasy, the complete surrender of the woman (cf. [§ 158]), a man may also phantasy her being exhausted, dry like an eaten orange, or, like a flower, drained of its honey by a bee; not realizing that the beginning of a woman’s love is only the beginning of an infinite growth, which he alone is able to develop for himself, and which no other man can develop for him—that, in short, a man who deserts one woman after another is simply showing an essentially perverted appetite.
What any one of these tasted and rejected women might later be developed into, in the shape of a full-blooded rich, warm femininity, he has not the intelligence to conceive. Possibly the cynical roué might say—look at the older women, are many of them attractive? To which we should reply no, but the reason they are not is simply that they were not properly loved into a state of full erotic development, in which they would have preserved the attractiveness of youth.
§ 87
The only true human love drama is one that has an organic relation to a whole lifetime of love. To the Don Juan type of ravisher of virgins the love episode, as part of a life drama with unity in it, does not exist. He satisfies himself with beginnings, with staking out foundations for other people to build and live in the homes constructed by their hands, not realizing, for his imagination is poor and weak, how soon his little stakes will be pulled up and thrown away by the first workers on the house, even if they do not entirely reject his plan’s outlines.
The only true love of a man for a woman is that in which he studies her reactions to his own behaviour, and cultivates that power of his, which is the innate power residing in any whole man, to control the entire emotional life of one woman, let her intellectual life be what it may.
“Why,” the man of the world may say, “should any man be satisfied with only one woman, when, if he has personal attractiveness, he may find hundreds of women ready to fall into his arms, and may drink the love life to the dregs?” What Enobarbus said of Cleopatra may be said of any woman, if she be developed by a man, as she should be.
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety; other women cloy