Altogether outsiders are not fit to mix in the internal differences between husband and wife. It is absolutely impossible for a stranger to know just where the trouble is and who the guilty party is. Sometimes there is no guilty party. Both husband and wife may be right; they may both be lovely people and still together they may form an incompatible, explosive mixture. And then again the party that to outsiders may seem the angelic one may in reality be the devilish one. It is a well-known fact that people who to the outside world may seem the personification of honor and good nature may be very devils at home. I have long ago given up not only meddling in, but even judging, domestic disharmonies. For it is almost impossible for an outsider to judge justly. I knew a husband who was considered a paragon of virtue. And when a clash came between him and his wife everybody was inclined to blame the wife. But it came out later that the husband had certain ways about him which made the wife's life a very torture. And vice versa. I know of another case where the wife was considered the sweetest thing in the world. She had nice ways about her, but she disliked her husband and made his life a hell. With genuine chivalry he bore everything, believing that it was a man's duty to bear his cross. She was unfaithful to him, but she was so clever and cunning that neither he nor anybody else suspected it. The fact became painfully patent to him, when on one of the rare occasions that they came together she infected him with a venereal disease, which incapacitated him for a long time. Nobody knew why he insisted upon a separation, and everybody, with the exception of his physician and perhaps one or two others, was blaming him for an unfeeling brute.
I will therefore repeat that as a general thing domestic tangles should be untangled by the tanglers themselves. It is not safe to call in outsiders—relatives or friends; they are apt to make the tangle more tangled, and, what is more, they are quite likely to put the blame on the innocent party, and bestow upon the guilty party the Montyon prize for virtue and gentleness.
Chapter Fifty[ToC]
WHAT IS LOVE?
Is Love Definable?—Raising a Corner of the Veil—Two Opinions of Love—The First Opinion: Sexual Intercourse and Love—The Second Opinion—The Grain of Truth in Each—The Truth Concerning Love—Foundation of Love—Sexual Attraction and Love—The Frigid Woman and Her Husband—Puzzling Cases of Love—The Paradox—Blindness of Love and the Penetrating Vision of Love—Limits of Homeliness—Physical Aversion and Genesis of Love—Mating in the Animal Kingdom—Mating in Low Races—Love in People of High Culture—Difference in Love of Savage and Man of Culture—Distinctions Between Loves—Varieties of Love and Varieties of Men—"Love" Without Sexual Desire—Refraining and Wanting—Cause of Love at First Sight—"Magnetic Forces" and Love at First Sight—The Pathological Side—Differentiation of Phases of Love—Infatuation—Difference Between "Infatuation" and "Being in Love"—Sexual Satisfaction and Infatuation—Sexual Satisfaction and Love—Infatuation Mistaken for Love—Love the Most Mysterious of Human Emotions—Great Love and Supreme Happiness.
I shall not attempt to give a definition, either brief or extensive, of Love. Many have tried and failed, and I shall not attempt the impossible. Nor shall I attempt to discuss Love in all its innumerable details.[9] To do so would alone require a book many times more voluminous than the one you have before you. I shall, however, endeavor to raise a corner of the veil which surrounds this most mysterious, most baffling and most complex of all human emotions, so that you may get a glimpse into its intricate mechanism and perhaps understand what Love is in its essence at least.
Sexual and Platonic Love. There are two widely different, in fact diametrically opposite, opinions as to what constitutes Love. One opinion is that Love is sexual love, sexual attraction, sexual desire. To people holding this opinion love and sexual desire or "lust" are synonymous. And they laugh and sneer at any attempt to idealize love, to present it as something finer and subtler, let alone nobler, than mere sex attraction. The writer has heard one cynical woman—and more than one man—say: Love? There is no such a thing. Sexual intercourse is love, and that's all there is to it.