But I will go still further. Where a substitute love—great or minor—cannot be found, then mere sex relations may help to diminish the suffering, to quiet the turbulent heart, to relieve the aching brain. As everything connected with sex, so our ideas about illicit sex relations that are not connected with love, are honeycombed with hypocrisy and false to the core. While purchasable, loveless sex relations can, of course, not be compared to love relations, still under our present social, economic and moral code they are the only relations that thousands of men and women can enjoy, and they are better than none; and in quite a considerable percentage of cases an element of romance and greater or lesser permanency do become attached to them, and they act as a more or less satisfactory substitute for genuine love relations.
I am not spinning theoretical gossamer webs. I am speaking from experience—the experience of patients and confiding friends. I could relate many interesting cases. And I may, in a more appropriate volume. Here one or two will have to suffice.
He was twenty-six years old and a senior student in the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, New York. He had been in love with and had considered himself engaged for four or five years to a young lady two years his junior. She was, of course, the most wonderful young lady in the world, the whole world; in fact, there was not another one to compare her to. She was unique; she stood all alone. But for a year or so she was getting rather cool towards him; which fanned his flame all the more. And suddenly he received a note asking him not to call any more, nor to try to communicate in any other way. He did write, but his letters were returned unopened. And soon after he read of her engagement to a prominent young banker. He nearly went insane, and this is used not in any figurative sense. His insomnia was complete, and resisted all treatment. When his pulse became very rapid and his eyes acquired the wild look that they do after many sleepless nights an attempt was made to administer hypnotics, but they had practically no effect. Chloral, veronal, etc., only made him "dopy," irritable and depressed, but did not give him one hour of sound sleep. His appetite was gone, now and then his limbs would twitch, and he would sit and stare into space for hours at a time. To study or attend the clinics was out of the question, and he did not even attempt to take the final examinations. The parents felt distressed, but were unable to do anything for him. The least attempt at interference on their part, any attempt to console him, to induce him to pull himself together, made him more irritable, more morose; so that they finally left him alone. He was practically a total abstainer, but one evening he went out and came home drunk; and after that he drank frequently and heavily. His parents could do nothing with him. One evening on Broadway he was accosted by a young street-walker. She had a pleasant, sympathetic face, and he went with her. That was his first sex experience. Up to that time he was chaste. He met her again the following evening. Gradually a sort of friendship grew up between them. She found out the cause of his grief, and with maternal solicitude she tried everything in her power to console him, and he began to look forward to the nightly meeting with her. His grief became gradually less acute, he gave up drinking, which he disliked, and which he had taken up only to deaden his pain; he began to pull himself together, and in six or eight months he took over his last year in Columbia and was properly graduated. He kept up the friendship with the girl for over two years, when she died of pneumonia. He did not love her, but he liked to be with her, as her presence gave him physical and mental comfort. It is possible that she loved him genuinely, but there was never any sentimental talk between them, and there was never any question between them of the permanency of the relationship. They both knew that it was temporary. But he is absolutely certain that but for one of the representatives of the class that is despised, driven about and persecuted by brutal policemen and ignorant judges, he would have become a bum, or, most likely, he would have committed suicide—at the point of which he was several times; only pity for his mother and sisters restrained him.
And here is another case. A girl about twenty-eight years of age fell in love with a man four or five years her senior. The love seemed to be reciprocated, and they soon became engaged to be married. He asked that the engagement, on account of certain business reasons, be kept secret. She did not know the man well; she had met him at several entertainments and church affairs and he seemed very nice. He always found some excuses for delaying the marriage, and after they had been engaged about a year he began to insist on sex relations. Though of a refined and noble character, she was of a passionate nature and she did not offer much resistance. Many girls who would under no circumstance indulge in illicit relations, considering it a great sin, have no compunctions about having relations with their fiancés. They lived together for about a year. They were together almost daily, except now and then, when he would go away for a week or two on business. Once he went away—and never came back. He wrote to her that their relations were at an end; that he was a married man and a father of children; he had hoped he might get a divorce, but that now he had changed his mind and that she must forget him, etc. Everything was black before her. It cost her a supreme effort not to faint, and she was supported in this effort by the fact that when the letter came she was in the presence of friends; a terrible, overpowering, all-inundating sense of shame gave her the strength not to betray her condition and her story before the world at large. But as soon as she was alone she collapsed completely. There was the most absolute insomnia imaginable, complete anorexia, but the most distressing features were frequent fainting spells, severe palpitation of the heart and tremors. She had no love for the man—so she said. Her love had turned to hatred and contempt—but the jealousy was all-consuming. Like a fire it was burning in her, searing her brain and her soul day and night.
She felt that she was not strong enough to stand this physical and mental torture, and so she decided to commit suicide. As the means she selected gas. Fortunately, the smell became perceptible before the injury was irreparable. She was saved. But she felt that she could not stand the torture very long—and more than anything was she afraid that her mind would give way. She had a special horror of insanity. And so she decided to make another attempt This time with bichloride. Again she was saved. A friend of hers then got an inkling of the events that were transpiring, and she introduced her to some gentlemen friends. They were nice people and more or less radical on the sex question. In order to drown her pain she began to go out very frequently with that crowd, and to her surprise and delight she found that she soon began to think less and less about her contemptible seducer, and, what was more important to her, she was soon able to sleep. For about six months she led an extremely active, almost promiscuous sex life. But then she gave it up, as she felt herself normal and no longer in need of it. She is now happily married.
I am through with this rather lengthy essay on one of the most painful manifestations of human emotional life. I repeat that I am aware that feelings are often stronger than reason; but saying this does not mean asserting that feelings cannot be modified and held in check by reason. And I feel confident that a careful, open-minded reading of these pages and an acceptance of the ideas therein promulgated would aid in preventing a good deal of the misery of jealousy and in curing a certain proportion of it after it has found lodgment in the hearts of unhappy men and women.
There are one or two more points that might be touched upon, but with the freedom of press in reference to sex matters as it exists in this country to-day, I have said all that I could say.