Sexual love

“ Sexual love being an emotion whose evolution is complete, it is impossible to determine the physiological and psychical signs suiting all cases, from the blind instinct to the most refined and intellectualised forms. Nevertheless, there are certain specific characters which it always preserves, one special mark which is never effaced throughout its various metamorphoses, and that is, its origin. For the moment, let us take as typical the common and average forms which, as we shall see later on, are met with half-way, 249as we follow the evolution of sexual love from the lowest to the highest. ”

“ As sexual love has its origin in the fact that the sexual characters, which biologically are favourable to the race, are the most attractive, this general attraction constantly operates side by side with the individual; and it operates most strongly precisely in that kind of love which is rightly called “blind passion,” the kind which thus brings together to their misfortune conflicting contradictions. ”

“ Nevertheless the moment the other love and all that goes with it is realised the natural sexual love has to fall into a secondary place—the lover must stand on his feet and not on his head—or else the most dire confusions ensue, and torments æonian. ”

“ Sexual activity, we see, is not merely a bald propagative act, nor, when propagation is put aside, is it merely the relief of distended vessels. It is something more even than the foundation of great social institutions. It is the function by which all the finer activities of the organism, physical and psychic, may be developed and satisfied. Nothing, it has been said, is so serious as lust—to use the beautiful term which has been degraded into the expression of the lowest forms of sensual pleasure—and we have now to add that nothing is so full of play as love. ”

“ Sexual love is the passion which unites the sexes. The stimulating impressions produced by health, youth, and beauty, and ornaments and other artificial means of attraction, are all elements of this feeling. The antipathy to sexual intercourse with individuals of another species, and the horror of incest, belong to the same phenomenon. ”

“ Love.—I speak here of the true love of a higher nature of one sex for the other, or sexual love, which is not simple friendship, but is combined with sexual appetite. To write on love is almost to pour water into the ocean, for literature is three parts composed of dissertations on love. There can be no doubt that the normal man feels a great desire for love. The irradiations of love in the mind constitute one of the fundamental conditions of human happiness and one of the principal objects of life. ”

“ I can make such a statement about the potentialities of modern love for one reason—that women today have, beyond the shadow of any doubt, achieved complete equality with men. Above all, this equality can be observed as fully operative in the realm of love, sexual love. ”

“ On the other hand, the growth in men of the mental element in sexual passion, from mighty wifely love, often comes like a revelation to the husband. The dying words of a man to the wife who, sending away children, friends, every distraction, had bent the whole force of her passionate nature to holding the beloved object in life—‘I never knew before what love meant’—indicates the revelation which the higher element of sexual passion should bring to the lower phase. ”

“ We may sometimes be in doubt whether we have to do with sexual love, or whether some other sentiment may not be in operation. For example, the devotion to some saint of either sex may overpower all other feelings. ”

“ All that we can say in a general way concerning the complex entanglement of our sentiments and instincts is that, the most deeply rooted characters in human nature are at the same time, phylogenetically speaking, the most ancient.
Among the most profound instincts of sexual life, we find moral and intellectual incongruities. Along with excitement of the sexual appetite in the male by the odor of the female genital organs, or by the sight of erotic pictures, we find the most touching conjugal love, and life-long devotion of one conjoint for the other and for the children. ”

“ The chapter on love is infinite, and its relations to the sexual appetite make it still more complex. We shall confine ourselves to indicating two more of its irradiations, peculiar to each sex, but having for each a physionomy corresponding to its own mentality. ”

“ The concept of this happy unity is most clearly seen in the love between men and women. The act of sexual love is a direct expression of it. Two individuals once unknown to each other, until recently total strangers, now nevertheless literally merge together physically, know each other in the closest of physical embraces. ”

“ From these simple facts is evolved the intimate relationship which exists between sexual love and other sentiments of sympathy, that is to say affection, or love in the more vague and more extended sense of the term. ”

“ And now, taking a still further step, we may say that it has a spiritual value in relation to our whole conception of the sexual impulse. Our attitude towards the naked human body is the test of our attitude towards the instinct of sex. If our own and our fellows' bodies seem to us intrinsically shameful or disgusting, nothing will ever really ennoble or purify our conceptions of sexual love. Love craves the flesh, and if the flesh is shameful the lover must be shameful. ”

“ Erotic symbolism is, however, by no means confined to the individualizing tendency to concentrate amorous attention upon some single characteristic of the adult woman or man who is normally the object of sexual love. ”

“ But as the brain and its faculties develop, powerfully aided indeed by the very difficulties of the sexual life, the impulse for sexual union has to traverse ever longer, slower, more painful paths, before it reaches—and sometimes it never reaches—its ultimate object. This means that sex gradually becomes intertwined with all the highest and subtlest human emotions and activities, with the refinements of social intercourse, with high adventure in every sphere, with art, with religion. ”

“ The art of love certainly includes such primary facts of sexual hygiene, but it involves also the whole erotic discipline of marriage, and that is why its significance is so great, for the welfare and happiness of the individual, for the stability of sexual unions, and indirectly for the race, since the art of love is ultimately the art of attaining the right conditions for procreation. ”

“ In love we project what is good in us, and so having created a good and an evil image we are more able to compare and value them.
Lovers seek their own souls in the loved ones, and so love is free from the limits I described in the first part of this book, not being bound down by the conditions of merely sexual attraction. In spite of their real opposition, there is an analogy between erotics and sexuality. ”

“ Perhaps the clearest descriptions come when we tell the reader to take any and every phase of admiration, of attraction and sexual love, which a normal, amorous man feels for a woman, and to translate that into the uranistic passion; into sexual love for a man or youth, on the part of a man. There is the same impressionability to the outward beauty. ”

“ I again emphasize the fact that in normal women, especially young girls, the sexual appetite is subordinate to love. In the young girl love is a mixture of exalted admiration for masculine courage and grandeur, and an ardent desire for affection and maternity. She wishes to be outwardly dominated by a man, but to dominate him by her heart. This sentimentalism of the young girl, joined to the passive role of her sex, produces in her a state of exaltation which often borders on ecstasy and then overcomes all the resistance of will and reason. ”

“ But because of the more or less clear consciousness that sexual intercourse is really what is most desired in love, and because of the lack of courage openly to admit it, attempts are made to justify it from a social standpoint. ”

“ Thus the seeker of love, too, though in a restricted sense, may be regarded as a metaphysical erotic, for he loathes sexuality—his portion—and yearns for a higher form of love. He shares this attitude with the slave of love, who is also a sensualist and a would-be lover. The slave of love imitates the attitude of the worshipper, but he infallibly sinks into the sexual sphere. ”

“ Whatever the real benefits, and there is no occasion for questioning them, of the sexual order thus established, it becomes clear that in certain important respects it had an unnatural and repressive influence on the erotic aspect of woman’s sexual life. ”

“ Sexuality with its various manifestations has existed from the beginning; the ultimate object of sexual intercourse is pleasure; but here and there, and parallel with sexual pleasure, there have been, in varying degrees of intensity, instances of spiritual love. ”

“ And this elementary sexual longing it is that clouds the woman’s brain, that drives her into the man’s arms, that leads her to forget all the shame threatening her and her child, that brings her to sexual union—not the longing for a child, not the so-called impulse to motherhood.” And again: “Woman yearns for love, all her love-organs cry out for love, soul and body * * *. ”

“ These comparatively simple curves represent what I would postulate as the normal spontaneous up-welling of natural desire in woman. These are the foundations on which the edifice of the physical expression of love may be built. It must not be forgotten, however, that, particularly in modern luxurious life, there are innumerable excitements which may stimulate sexual feeling, just as there are many factors in our life which tend to inhibit or retard it. ”

“ The Art of Loving Long.—The ideal true love often only shows itself after the first amorous intoxication has subsided. In order to remain harmonious, love requires above all things the higher psychic irradiation of intimate sympathetic sentiments associated with the sexual appetite, with which they should always [521] remain intimately connected, or at any rate as long as the duration of the active sexual life of man. Later on, in the evening of life, the first are sufficient.
The great error into which most men fall who marry is to rely on the civil and religious bonds of matrimony. ”

“ The novelists who speculate on the eroticism of the public are no doubt more interested in describing sexual passion and amorous intoxication, with all the catastrophes and conflicts which arise from them, than the tranquil and regular love of a couple more advanced in age, the greatest happiness of which consists in harmony of sentiment and thought, as well as the mutual regard and devotion of the couple for each other.
Sexual appetite and sexual power in man become extinguished between the ages of sixty and eighty; old men of eighty are sometimes still capable, but they are no longer fecund. ”

“ True enough sexual passion is the passion of creation, the most important function in the universe. Sympathy, affection, fidelity, sacrifice, indeed, all those noble traits, included under the term altruism, spring from the reproductive instinct. Still the two emotions, love, sung by poetry and exalted by art, and sex-attraction, found in animals and plants as well as in man, can not be identical. ”

“ I will not go into these well-known details, for the psychical position is clear enough: to the man whose heart is filled with the love of good and the spiritual love of woman, sensuousness will appear as dangerous and perilous, and will have at the same time the glamour of the demoniacally-sexual. It is the diabolical element of dualistic consciousness in the sphere of eroticism. ”

“ Between these two terms are placed the sentiments of sympathy experienced by the individual in his former life, which have most often been provoked by sexual desire for an individual of the opposite sex, and which may be evoked by the aid of remembrance, kindled afresh, and contribute strongly to maintain constancy of love. These different sentiments pass into each other in all possible shades, and continually react on each other. ”

“ While it is the contact through the sense of touch that acts both as the most natural and most complete expression of love between the sexes and a powerful sexual excitant, there is a contact of the eyes of adolescent and adult lovers,—a sort of embrace by means of the eyes—that is as exciting to many as contact through touch. ”

“ It is therefore not likely that the line we have just touched upon will be that followed by the development of sexual morality, for even now an increasing proportion of mankind shows itself too exacting in erotic questions to allow of the realisation of the above-mentioned ideal of purity. No thought of the end will to their minds sanctify a means which when deprived of love appears to them ugly. ”

“ This love soon becomes tinged with a very strong erotic feeling connected with the little one’s growing sensuality, which, as we have seen, is centered on her clitoris.
Now, it is necessary for humans to love and to have erotic feelings centered on others. But clearly, if this early love situation did not change at some point, the little girl would grow up to have women as her erotic centers of interest. Nature intends no such end result. She intends these erotic feelings to become ultimately very much man-centered. ”

“ In its proper place, we shall consider the successive stages of the love-life, which are important milestones in the development of the individual from infancy to adulthood.
Let us dwell for the moment upon the social, ethical, and esthetic significance of sex and love. On this point, Maudsley, the English psychiatrist, has expressed himself in the following words: "If man were robbed of sexual desire and everything mentally connected with and emanating from the same, almost every vestige of poetry and perhaps all moral sentiment would be torn from his life." ”