To overweight the physical factor in the love between the sexes and
to place the love motive ahead of the egoistic-social motive are not
by any means the same thing. It has been already indicated that the
overweighting of the physical factor proceeds from an egoistic motive,
and is thereby vitiated as a truly human motive in the highest sense.
Both parties to such a marriage can, if they see and understand, change
so as to raise the level of their own motive and give the true love
motive its real place, as might be illustrated by the case of a young man
who marries a woman author twenty years older than himself, motivated
at first solely by the glamour of her reputation; but, finding in her a
great heart and womanly qualities he had not before suspected, becomes
her true mate in every sense; or the girl who, dazzled by the wealth of
a suitor old enough to be her father but rich enough to “buy and sell”
her father several times over, finally discovers in him a completeness
and fullness of love that quite satisfies her when she realizes that,
in spite of his egoistic instincts that have made him rich his love
instinct is still richer. All that is necessary in a match “misgrafféd
in respect of years” is the proper subordination by both partners of the
egoistic-social to the love instinct.
§ 171
Unconsciously, of course, such people know from the first that they
should get from each other the sweetness par excellence of human
life, but while they know this unconsciously and it makes some of
them uncomfortable and eccentric, even unhuman, they fancy so many
inhibitions and barriers to it (particularly in the case of narrowly
brought up women) that they do not gain from marriage that unspeakable
and indescribable sense of identity each with the other that would
successfully obviate any tendency whatever to infidelity.
This feeling of identity is not only thus physical in the husband
and wife at the climax of erotism, but is given tangible, visible,
and in all ways perceptible, manifestation in their children. It is
given ideal existence in the community of interests it engenders in
connection with the family life, interests which are here the expression
of the ego-instinct, but here, as they should be, interests arising
from the subordination of the ego-instinct to the now brightly revealed
love instincts, which are not accessible to consciousness until after
enlightenment in the technique of the love drama.
Those people also are unable to give fullest expression to themselves in
the love episode who consciously or unconsciously, frankly or otherwise,
place the egoistic-social motive above the love motive, who marry “for a
meal ticket” or for any other egoistic-social motive such as wealth or
position.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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