Jealousy on the part of the wife may then prevent the advent of the platonic friendship which is not uncommon between old married mates, altho Montaigne denies the possibility of its existence. Modern mates, conscious of that danger, have now and then devised ways and means to combat Balzac's monster. Not so long ago a well-known woman writer announced that she was planning to marry a certain man with whom, however, she did not intend to live day after day. The experiment has many chances of success if jealousy does not complicate the situation. I suggested to reporters last summer, when two famous artists parted company, that their union might have been of longer duration if one of them had lived at the Plaza while the other was stopping at the St. Regis. =Married People Should Separate for Periods of Variable Duration= in order that a fresh stimulation may emanate from their fetishes when they meet again. By leading more individual lives and having separate sets of friends, they would, besides, bring to each other a new sort of mental pabulum and stimulation day after day. Conversation becomes futile and unnecessary between a husband and wife who always pay and receive calls together, attend the same spectacles and hence always see the same side of life. Now and then we read of couples who separate and a few years later remarry. Those few years spent apart from each other mean for both new experiences which enrich their mind and their conversation and make them again interesting to each other. =The Play Function of Love.= Another factor which the monstrous hypocrisy of puritanism makes very difficult to discuss openly and honestly and which wrecks many promising unions is the ignorance, more common than we suspect among married couples, of what Maurice Parmelee in his "Personality and Behavior" has called the Play Function of Love, a term which has been given a broader meaning by Havelock Ellis in an article for the _Medical Review of Reviews_ for March 1921. The average man or woman is tragically ignorant of the mission of sex. The average man, as Ellis writes, has two aims: "to prove that he is a man and to relieve a sexual tension. "He too often considers himself, from traditional habits, as the active partner in love and his own pleasure as the prime motive of the sex communion. "His wife, naturally adopts the complementary attitude, regards herself as the passive partner and her pleasure as negligible. "She has not mastered the art of love, with the result that her whole nature remains ill-developed and unharmonized, and that she is incapable of bringing her personality (having indeed no achieved personality to bring) to bear effectively on the problems of society and the world around her."