=When Love Dies.= "Normal" infidelity may also be merely the only hope
of sexual gratification for the normal man or woman whose mate has
ceased to present the fetishes needed to awaken his or her eroticism.
Healthy individuals are neither willing nor capable to forego sexual
gratification. Now and then complications arise, a man being very
fond, for sexual reasons, of a woman who would prove undesirable as
his mate and, for sentimental reasons, of a woman who is infinitely
congenial but no longer arouses his desire. Likewise, a woman may be
deeply attached to both her lover and her husband. Ivan Bloch writes:
"It is quite possible to love more than one person at the same time
with nearly equal tenderness and be honestly able to assure each of the
passion felt for him or her. The vast psychic differentiation involved
by modern civilization increases the possibility of this double love
for it is difficult to find one's complement in a single person and
this applies to women as well as to men."
George Hirth, in his "Wege zur Heimat" also points out that women,
as well as men, can love two persons at the same time. Men flatter
themselves with the prejudice that the female heart, or rather brain,
can only hold one man at a time and that if there is a second man, it
is by a kind of prostitution. Nearly all the erotic writers, poets
and novelists, even physicians and psychologists, belong to this
class. They look upon a woman as property and of course two men cannot
"possess" one woman.
"Regarding novelists, however," remarks Havelock Ellis, "the remark
may be interpolated that there are many exceptions. Thomas Hardy, for
instance, frequently represents a woman as more or less in love with
two men at the same time."
Hirth maintains that a woman is not necessarily obliged to be untrue to
one man because she has conceived a passion for another man. "Today,"
Hirth writes, "truly love and justice can count as honorable motives
in marriage. The modern man accords to the beloved wife and life
companion the same freedom he himself took before marriage, and perhaps
still, takes in marriage. If she makes no use of it, as is to be
hoped, so much the better. But let there be no lies, no deception, the
indispensable foundation of modern marriage is boundless sincerity and
friendship, the deepest trust, affectionate devotion and consideration.
That is the best safeguard against adultery. Let him, however, who is,
nevertheless, overtaken by the outbreak of it, console himself with the
undoubted fact that of two real lovers, the most noble minded and deep
seeing friend will always have the preference."
Even under an economic system countenancing free love and birth
control, such complications would surely arise and cause much suffering.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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