Romantic Love and Personal Beauty: Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiaritiesFinck, Henry T.
Science
Romantic Love and Personal Beauty: Their development, causal relations, historic and national peculiarities
Finck, Henry T.
Beauty, Personal; Love
These last two lines suggest the whole psychology of First Love. Romeo’s
first Love was not his best Love. When his soul had reached manly
maturity, and looked about for a proper object of affection, he did not
at once have the good luck to encounter his Juliet. Rosaline was the
_nearest approach_ to his ideal; so he worked himself into a
semi-fictitious passion and groaned for her, and would die, until
suddenly he saw his real ideal, and found that his first passion was a
fragile soap-bubble in comparison to his true Love for Juliet, which no
rival could have altered one speck.
In his first Love, in a word, he had _fallen in love with the species_,
rather than with an individual. Sexual Selection, or Individual
Preference, had come in more as a matter of chance than of decisive,
final choice. And so it is with most cases of first love. Man falls in
Love with woman, woman with man, not with a particular man or woman.
Thus it is that at an early age thousands of impatient youths marry
their Rosalines before they have had time or opportunity to meet their
Juliets. Doubtless there is a Juliet for every man in the world; but it
generally happens that she does not attend the same school, work in the
same manufactory, or live in the same village, or belong to the same
city-clique as he does; so, being less adventurous than Romeo, who went
outside of his clique for a sort of exogamous marriage by Capture, he
weds his first Love, _i.e._ his Rosaline; and this is one of the reasons
why so few cases of true Romantic Love are encountered even to-day,
outside of novels.
Most marriages, in truth, are brought about through accidental
acquaintance or companionship, not through Love. Suppose that a score of
young men who have never loved were cast on a desert island with one
pretty girl. Though she were as unamiable as Juno, cold and coy as
Diana, in less than a month nineteen of the twenty youths would be in
love with her and bitter personal enemies. Here the man would fall in
love with the woman; the fundamental tone of passion would prevail;
whereas if there had been a choice, eighteen of those men perhaps would
never have dreamed of proposing to that girl. Now second Love is much
more apt to be thus influenced by Individual Preference than first; and
the more Love is individualised the deeper it is. Failure to find
lasting satisfaction in the first choice makes a man more slow and
cautious in his second choice.
At the same time the mind expands and grows, and age strengthens not
only the intellect but the emotions as well. _For his size_, a boy may
love as ardently as a man; but the man is bigger.
The history of the race agrees with that of the individual in showing
that Love at first is a general passion, only slightly discriminative,
but becomes more and more so as time goes on.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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