What we call friendly feeling is a less vehement, more
intellectualized form of tender feeling. It demands a certain
equality and a certain similarity in tastes, though some
friendships are noted for the dissimilarity of the friends.
Friendship lives on reciprocal benefits, tangible or intangible,
though sentimentalists may take exception to this. Primary in it
is the good opinion of the friends and interest in one another;
we cannot be friends with those who think we are foolish or mean
or bad. We ALLOW a friend to say that we have acted wrongly
because we think he has our interest at heart, because he has
shown that he has this interest at heart, though his saying so
sometimes strains the friendship for a while. Friendship ideally
expects no material benefits, but it lives on the spiritual
benefit of sympathy and expressed interest and the flattery of a
taste in common. It is a unification of individuals that has been
glorified as the perfect relationship, since it has no
classifiable instinct behind it and is in a sense democracy at
its noblest. Friendship is easiest formed in youth, because men
are least selfish, least specialized at that time. As time goes
on, alas, our own interests and purposes narrow down in order
that we may succeed; there is less time and energy for
friendship.
Sex love is only in part made up of tender feeling. Passion,
admiration of beauty, desire of possession, the love of conquest,
take away from the "other" feeling that is the basis of
tenderness or true love. We desire so much for ourselves in sex
love that we have not so much capacity for tender feeling as we
usually think we have. The protests of eternal devotion and
unending self-sacrifice are sincere enough but they have this
proviso in the background: "You must give yourself to me." If the
lovers can also be friends, if they have a real harmony of
tastes, desires and ambitions, if they can recede their ego
feeling, know how to compromise, then this added to sex feeling
makes the most genuinely satisfying of all human relations, or at
least the most reciprocal. But the two human beings who fall in
love are rarely enough alike, and their relationship is rarely
one of equality; traditional duties and rights are not equal;
they will seek different things, and their relationship is too
close and intimate to be an easy one to maintain. Sex love and
marriage are different matters, for though they may be the same,
too often they are not. Rarely does sex love maintain itself
without marriage and marriage colors over sex love with parental
feelings, financial interests, home and its emotions, etc. In sex
gratification[1] there is the danger of all sensuous pleasure:
that a periodic appetite gratified often leaves behind it an
ennui, a distaste,--sometimes reaching dislike--of the entire act
and associations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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