Moreover, every human being, child, adult, savage or sage knows the fatal consequences of complete and exhaustive exploration: how it cloys, how it surfeits, how it nauseates! The very constitution of man as a sentient being necessitates such consequences. The repetition of a stimulus reduces the force of its appeal owing to the very tendency to habituation to which all of us as adaptable creatures are prone. We react eagerly and quickly at first; the thousandth time we hardly lift an eyelid. Now, in the face of all these facts of common and everyday experience, it would seem both absurd and indefensible to claim that any two people, whether of the same or of different sexes, could hope to spend many years together—not to mention a lifetime—without ultimately falling the prey to indifference, if not dislike; and where the circumstances of their first coming together have been attended by any excessive warmth of feeling, the ultimate revulsion of that feeling, by constituting at once a disillusionment and, among unwise people, a surprise, must lead to an indifference proportionately more acute. Unlike the mere association of friends, in which two people may work together, share the same interests, enjoy the same games, or suffer the same hardships, pleasures and difficulties, the married couple are united chiefly by a physical bond which has its basis in an act of _passion_, an act of _desire_, an act of _power_. But _passion_ is largely a matter of surplus strength, violent stimulation and the lust of possession, all of which are steadily worn down by (_a_) a steady drain on surplus strength, (_b_) the supervention of gradual callousness through the repetition of similar stimuli, and (_c_) the consciousness of holding definitely, or rather indefinitely, the object originally coveted. _Desire_ also, by being gratified, is stilled. The best cure, in fact, for desire is precisely gratification. But a _cure_ is hardly what is anticipated by the usual love-match.[55] With regard to the _act of power_, which, despite civilization, still accounts for more than half the savour of the sexual relationship, that is surely seriously impaired by the law itself which enjoins cohabitation as a duty upon the parties to a marriage contract. Thus the indefinite continuance of the emotion which first led a couple to unite, and the protraction _sine die_ of the delights of the early consummation of their desire, are bound, as it were, with mathematical certainty to become impossible. But this makes the relationship exceedingly difficult, and one which, far from constituting a promise of happiness, is very much more likely to develop into an absolute guarantee of incessant and most tiresome differences.