When one acquires this creative attitude toward love, one cannot lightly surrender oneself to another. The defect in many marriages has been that they were not marriages as creation but unions for sexual intercourse. And they all proceed calmly on, though standing on the very brink of destruction. Their passion, as they call it, is easily exhausted; they are merely captivated by fleeting sentiment; they have lost the creative feeling.
The love of the majority arises from sentimentality and has no time for the training of the will. It quite lacks strong, selective will. Today it drops the one once welcomed as the ideal wife, and tomorrow takes the cowardly position of transferring its affection to another woman. And such conduct is not considered strange; for folk fail to comprehend the creative feeling of passionate love. I venture to declare that passionate love is bound to be ethical.
When I declare that love must be ethical, I do not imply that love must be sacrificed to morality, but that love in its essence is above the sexual act. Where-fore, when one considers the various psychic relations, has regard to social relations as well, and settles one’s own personal attitude, then in the ardor that flames up above these and as a result of the great determination to create a new order, passionate love itself emerges.
In other words, passionate love must be that which wells forth from one’s personality as a starting point, from the creative feeling of the other personality–the discovery and creation of “you”–and from the high intention to develop a new order. Therefore, it is impossible for one easily to shift from one lover to another. If one has many loves, it must be concluded that one has a multiplicity of selves; and such a one we call insane.
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