All about love, dating and romance issues.
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.
In the ancient times of incomplete personalities, monogamy was impossible; but since the coming of Christ completed personality has been presented to our view and we have become incapable of bigamous love. Yet, naturally, as I have just stated, the principle of monogamy breaks down if there is more or less of abnormality in the character.
You probably wouldn’t go up to a stranger in a nightclub, tap them on the shoulder and say “hey, mind if I borrow your toothbrush?” because that would be objectively weird and disgusting. So, how come when we fancy someone we’re more than happy to lick the insides of their mouth – AKA kissing with tongues – even though the idea is sickening when you describe it literally.
It is a curious thing that Schopenhauer, old misanthrope as he is often called by the thin-skinned, should have, in this section referred to above, called sexual passion the “kernel of the will to live” and the “genital organs the focus of will.” He here expresses a truth of the relationship of love and will, indeed the interdependence of them in a way which runs contrary to modem man’s conventional understanding. Power—which we can for the moment identify with will—and love, even sexual love, are considered to be antithetical. I believe that Schopenhauer was right, that they are not opposites but closely related.
Personality traits are rarely if ever desirable or undesirable in an absolute and universal sense. As we mentioned, each group has its own norms of desirability which its members come to look upon as absolute and imperative. Then, too, every person, through his unique personal-social experiences in areas of behavior which are not culturally standardized, develops subjective ideals, standards, and tastes with regard to what he deems desirable in a mate. The degree to which any of these standards operates, however, depends on whether members of the opposite sex who would qualify under such standards are available.
Romance as a means to marriage is, on the average, more important to girls than to boys. By marriage a woman can obtain from a man not only companionship but economic and social advantages for the rest of her life. There is, of course, a penalty for the importance of romance in the life of the girl, for a failure in this realm leaves her relatively fewer alternative sources of ego satisfaction. Given the tradition of femininity, a woman is restricted in taking the initiative in making contact with the opposite sex.