Note AM — Chapter XIII · SENTIMENTAL LOVE

It is really amusing to notice how the radical writers put up a target and fire at it to their heart’s content. They take the church or state marriage and direct their poisoned arrows against it. As if the biologist, when speaking of animal and human marriage, could ever mean the conventional marriage. Neither does he understand by monogamy the condition generally known by this term. The biological monogamic marriage of a certain couple is their exclusive cohabitation for a certain length of time. If during this time they refrain from cohabitating with others they are for the time being living biologically in monogamic marriage. The cock in the barn-yard is polygamous, the steer in the herd is promiscuous, but the cow is monogamous. Once she has been impregnated she will not admit any other male until the end of the period of gestation and lactation, and the new period of rut has set in. From the beginning of one impregnation to the beginning of the other, almost a year, she is monogamic. This is the case with almost all females among the higher animals, and woman does not make any exception to this rule. Even the girl who professes free love, except she be a nymphomaniac, would not continue to live with her lover, if she found that while living with her he had had love affairs with others. She would divorce him forthwith, and sometimes such a divorce would be accompanied by quite a little scandal. Most of the erotic murders committed by men upon women and most of the cases of women throwing acid into the faces of men, we so often read in the Parisian papers, are perpetrated by those whose marriage relations have never been sanctioned by church or state. This fact reveals another error of the radicals who picture the peaceful parting of their free-loving couples in such glowing colors. They simply leave each other when they do not love any longer. But in practice love does not depart from both parties simultaneously, and the party which is still attached to the other will resent the desertion no less than if they would have been legally married. The reason is that normal men and women, except in early youth, perhaps, are never varietists. The varietist who lacks the instinct of exclusiveness is a psychopathic sensualist. No alienist could have given a better description of the symptoms of the psychopathic sensualist than that found in E. C. Walker’s (The moloch of the monogamic ideal) picture of the sufferings of the varietist, not of the suffering of total abstinence—in this case there may be some physiological basis—but of the suffering for lack of variety. And those pathological specimens are presented to us as normal men and women.