MISTAKES REGARDING CONJUGAL LOVE

Having distinguished romantic or sentimental love from sentimentality on one side and sensuality on the other, it remains to show how it differs from conjugal affection.

HOW ROMANTIC LOVE IS METAMORPHOSED

On hearing the words “love letters,” does anybody ever think of a man’s letters to his wife?  No more than of his letters to his mother.  He may love both his wife and his mother dearly, but when he writes love letters he writes them to his sweetheart.  Thus, public opinion and every-day literary usage clearly recognize the difference between romantic love and conjugal affection.  Yet when I maintained in my first book that romantic love differs as widely from conjugal affection as maternal love differs from friendship; that romantic love is almost as modern as the telegraph, the railway, and the electric light; and that perhaps the main reasons why no one had anticipated me in an attempt to write a book to prove this, were that no distinction had heretofore been made between conjugal and romantic love, and that the apparent occurrence of noble examples of conjugal attachment among the ancient Greeks had obscured the issue—­there was a chorus of dissenting voices.  “The distinction drawn by him between romantic and conjugal love,” wrote one critic, “seems more fanciful than real.”  “He will not succeed,” wrote another, “in convincing anybody that romantic and conjugal love differ in kind instead of only in degree or place”; while a third even objected to my theory as “essentially immoral!”

Mr. W.D.  Howells, on the other hand, accepted my distinction, and in a letter to me declared that he found conjugal affection an even more interesting field of study than romantic love.  Why, indeed, should anyone be alarmed at the distinction I made?  Is not a man’s feeling toward his sweetheart different from his feeling toward his mother or sister?  Why then should it be absurd or “immoral” to maintain that it differs from his feeling toward his wife?  What I maintain is that romantic love disappears gradually, to be replaced, as a rule, by conjugal affection, which is sometimes a less intense, at other times a more intense, feeling than the emotions aroused during courtship.  The process may be compared to a modulation in music, in which some of the tones in a chord are retained while others are displaced by new ones.  Such modulations are delightful, and the new harmony may be as beautiful as the old.  A visitor to Wordsworth’s home wrote: 

“I saw the old man walking in the garden with his wife.  They were both quite old, and he was almost blind; but they seemed like sweethearts courting, they were so tender to each other and attentive.”

A husband may be, and should be, quite as tender, as attentive, as gallant and self-sacrificing, as sympathetic, proud, and devoted as a lover; yet all