we casually raise a flat stone in our gardens.  Great as are the problems of love, and great as should be our attention to them, it must always be remembered that love is not a little circle that is complete in itself.  It is the nature of love to irradiate.  Just as family life exists mainly for the social end of breeding the future race, so family love has its social ends in the extension of sympathy and affection to those outside it, and even in ends that go beyond love altogether.[417]

The question is debated from time to time as to how far it is possible for men and women to have intimate friendships with each other outside the erotic sphere.[418] There can be no doubt whatever that it is perfectly possible for a man and a woman to experience for each other a friendship which never intrudes into the sexual sphere.  As a rule, however, this only happens under special conditions, and those are generally conditions which exclude the closest and most intimate friendship.  If, as we have seen, love may be defined as a synthesis of lust and friendship, friendship inevitably enters into the erotic sphere.  Just as sexual emotion tends to merge into friendship, so friendship between persons of opposite sex, if young, healthy, and attractive, tends to involve sexual emotion.  The two feelings are too closely allied for an artificial barrier to be permanently placed between them without protest.  Men who offer a woman friendship usually find that it is not received with much satisfaction except as the first installment of a warmer emotion, and women who offer friendship to a man usually find that he responds with an offer of love; very often the “friendship” is from the first simply love or flirtation masquerading under another name.

“In the long run,” a woman writes (in a letter published in Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Bd. i, Heft 7), “the senses become discontented at their complete exclusion.  And I believe that a man can only come into the closest mutual association with a woman by whom, consciously or unconsciously, he is physically attracted.  He cannot enter into the closest psychic intercourse with a woman with whom he could not imagine himself in physical intercourse.  His prevailing wish is for the possession of a woman, of the whole woman, her soul as well as her body.  And a woman also cannot imagine an intimate relation to a man in which the heart and the body, as well as the mind, are not involved.  (Naturally I am thinking of people with sound nerves and healthy blood.) Can a woman carry on a Platonic relation with a man from year to year without the thought sometimes coming to her:  ’Why does he never kiss me?  Have I no charm for him?’ And in the most concealed corner of her heart will it not happen that she uses that word ‘kiss’ in the more comprehensive sense in which the French sometimes employ it?” There is undoubtedly an element of truth in this statement.  The frontier between erotic love and friendship is vague, and