an intimate psychic intercourse that is sternly debarred from ever manifesting itself in a caress, or other physical manifestation of tender intimacy, tends to be constrained, and arouses unspoken and unspeakable thoughts and desires which are fatal to any complete friendship.

Undoubtedly the only perfect “Platonic friendships” are those which have been reached through the portal of a preliminary erotic intimacy.  In such a case bad lovers, when they have resolutely traversed the erotic stage, may become exceedingly good friends.  A satisfactory friendship is possible between brother and sister because they have been physically intimate in childhood, and all erotic curiosities are absent.  The most admirable “Platonic friendship” may often be attained by husband and wife in whom sympathy and affection and common interests have outlived passion.  In nearly all the most famous friendships of distinguished men and women—­as we know in some cases and divine in others—­an hour’s passion, in Sainte-Beuve’s words, has served as the golden key to unlock the most precious and intimate secrets of friendship.[419]

The friendships that have been entered through the erotic portal possess an intimacy and retain a spiritually erotic character which could not be attained on the basis of a normal friendship between persons of the same sex.  This is true in a far higher degree of the ultimate relationship, under fortunate circumstances, of husband and wife in the years after passion has become impossible.  They have ceased to be passionate lovers but they have not become mere friends and comrades.  More especially their relationship takes on elements borrowed from the attitude of child to parent, of parent to child.  Everyone from his first years retains something of the child which cannot be revealed to all the world; everyone acquires something of the guardian paternal or maternal spirit.  Husband and wife are each child to the other, and are indeed parent and child by turn.  And here still the woman retains a certain erotic supremacy, for she is to the last more of a child than it is ever easy for the man to be, and much more essentially a mother than he is a father.

    Groos (Der AEsthetische Genuss, p. 249) has pointed out that
    “love” is really made up of both sexual instinct and parental
    instinct.

“So-called happy marriages,” says Professor W. Thomas (Sex and Society, p. 246), “represent an equilibrium reached through an extension of the maternal interest of the woman to the man, whereby she looks after his personal needs as she does after those of the children—­cherishing him, in fact, as a child—­or in an extension to woman on the part of man of the nurture and affection which is in his nature to give to pets and all helpless (and preferably dumb) creatures.”

“When the devotion in the tie between mother and son,” a woman writes, “is added to the relation of husband and wife,