take the case of A and B, and let A stand for any man and B for any
woman; or, _vice versa_, let A be the woman and B the man, for in
jealousy and love what applies to one sex is applicable with
practically the same force to the opposite sex. Suppose A is intensely
jealous of and deeply, passionately in love with B; but B is utterly
indifferent and does not care what A may feel or do. A and B may be
married or not; this does not alter the case materially. Suppose B, if
unmarried to A, goes off and marries another man, or, if married to
A, goes off and leaves him; or suppose B does not love anybody else,
but just remains indifferent to A's advances or repels him because she
cannot reciprocate his love. Unrequited love alone can cause almost as
fierce tortures as the most intense jealousy. And A suffers tortures.
What shall he do? What shall he do to save himself--to save his
health, his mind, his life? For he is unable to eat, unable to sleep,
unable to work, and he feels that he is going to pieces. He has lost
his position and is in danger of losing his reason. What shall he do
to escape insanity or a suicide's grave? There is but one remedy. Let
him use all his energies to find a _substitute_. I mean a living
substitute. Mere sexual desire may be sublimated, to a certain extent,
into other channels, may be replaced by work, study, a hobby or some
engrossing interest. A great unrequited love, with the element of
jealousy present or absent, cannot be replaced by anything else except
by another love. And where as great a love is impossible let it be a
minor love or a series of minor loves. When Goethe, one of the world's
great lovers, was unable to walk in the broad avenue of a great love
he would walk in the by-paths of a number of little loves. The common
talk about a person being unable to love more than once in his or her
life is silly nonsense. A man or a woman is able to love, and love
very deeply, a number of times; and love simultaneously or
successively. It is often a mere matter of opportunity. I know that
there _are_ loves that are eternal; that there are loves for which no
substitute can be found. But these supreme, divine loves are so rare
that among ordinary mortals they may be left out of account. They are
the portion of supermen and superwomen. Ordinarily a substitute may be
found. The substitute love may never reach the intensity of the
original love, it may never give full or even half-full satisfaction;
but it will help to dull the sharp cutting edge, it will act as a
partial hemostatic to the bleeding heart, it will soothe and
anesthetize the wound even if it cannot completely heal it. And this
is a valuable aid while the sufferer is coming to himself or herself,
while the gathered fragments of a broken life are being cemented and
while the cement is hardening. Yes, the man or woman who is in inferno
on account of an unreciprocated or a betrayed love should lose no time
in searching for a substitute love. I do not believe in people losing
their health and their minds on account of suffering which does nobody
any good.
But I will go still further. Where a substitute love--great or
minor--cannot be found, then mere sex relations may help to diminish
the suffering, to quiet the turbulent heart, to relieve the aching
brain. As everything connected with sex, so our ideas about illicit
sex relations that are not connected with love, are honeycombed with
hypocrisy and false to the core. While purchasable, loveless sex
relations can, of course, not be compared to love relations, still
under our present social, economic and moral code they are the only
relations that thousands of men and women can enjoy, and they are
better than none; and in quite a considerable percentage of cases an
element of romance and greater or lesser permanency do become attached
to them, and they act as a more or less satisfactory substitute for
genuine love relations.
I am not spinning theoretical gossamer webs. I am speaking from
experience--the experience of patients and confiding friends. I could
relate many interesting cases. And I may, in a more appropriate
volume. Here one or two will have to suffice.
He was twenty-six years old and a senior student in the College of
Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, New York. He had been in
love with and had considered himself engaged for four or five years to
a young lady two years his junior. She was, of course, the most
wonderful young lady in the world, the whole world; in fact, there was
not another one to compare her to. She was unique; she stood all
alone. But for a year or so she was getting rather cool towards him;
which fanned his flame all the more. And suddenly he received a note
asking him not to call any more, nor to try to communicate in any
other way. He did write, but his letters were returned unopened. And
soon after he read of her engagement to a prominent young banker. He
nearly went insane, and this is used not in any figurative sense. His
insomnia was _complete_, and resisted all treatment. When his pulse
became very rapid and his eyes acquired the wild look that they do
after many sleepless nights an attempt was made to administer
hypnotics, but they had practically no effect. Chloral, veronal, etc.,
only made him "dopy," irritable and depressed, but did not give him
one hour of sound sleep. His appetite was gone, now and then his limbs
would twitch, and he would sit and stare into space for hours at a
time. To study or attend the clinics was out of the question, and he
did not even attempt to take the final examinations. The parents felt
distressed, but were unable to do anything for him. The least attempt
at interference on their part, any attempt to console him, to induce
him to pull himself together, made him more irritable, more morose; so
that they finally left him alone. He was practically a total
abstainer, but one evening he went out and came home drunk; and after
that he drank frequently and heavily. His parents could do nothing
with him. One evening on Broadway he was accosted by a young
street-walker. She had a pleasant, sympathetic face, and he went with
her. _That was his first sex experience._ Up to that time he was
chaste. He met her again the following evening. Gradually a sort of
friendship grew up between them. She found out the cause of his grief,
and with maternal solicitude she tried everything in her power to
console him, and he began to look forward to the nightly meeting with
her. His grief became gradually less acute, he gave up drinking, which
he disliked, and which he had taken up only to deaden his pain; he
began to pull himself together, and in six or eight months he took
over his last year in Columbia and was properly graduated. He kept up
the friendship with the girl for over two years, when she died of
pneumonia. He did not love her, but he liked to be with her, as her
presence gave him physical and mental comfort. It is possible that she
loved him genuinely, but there was never any sentimental talk between
them, and there was never any question between them of the permanency
of the relationship. They both knew that it was temporary. But he is
absolutely certain that but for one of the representatives of the
class that is despised, driven about and persecuted by brutal
policemen and ignorant judges, he would have become a bum, or, most
likely, he would have committed suicide--at the point of which he was
several times; only pity for his mother and sisters restrained him.
And here is another case. A girl about twenty-eight years of age fell
in love with a man four or five years her senior. The love seemed to
be reciprocated, and they soon became engaged to be married. He asked
that the engagement, on account of certain business reasons, be kept
secret. She did not know the man well; she had met him at several
entertainments and church affairs and he seemed very nice. He always
found some excuses for delaying the marriage, and after they had been
engaged about a year he began to insist on sex relations. Though of a
refined and noble character, she was of a passionate nature and she
did not offer much resistance. Many girls who would under no
circumstance indulge in illicit relations, considering it a great sin,
have no compunctions about having relations with their fiancés. They
lived together for about a year. They were together almost daily,
except now and then, when he would go away for a week or two on
business. Once he went away--and never came back. He wrote to her that
their relations were at an end; that he was a married man and a
father of children; he had hoped he might get a divorce, but that now
he had changed his mind and that she must forget him, etc. Everything
was black before her. It cost her a supreme effort not to faint, and
she was supported in this effort by the fact that when the letter came
she was in the presence of friends; a terrible, overpowering,
all-inundating sense of shame gave her the strength not to betray her
condition and her story before the world at large. But as soon as she
was alone she collapsed completely. There was the most absolute
insomnia imaginable, complete anorexia, but the most distressing
features were frequent fainting spells, severe palpitation of the
heart and tremors. She had no love for the man--so she said. Her love
had turned to hatred and contempt--but the jealousy was all-consuming.
Like a fire it was burning in her, searing her brain and her soul day
and night.
She felt that she was not strong enough to stand this physical and
mental torture, and so she decided to commit suicide. As the means she
selected gas. Fortunately, the smell became perceptible before the
injury was irreparable. She was saved. But she felt that she could not
stand the torture very long--and more than anything was she afraid
that her mind would give way. She had a special horror of insanity.
And so she decided to make another attempt This time with bichloride.
Again she was saved. A friend of hers then got an inkling of the
events that were transpiring, and she introduced her to some gentlemen
friends. They were nice people and more or less radical on the sex
question. In order to drown her pain she began to go out very
frequently with that crowd, and to her surprise and delight she found
that she soon began to think less and less about her contemptible
seducer, and, what was more important to her, she was soon able to
sleep. For about six months she led an extremely active, almost
promiscuous sex life. But then she gave it up, as she felt herself
normal and no longer in need of it. She is now happily married.
I am through with this rather lengthy essay on one of the most painful
manifestations of human emotional life. I repeat that I am aware that
feelings are often stronger than reason; but saying this does not mean
asserting that feelings cannot be modified and held in check by
reason. And I feel confident that a careful, open-minded reading of
these pages and an acceptance of the ideas therein promulgated would
aid in _preventing_ a good deal of the misery of jealousy and in
curing a certain proportion of it after it has found lodgment in the
hearts of unhappy men and women.
There are one or two more points that might be touched upon, but with
the freedom of press in reference to sex matters as it exists in this
country to-day, I have said all that I could say.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
CONCLUDING WORDS
It is my sincere belief--and I cherish the belief in spite of this
horrible, wretched war which seems to be shattering the very
foundations of everything that we hold dear, destroying all the humane
and moral achievements that have been laboriously built up in the
course of many centuries--that the time will come when the world will
be practically free from pain and suffering. Almost all disease will
be conquered, accidents will be rare, the fear of starvation or
poverty or unemployment will no longer haunt men and women, every
infant born will be well-born and welcome, and the numerous anxieties
and ambitions that now disturb the lives of so many of the earth's
inhabitants will no longer plague us. They will be the dead memories
of a dead and forgotten past.
Yes, I believe that the time will come when the world will be
practically free from pain and suffering. But there is one exception.
I do not believe that we will ever be able entirely to eliminate the
_tragedies of the heart_. For our physical ills, which will be few in
number, there will be a socialized medical profession; everywhere
there will be free hospitals and convalescent homes. The unemployment
problem will be dealt with by the State, and dealt with so that there
will be no unemployment problem. There will be work for everybody and
everybody will do the work which he finds most congenial. But the
State, I fear, will be able to do nothing in affairs of the heart.
When John loves Mary with every fiber of his soul, and Mary remains
completely indifferent, then no State physician and no Government
official will be able to offer any balm or consolation to poor John.
And if Mary loves Robert, and Robert behaves so that he breaks Mary's
heart, then no official glue will put it together and no convalescent
home will make it whole.
Yes, I believe that love pangs and tragedies of the heart will cause
mortal men and women suffering even under the most perfect social
regime. But I also believe that these pangs will be less acute, that
the suffering will be less cruel than it is now.
Proper ideas about love, freer intercourse between the sexes, a normal
and regular sex life, a saner attitude towards many things which are
now unjustly considered shameful or criminal will, to a large degree,
prevent the heart tragedies and facilitate their cure where they
cannot be prevented.
And it is the duty of everybody who loves mankind to study the various
phases of human sexuality and help to spread sane and humane ideas on
the subject of Sex and Love.
The author trusts that WOMAN: HER SEX AND LOVE LIFE will help, in some
slight degree, in spreading healthy, sane and honest ideas about sex
among the men and women of America.
THE END
SEXUAL TRUTHS
VERSUS
SEXUAL LIES, MISCONCEPTIONS AND EXAGGERATIONS
By WILLIAM J. ROBINSON, M.D.
This book effectually demolishes the numerous lies and senseless
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STEKEL'S ESSAYS ON SEX AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
While we are far from agreeing with everything this author has
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EUGENICS PUBLISHING CO., 250 W. 54th Street, New York
SEXUAL PROBLEMS OF TODAY
By WILLIAM J. ROBINSON, M.D.
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from an Economic and Eugenic Standpoint.--What To Do With the
Prostitute and How To Abolish Venereal Disease.--The Question of
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SEXUAL IMPOTENCE
A Practical Treatise on the Causes, Symptoms and Treatment of Sexual
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By WILLIAM J. ROBINSON, M.D.
Chief of the Department of Genito-Urinary Diseases and
Dermatology, Bronx Hospital and Dispensary; Editor of "The
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Eleventh Edition, revised and enlarged, 502 pages. Illustrated. Price,
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The eleventh edition has just come off the press. Dr. Robinson has
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Those who know the book consider it the best of its kind in any
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The Sexual Crisis
A CRITIQUE OF OUR SEX LIFE
A Psychologic and Sociologic Study
By GRETE MEISEL-HESS
AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION BY EDEN AND CEDAR PAUL
_EDITED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION_
By WILLIAM J. ROBINSON, M.D.
One of the greatest of all books on the sex question that have
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360 PAGES. PRICE $3.00
EUGENICS PUBLISHING COMPANY 250 W. 54th STREET NEW YORK
* * * * *
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