ip.

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