ious inconveniences, there is some need in human nature which demands a
permanent and a stable sex relationship to meet it.

I believe that there is something in our human nature which desires
stability in its relations with other human beings. It is perhaps a
recognition of the fact that, though we live in time and suffer its
conditions, we are immortal also and chafe under too strict a bondage to
time. Our relations with other human beings ought not to be evanescent!
There is something cheap and shoddy in the giving and taking of human
personality on such easy soon-forgotten terms. It is not only in sexual
relations that this is true. It is true of all human intercourse. The
longer care and devotion of human parents for their offspring is not a
physical only, but a spiritual necessity: and it is bound up with the
greater faithfulness of human lovers. In parenthood, in loverhood, in
friendship, those who take their obligations lightly are not the finer
sort of men and women, but the slighter, cheaper make. It is not a love of
freedom but a certain inferiority and shoddiness that makes it possible
for us to give ourselves, and take others, lightly. For in all human
relationships it is "ourselves" that we give and take. It is not what your
friend does for you or gives to you that makes him your friend; but what
he _is_ to you. It is his personality that you have shared. And so there
is something rather repulsive in quickly forgetting or throwing it away.
People who make friends and lose them as the trees put out their leaves
in spring to shed them in the autumn, are not quite human. The capacity to
make friends--to make many friends--is a great power: the capacity to lose
them not so admirable. Yet there are people who always have a bosom-friend,
every time you meet them; only it is never the same friend. And this is a
poor sort of friendship, for it _is_ poor to give and take so little that
you easily cease or forget to give at all.

If this is true of friends, it is not less true of lovers: it is more
true. For sex-love includes more of one's personality, it more completely
involves body, soul and spirit, is the most perfect form of union that
human beings know. How strange, then, to argue that one may treat a lover
as one would not treat a friend! Make one and lose one so lightly, and
disavow all the responsibility of a love in which so much is given, so much
involved! It is true that all human love has a physical elem