4.3. THE WILL TO LOVE.
Love is a thing to a large extent in its beginnings voluntary and
controllable, and at last quite involuntary. It is so hedged about by
obligations and consequences, real and artificial, that for the most
part I think people are overmuch afraid of it. And also the tradition of
sentiment that suggests its forms and guides it in the world about us,
is far too strongly exclusive. It is not so much when love is glowing as
when it is becoming habitual that it is jealous for itself and others.
Lovers a little exhausting their mutual interest find a fillip in an
alliance against the world. They bury their talent of understanding and
sympathy to return it duly in a clean napkin. They narrow their interest
in life lest the other lover should misunderstand their amplitude as
disloyalty.
Our institutions and social customs seem all to assume a definiteness of
preference, a singleness and a limitation of love, which is not
psychologically justifiable. People do not, I think, fall naturally into
agreement with these assumptions; they train themselves to agreement.
They take refuge from experiences that seem to carry with them the risk
at least of perplexing situations, in a theory of barred possibilities
and locked doors. How far this shy and cultivated irresponsive
lovelessness towards the world at large may not carry with it the
possibility of compensating intensities, I do not know. Quite equally
probable is a starvation of one's emotional nature.
The same reasons that make me decide against mere wanton abstinences
make me hostile to the common convention of emotional indifference to
most of the charming and interesting people one encounters. In pleasing
and being pleased, in the mutual interest, the mutual opening out of
people to one another, is the key of the door to all sweet and mellow
living.
