in the same person. The
art of love is even more the art of retaining love than of arousing it.
Otherwise it tends to degenerate towards the Shakespearian lust,

"Past reason hunted, and no sooner had,
Past reason hated,"

though it must be remembered that even from the most strictly natural
point of view the transitions of passion are not normally towards
repulsion but towards affection.[409]

The young man and woman who are brought into the complete unrestraint of
marriage after a prolonged and unnatural separation, during which desire
and the satisfactions of desire have been artificially disconnected, are
certainly not under the best conditions for learning the art of love. They
are tempted by reckless and promiscuous indulgence in the intimacies of
marriage to fling carelessly aside all the reasons that make that art
worth learning. "There are married people," as Ellen Key remarks, "who
might have loved each other all their lives if they had not been
compelled, every day and all the year, to direct their habits, wills, and
inclinations towards each other."

All the tendencies of our civilized life are, in personal matters, towards
individualism; they involve the specialization, and they ensure the
sacredness, of personal habits and even peculiarities. This individualism
cannot be broken down suddenly at the arbitrary dictation of a tradition,
or even by the force of passion from which the restraints have been
removed. Out of deference to the conventions and prejudices of their
friends, or out of the reckless abandonment of young love, or merely out
of a fear of hurting each other's feelings, young couples have often
plunged prematurely into an unbroken intimacy which is even more
disastrous to the permanency of marriage than the failure ever to reach a
complete intimacy at all. That is one of the chief reasons why most
writers on the moral hygiene of marriage nowadays recommend separate beds
for the married couple, if possible separate bedrooms, and even sometimes,
with Ellen Key, see no objection to their living in separate houses.
Certainly the happiest marriages have often involved the closest and most
unbroken intimacy, in persons peculiarly fitted for such intimacy. It is
far from true that, as Bloch has affirmed, familiarity is fatal to love.
It is deadly to a love that has no roots, but it is the nourishment of the
deeply-rooted love. Yet it remains true that absence is needed to maint