itions, and those are generally conditions which
exclude the closest and most intimate friendship. If, as we have seen,
love may be defined as a synthesis of lust and friendship, friendship
inevitably enters into the erotic sphere. Just as sexual emotion tends to
merge into friendship, so friendship between persons of opposite sex, if
young, healthy, and attractive, tends to involve sexual emotion. The two
feelings are too closely allied for an artificial barrier to be
permanently placed between them without protest. Men who offer a woman
friendship usually find that it is not received with much satisfaction
except as the first installment of a warmer emotion, and women who offer
friendship to a man usually find that he responds with an offer of love;
very often the "friendship" is from the first simply love or flirtation
masquerading under another name.

"In the long run," a woman writes (in a letter published in
_Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, Bd. i, Heft 7), "the senses become
discontented at their complete exclusion. And I believe that a
man can only come into the closest mutual association with a
woman by whom, consciously or unconsciously, he is physically
attracted. He cannot enter into the closest psychic intercourse
with a woman with whom he could not imagine himself in physical
intercourse. His prevailing wish is for the possession of a
woman, of the whole woman, her soul as well as her body. And a
woman also cannot imagine an intimate relation to a man in which
the heart and the body, as well as the mind, are not involved.
(Naturally I am thinking of people with sound nerves and healthy
blood.) Can a woman carry on a Platonic relation with a man from
year to year without the thought sometimes coming to her: 'Why
does he never kiss me? Have I no charm for him?' And in the most
concealed corner of her heart will it not happen that she uses
that word 'kiss' in the more comprehensive sense in which the
French sometimes employ it?" There is undoubtedly an element of
truth in this statement. The frontier between erotic love and
friendship is vague, and an intimate psychic intercourse that is
sternly debarred from ever manifesting itself in a caress, or
other physical manifestation of tender intimacy, tends to be
constrained, and arouses unspoken and unspeakable thoughts and
desires which are fatal to any complete friendsh