PLATONIC LOVE NOT IN NATURE'S BOOKS.

Cromwell Argus, Volume XXVI, Issue 1323, 28 August 1894, Page 6

PLATONIC LOVE NOT IN NATURE'S BOOKS.

Love between women and men was not invented for the entertainment of philosophers, but largely for domestic puposes ; and if platonic love is to have anything better than a hazardous and unstable existence, the conditions of it must be such that it may prosper without conflict with Nature’s more important ends. Thus we see why platonic friendships between young people who migh marry do not endure. Such couples get married, and their friendship merges into a more durable sentiment, or else one of them marries someone else, and then it lapses. At least it should lapse, for if it does not, it not only militates against peace in a family, but it tends to keep the unmarried platonist from going about his business and finding himself a name, according to Nature’s design. It is true that there are women, and young women at that, who can contrive for a time to maintain a husband and one or two simultaneous platonic intimates. But in such cases one of the three things happens : either the wife makes her husband happy and her platonic admirers miserable, or she makes her friends happy and her husband miserable, or she makes them all miserable. If by any chance or miracle of talent she seems to make them all happy, she makes society miserable, because it cannot see how she does it. And when society is miserable it talks, until finally it breaks up the arrangement. She is , bound to fall; and the reason does ! not lie in any defect in her, but in the j fact that her purpose is contrary to the economy of Nature, which has provided barely men enough to go 1 around, and does not permit a woman j who has a man of her own to monopolise other men with impunity. Every marriageable man besides her husband that any woman absorbs involves the waste of some other woman’s opportunities, and Nature abhors waste with a proverbial anti- ' pathy. !