=When Love Dies.= "Normal" infidelity may also be merely the only hope of sexual gratification for the normal man or woman whose mate has ceased to present the fetishes needed to awaken his or her eroticism. Healthy individuals are neither willing nor capable to forego sexual gratification. Now and then complications arise, a man being very fond, for sexual reasons, of a woman who would prove undesirable as his mate and, for sentimental reasons, of a woman who is infinitely congenial but no longer arouses his desire. Likewise, a woman may be deeply attached to both her lover and her husband. Ivan Bloch writes: "It is quite possible to love more than one person at the same time with nearly equal tenderness and be honestly able to assure each of the passion felt for him or her. The vast psychic differentiation involved by modern civilization increases the possibility of this double love for it is difficult to find one's complement in a single person and this applies to women as well as to men."
George Hirth, in his "Wege zur Heimat" also points out that women, as well as men, can love two persons at the same time. Men flatter themselves with the prejudice that the female heart, or rather brain, can only hold one man at a time and that if there is a second man, it is by a kind of prostitution. Nearly all the erotic writers, poets and novelists, even physicians and psychologists, belong to this class. They look upon a woman as property and of course two men cannot "possess" one woman.
"Regarding novelists, however," remarks Havelock Ellis, "the remark may be interpolated that there are many exceptions. Thomas Hardy, for instance, frequently represents a woman as more or less in love with two men at the same time."
Hirth maintains that a woman is not necessarily obliged to be untrue to one man because she has conceived a passion for another man. "Today," Hirth writes, "truly love and justice can count as honorable motives in marriage. The modern man accords to the beloved wife and life companion the same freedom he himself took before marriage, and perhaps still, takes in marriage. If she makes no use of it, as is to be hoped, so much the better. But let there be no lies, no deception, the indispensable foundation of modern marriage is boundless sincerity and friendship, the deepest trust, affectionate devotion and consideration. That is the best safeguard against adultery. Let him, however, who is, nevertheless, overtaken by the outbreak of it, console himself with the undoubted fact that of two real lovers, the most noble minded and deep seeing friend will always have the preference."