story appears to be that each lover in a metaphysical way has possession of the other's body. So long as the mutual love exists, life is a pleasure; it's a joy to get up in the morning, a joy to go to work, a joy to go to bed at night. When it is broken, life becomes a weariness, and a heaviness. It seems to have no purpose, some think of suicide, neither work nor pleasure have any appeal anymore. It is as though the love of the other, at whatever distance, breathes life into the limbs, and its absence breathes death, and lethargy. “Yes”, it may be said, “but this is all in the mind”. Certainly the trauma is in the mind, but if it were only there one would expect a new love to be able to replace the loss of the old. Anyone who has suffered grief knows that it is not so. Men may try, but it never works. Probably the poet in Schubert's Winterreise was correct, in that it is only when a man starts again to think of others, that he begins to overcome grief in himself.
So a more mature love may replace an earlier less mature one, but that is inevitable in the process of growing up; and the fact that the new love is more mature means that it is not a substitute for the old, but the fulfilment of the earlier yearnings. Indeed the whole fabric of marital fidelity (except insofar as it is a slavish adherence to convenience or respectability) depends on the instinctive knowledge that a new love would not replace the old, however attractive and glamorous she might be. Adulterers, in principle, are people who make the mistake of thinking that she will!
The first lessons that love teaches therefore are that people are unique and irreplaceable, and that others depend on their affection; whereas in the community people are expendable and replaceable, and though it is true that in any team-work people depend on you, they depend on your reliability, not upon your affection. This is the knowledge that most people demand as the price of being willing to lead a fairly dull life in an industrial community – the…