HOW OFTEN! HOW UNEXPECTED!

How may married men
have some morning awakened to the fact
that their young wife is dull,
although she thinks quite the contrary!
not to speak of those wives whose flesh is willing
but whose intellect is weak! — aphorism 276

DANGER IN BEAUTY.

This woman is beautiful and intelligent:
alas, how much more intelligent
she would have become
if she had not been beautiful. – aphorism 282

The Dawn Of Day by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by J. M. Kennedy

Male and female relationships are complex, a composite of many layers. Nietzsche was single for the entirety of his adult life. He did “fall in love” with Lou Salomé when they met in Rome in 1882. He requested an assist of a friend, Paul Reé, to forward a proposal of marriage to Salomé. She declined his offer, and was interested in Nietzsche as a friend. Salomé was a Russian-born psychoanalyst and a well-traveled author, narrator, and essayist from a French Huguenot-German family.

Nietzsche as a writer always gives the body its due. He often writes of our genetic kinship to every other mammal. Do hormones play a role, the animal-magnetic attraction, the seduction of female beauty to the male? The allure of female beauty cannot be over estimated. Nevertheless there is more, something essential to the arc of a durable association. Life together is the possibility of joint collaboration of minds, the ability, the will to engage in the give and take, the friction of learning together.

However, by what means this strong Damascus Steel-like laminate relationship is forged, necessarily improvised, worked out, by each couple — there is no single recipe. Every marriage, every long term partnership is one-of-a-kind.

The individual, whether man or woman, when considering the relationship they are in may say:

So far, so good!