When a man loves a girl, he feels such an overwhelming _individual preference_ for her that though she were a beggar-maid he would scorn the offer to exchange her for an heiress, a princess, or the goddess of beauty herself. To him she seems to have a monopoly of all the feminine charms, and she therefore monopolizes his thoughts and feelings to the exclusion of all other interests, and he longs not only for her reciprocal affection but for a monopoly of it. "Does she love me?" he asks himself a hundred times a day. "Sometimes she seems to treat me with cold indifference--is that merely the instinctive assertion of feminine _coyness_, or does she prefer another man?" The pangs, the agony of _jealousy_ overcome him at this thought. He hopes one moment, despairs the next, till his _moods_ become so _mixed_ that he hardly knows whether he is happy or miserable. He, who is usually so bold and self-confident, is humbled; feels utterly unworthy of her. In his fancy she soars so far above all other women that calling her an angel seems not a _hyperbole_, but a compliment to the angel. Toward such a superior being the only proper attitude is _adoration_. She is spotless as an angel, and his feelings toward her are as _pure_, as free from coarse cravings, as if she were a goddess. How royally _proud_ a man must feel at the thought of being preferred above all mortals by this divine being! In _personal beauty_ had she ever a peer? Since Venus left this planet, has such grace been seen? In face of her, the strongest of all impulses--selfishness--is annihilated. The lover is no longer "number one" to himself; his own pleasures and comforts are ignored in the eager desire to please her, to show her _gallant_ attentions. To save her from disaster or grief he is ready to _sacrifice_ his life. His cordial _sympathy_ makes him share all her joys and sorrows, and his _affection_ for her, though he may have known her only a few days--nay, a few minutes--is as strong and devoted as that of a mother for the child that is her own flesh and blood.
No one who has ever been truly in love will deny that this description, however romantic it may seem in its apparent exaggeration, is a realistic reflection of his feelings and impulses. As this brief review shows, Individual Preference, Monopolism, Coyness, Jealousy, Mixed Moods of Hope and Despair, Hyperbole, Adoration, Purity, Pride, Admiration of Personal Beauty, Gallantry, Self-sacrifice, Sympathy, and Affection, are the essential ingredients in that very composite mental state, which we call romantic love. Coyness, of course, occurs only in feminine love, and there are other sexual differences which will be noted later on. Here I wish to point out that the fourteen ingredients named may be divided into two groups of seven each--the egoistic and the altruistic. The prevailing notion that love is a species of selfishness--a "double selfishness," some wiseacre has called it--is deplorably untrue and shows how little the psychology of love has heretofore been understood.