Windows of Love

commonplace of ordinary conversation; that it is scientifically true,one time with another, when we take an extended range of cases, may, Ithink, be almost demonstrated by sure and certain warranty of humannature.

Brothers and sisters have more in common, mentally and physically, thanany other members of the same race can possibly have with one another.But nobody falls in love with his sister. A profound instinct has taughteven the lower races of men (for the most part) to avoid such union ofthe all-but-identical. In the higher races the idea never so much asoccurs to us. Even cousins seldom fall in love–seldom, that is to say,in comparison with the frequent opportunities of intercourse they enjoy,relatively to the remainder of general society. When they do, and whenthey carry out their perilous choice effectively by marriage, naturalselection soon avenges Nature upon the offspring by cutting off theidiots, the consumptives, the weaklings, and the cripples, who oftenresult from such consanguineous marriages. In narrow communities, wherebreeding in-and-in becomes almost inevitable, natural selection hassimilarly to exert itself upon a crowd of _cretins_ and other haplessincapables. But in wide and open champaign countries, where individualchoice has free room for exercise, men and women as a rule (if notconstrained by parents and moralists) marry for love, and marry on thewhole their natural complements. They prefer outsiders, fresh blood,somebody who comes from beyond the community, to the people of their ownimmediate surroundings. In many men the dislike to marrying among thefolk with whom they have been brought up amounts almost to a positiveinstinct; they feel it as impossible to fall in love with afellow-townswoman as to fall in love with their own first cousins. Amongexogamous tribes such an instinct (aided, of course, by other extraneouscauses) has hardened into custom; and there is reason to believe (fromthe universal traces among the higher civilisations of marriage bycapture) that all the leading races of the world are ultimately derivedfrom exogamous ancestors, possessing this healthy and excellentsentiment.

In minor matters, it is of course universally admitted that short men,as a rule, prefer tall women, while tall men admire little women. Darkpairs by preference with fair; the commonplace often runs after theoriginal. People have long noticed that this attraction towards one’sopposite tends to keep true the standard of the race; they have not,perhaps, so generally observed that it also indicates roughly theexistence in either individual of a desire for its own naturalcomplement. It is difficult here to give definite examples, buteverybody knows how, in the subtle psychology of Falling in Love, thereare involved innumerable minor elements, physical and mental, whichstrike us exactly because of their absolute adaptation to form withourselves an adequate union. Of course we do not definitely seek outand discover such qualities; instinct works far more intuitively thanthat; but we find at last, by subsequent observation, how true and howtrustworthy were its immediate indications. That is to say, those men do