How each sex has its own prejudice about love. – Despite all the concessions I am willing to make to the prejudice favouring monogamy, I will never admit talk of equal rights for man and woman in love: there are none. For man and woman have different conceptions of love – and it belongs to the conditions of love in each sex that neither presupposes the same feeling, the same concept of ‘love’ in the other. What woman means by love is clear enough: total devotion (and not mere surrender) with soul and body, without any consideration or reserve, rather with shame and horror at the thought of a devotion that might be tied to special clauses or conditions. In this absence of conditions her love is a faith: woman has no other. Man, when he loves a woman, wants precisely this love from her and is thus himself as far as can be from the presupposition of female love; supposing, however, that there should also be men to whom the desire for complete surrender is not alien, well, then they are – not men. A man who loves like a woman becomes a slave, but a woman who loves like a woman becomes a more perfect woman… The passion of a woman, in its unconditional renunciation of her own rights, presupposes precisely that on the other side there is not an equal pathos, not an equal will to renunciation; for if both should renounce themselves from love, the result would be – well, I don’t know, maybe an empty space? Woman wants to be taken, adopted as a possession, wants to be absorbed in the concept ‘possession’, ‘possessed’; consequently, she wants someone who takes, who does not himself give or give himself away; who on the contrary is supposed precisely to be made richer in ‘himself’ – through the increase in strength, happiness, and faith given him by the woman who gives herself. Woman gives herself away; man takes more – I do not believe one can get around this natural opposition through any social contracts or with the best will to justice, desirable as it may be not to remind oneself constantly how harsh, terrible, enigmatic, and immoral this antagonism is. For love, when one considers it in its perfect, fully developed state, is nature, and nature is eternally ‘immoral’. Faithfulness is then implicit in woman’s love, and follows from its definition; in a man’s case it could perhaps arise as a consequence of his love, for instance as gratitude or as an idiosyncrasy of taste, a so-called ‘elective affinity’, but it does not belong to the essence of his love. Indeed this is so little the case that one might almost speak with some justification of a natural back-and-forth between love and faithfulness in a man: his love is desire for possession and not a renunciation or giving away, but with possession desire for possession always ceases… In fact it is the highly refined and suspicious thirst for possession on the part of a man who rarely and only after a long time admits that he has ‘possession’, which allows his love to endure. Thus it is possible that his love continues to grow even after surrender – he will not easily admit that a woman has nothing more to ‘give up’ to him.