856. But life does not stand still. And nothing can continue being in an embryonic condition. Every embryo must hasten towards its birth. One day this birth will come about, which means that the individual's mental transformation will not continue to be unknown to it. It will eventually discover that the heartfelt sympathy it feels in a particular friendship with this or that friend of its own sex is sometimes not as mutual as it might have wished. It begins to make every effort to stimulate or bring about a mutual response in the other person. This proves useless in most cases, for, as a rule, the other person is unable to feel such a heartfelt sympathy for beings of their own sex, since this person's sympathetic faculty is still to an overwhelming degree directed towards the opposite sex, and this begins to cause difficulties for the former being. This being will be forced to see the object of its sympathy fall in love, become engaged and marry and thus slide still further away from the fulfilment of its secret attraction. At this point one cannot fail to notice that this absorption in the affairs of the friend completely fills its mentality. Inwardly it is deeply downcast. It feels that its friend is lost to him. He suffers the same pain as a betrothed person who has been abandoned by their partner, namely, "unrequited love". This unhappy condition is even worse than in ordinary or "normal" relationships where the person who leaves is a being of the opposite sex. In this case they can to some extent give vent to their sorrow or depression by reproaching this person, just as they might also expect to find sympathy among other people. But in a situation in which a being feels unhappy about a friend's attraction towards a person of the opposite sex, he is cut off from making reproaches, just as he cannot expect to find empathy from other beings, for it is actually necessary for him to keep his condition secret if he is not to be found out and thereby stamped as a pariah or an odd person by his associates and consequently made an object of the unpleasantness, scorn and mockery connected with this. The individual therefore has to live more or less alone with its unhappy condition, and, what is more, has to make every attempt to make it look as if it is pleased for its "lost" friend, congratulating him, so that also he will not notice anything. It may later become attached to a new friend and experiences the same story all over again. And it can in fact live through long periods of the sexually mature part of its life like this. In between these periods it can still have an outbreak of the so-called "normal" condition where it is attracted to the opposite sex. Indeed, this attraction can be so strong that the individual at this point actually marries and, in many cases, has children within the marriage. But this marriage can be put under a great strain if a new period of the so-called "abnormal" condition recurs during its present incarnation.