Marriage anxieties trigger neuroses far more often in girls than men

Evidence

It happens that after a longer or shorter period of fidelity, the woman no longer confines herself to these flirtations or coquetries. Often, she decides to deceive her husband out of resentment. Adler maintains that woman’s infidelity always stems from revenge; this is going too far; but the fact is that she often yields less to a lover’s seduction than to a desire to defy her husband: “He is not the only man in the world—I can attract others—I am not his slave, he thinks he is clever but he can be duped.” It may happen that the derided husband retains his primordial importance for the wife; just as the girl will sometimes take a lover to rebel against her mother or protest against her parents, disobey them, affirm herself, so a woman whose very resentment attaches her to her husband seeks a confidant in her lover, an observer who considers her a victim, an accomplice who helps her humiliate her husband; she talks to him endlessly about her husband under the pretext of subjecting him to his scorn; and if the lover does not play his role well, she moodily turns from him either to go back to her husband or to find another consoler. But very often, it is less resentment than disappointment that drives her into the arms of a lover; she does not find love in marriage; she resigns herself with difficulty to never knowing the sensual pleasures and joys whose expectations charmed her youth. Marriage, by frustrating women’s erotic satisfaction, denies them the freedom and individuality of their feelings, drives them to adultery by way of a necessary and ironic dialectic. … We train them from childhood to the ways of love. Their grace, their dressing up, their knowledge, their language, all their instruction, has only this end in view. … Thus it is folly to try to bridle women’s desire, which is so burning and natural. … With monogamous marriage, two constant social types, unknown hitherto, make their appearance on the scene—the wife’s attendant lover and the cuckold husband … Together with monogamous marriage and hetaerism, adultery became an unavoidable social institution—denounced, severely penalised, but impossible to suppress. … If conjugal sex has excited the wife’s curiosity without satisfying her senses, like in Colette’s The Innocent Libertine, she tries to complete her education in the beds of strangers. If she has no singular attachment to her husband, but he has succeeded in awakening her sexuality, she will want to taste the pleasures she has discovered through him with others. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1617 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Girls’ early fears of sexuality often crystallize into a refusal of marriage; Imposed marriage can be so traumatic a girl kills herself over it — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1130; Girls develop psychosomatic illnesses as an unconscious exit from marriage (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Girls develop psychosomatic illnesses as an unconscious exit from marriage #exemplifies (0.85)
• Sexual ignorance and fear can produce crippling obsessive phobias in young women #qualifies (0.75)
• Marriage’s frustrated eroticism causally drives wives into adultery #complicates (0.70) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1617