Passionate women experience a totalizing misery that men’s activities spare them

Evidence

My God! If you only knew what the days are like, what life is like without the interest and pleasure of seeing you! My friend, dissipation, occupation, and movement satisfy you; and I, my happiness is you, it is only you; I would not want to live if I could not see you and love you every minute of my life. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1871

Categorization

• XREF: The gendered asymmetry of love as total vocation (her) vs. one interest among many (his) connects to Beauvoir’s core thesis about women lacking transcendence and to Sartre’s analysis of bad faith. — connects to: Newly married women suffer depression, boredom, and disgust at marital intimacy; Female biological instability produces an emotional vulnerability men lack; Men survive rupture through their own life while abandoned women lose everything. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1882
• SHARE: Mlle de Lespinasse’s letter is a perfect illustrative quote for someone teaching or writing about the gendered division of emotional labor historically.
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Newly married women suffer depression, boredom, and disgust at marital intimacy; Female biological instability produces an emotional vulnerability men lack; Men survive rupture through their own life while abandoned women lose everything. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1882

Broader Connections

• Female biological instability produces an emotional vulnerability men lack #complicates (0.72)