Or she will be too healthy to repress her desires, and her
disappointment may change her love into scorn, especially when
conversation with other women or a clever suitor opens her eyes to what
is lacking in her life.
A separation, sometimes complicated by the usual triangle situation,
may become unavoidable.
There are cases in which both mates are frankly neurotic and were drawn
together as invalids and weak-minded often are, by the similarity of
their predicament.
=The Plight of Two Neurotics.= Both of them may, as I observed it
once, seek safety in a mock-incestuous relationship, the older mate,
seeking safety in a union with an immature human being, the younger
mate in a union with the parent image. In one case which I have in
mind, the husband, fifty-five years old, had been several times on the
verge of exposure for unlawful "liberties" he took with very young
girls. The wife, a few days after her father's death, married the old
man who had been her father's associate and who had tried to seduce her
when she was barely ten.
She visited me when a new scandal in which her husband became
implicated caused her to leave him. She was considerably "mixed up"
for, while young men had begun to attract her, she felt extremely
self-conscious in their presence and could only enjoy herself in the
company of elderly men who, in turn, reminded her too much of the
nightmare thru which she had lived for two years.
A pious Catholic, she solved the conflict prematurely, before I had
time to bring insight into her mind, by fleeing from all sorts of men
and into a convent.
Other cases have a less tragic history: A young woman of twenty-eight
who had never been happy with her husband, (thirty), took advantage of
the numberless opportunities war work and war drives gave to women, to
become faithless to her husband. She had four short-lived affairs with
men twice her age, then "broke down" when her husband secured a divorce
for adultery. Analysis gave her insight into her father fixation which
was not very deep and might never have driven her into overt acts but
for the unusual conditions in which she found herself.
She is now happily remarried to a man of her age.
=What the Community Says.= Mates whose ages are out of proportion,
are often thrown into deep discord by the pressure of the community's
criticism. They might thrive on a desert island or on a farm or, as in
the case of an explorer I knew, when surrounded almost continuously by
an "inferior" race whose opinion they can easily disregard.
The community's smiles or open disapproval, on the other hand, are a
heavy burden, especially for the more neurotic mate, who is likely to
feel very self-conscious in everything he or she does.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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