=Bored Wives.= Infidelity is often also a refuge from boredom for
the middle class woman who has no definite training or ability in
any direction and is thereby condemned to idleness. Left alone all
day and a few evenings every month by a busy husband, she yearns for
companionship. Unless she is slightly homosexual, she soon tires of
stupid teas, bridge and gossip parties and she accepts the attentions
of some man who brings into her life a little romance and a different
aspect of the world's activities. The French cynic Willy had that type
in mind when he wrote: "adultery has become the key stone of society.
By making married life tolerable it prevents the breaking up of the
home."
Besides normal sexual cravings, there are many unconscious or only
partly conscious causes which drive human beings into being faithless
to their life mates.
Many women take lovers, many men take mistresses for purely egotistical
reasons. Justly or unjustly they feel a certain lack of appreciation in
their mates and make up their minds to get even with them.
="Getting Even"= is one of the great neurotic cravings, one which
has led to numberless offences, including crime and suicide.
To some neurotics with a sense of inferiority, an extramatrimonial
affair seems to be the sole means of restoring one's self confidence.
"I am of no account at home but to some one else I mean the world."
Many neurotics use "romance" and "inspiration" as convenient scapegoats.
"But for the inspiration I derive from my affair with So and So, I
could not do my work properly," and this is true in a good many cases,
but in many more cases, any one else would do just as well as a lover
or mistress. Some neurotics, who remind one of Madame Bovary, the
heroine of Flaubert's great novel, feel that accomplishment and the
fullness of life are naturally associated with sexual irregularities.
Too inferior to accomplish anything by dint of hard work, Emma Bovary
childishly expected love to accomplish everything for her. Other
neurotics, incapable of any creative work, consider romance as an
achievement in itself and proceed to call every carnal dissipation
romance. Just as inferior boys at the gang age steal or destroy in an
absurd attempt at "doing something out of the ordinary."
Some neurotics never feel safe very long with any sexual mate; they
grow afraid or suspicious and seek safety in the arms of some other
human being in whom they unconsciously hope to find the father or
mother image to which they were over-attached. Their search for the
safe mate, that is, for the parent image, is, of course, always
unsuccessful.
=Varietists.= I have observed a number of men and women who liked
to designate themselves as varietists and who were simply unconscious
or partly conscious homosexuals struggling against perverse tendencies
to which they did not wish to yield.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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