But the complexity of the situation lies in the fact that the erotic impulses may become conditioned to respond to an indefinite number of substituted stimuli. For example, the parental fixation may become reconditioned by focussing upon some special characteristic of the father or mother, which becomes an erotic fetish. If the mate is selected on the basis of this fetishistic attraction, he (or she) may prove to be so unlike the parent in other respects as to lose all the affection which was originally inspired. A concrete illustration of these conflicting emotional reactions is the case of the girl who declared that she feared her fiancé as much as she loved him, but felt that she must marry him nevertheless. An investigation showed that her almost compulsive feeling about her lover was due to the fact that his gestures and manner of regarding her, in fact his whole bearing, reminded her of her dead father, while in other respects he was totally repugnant to her because his character traits were so far removed from those of her father ideal. The conflict between the parental ideal and other phases of the sexual impulse is even more pronounced in men than in women, for two reasons. In the first place, the mother plays by far the largest part in the life of her children, so that the son's fixation upon her is necessarily more intense than the daughter's affection for the father. Yet on the other hand, the sexual desire of the male is more easily aroused than that of the female, and is more apt to centre upon some member of the opposite sex who possesses certain physical attractiveness but is not at all like the mother ideal. Thus it happens that men often enshrine on their hearthstone the woman who approximates the worshipped mother, while they seek satisfaction for their erotic needs outside the home. In other words, in the masculine psyche there is often a dissociation of the sexual impulse in its direct manifestations and the sentiment of love in its more idealistic aspects. This partially explains the fact that it is possible for a man to be "unfaithful" to his wife while actually loving her devotedly all the time.