And what is true of the husband here is equally true of the wife. She gets to know her husband’s every word, every mood, every gesture by heart. To call his presence companionship, or the boon that comes with friendship, would be to cast a slur on all companionship and friendship for ever. Companionship between husband and wife is therefore impossible. It is impossible because the very source of the chief quality of companionship—refreshment—is cut off at the root by too much association, too much and too incessant exploration of each other’s minds, by the two spouses. (F) The monogamic marriage is as a rule more satisfying to the female than to the male; but only, as we shall see in the chapter on Divorce, if children are born regularly, and the circumstances of their birth and their infancy run a normal course. The reason of this is that since the positive healthy woman finds her complete sexual experience only by means of the coitus, _plus_ the period of gestation, _plus_ parturition, and _plus_ the months of lactation, she finds, as a rule, in the course of a married life in which she brings forth children regularly and in normal circumstances, all that her body can possibly expect from an adapted sexual life.[56] The act of fertilization, which, as we have already seen in a former chapter, is only the sparking-plug that starts the huge cycle that culminates in the weaning, is such a trifling incident in her sexual experience that very soon her husband begins to assume in her eyes the importance which, as a matter of fact, he enjoys relative to the huge cycle itself. And if she happens no longer to feel that enthusiasm for him which she felt as a fiancée, she can endure the disillusionment with equanimity and sweetness because she is now aware that, after all said and done, he does not really matter to her nearly as much as she once rather foolishly imagined. Promoting and expediting the drop in a woman’s affection for her husband must also be reckoned not only the natural surfeit and indifference that comes with excessive familiarity, but also the presence of the children themselves. For while they act as a consolation to the woman for the declining affection of the pair, they also operate as a powerful reducer of that affection in herself. The unconscious longing for fertilization that has long been drawing her to her husband and forcing her to transfigure his very common and ordinary personality into something exceptional, naturally abates as fast as children are born, because, as an unconscious longing, it gets gratified and therefore stifled. And thus children, far from being the alleged bonds uniting couples, may become the most potent wedges driving them asunder. The extraordinary number of loving childless couples in which the woman’s devotion remains unabated may be accounted for in this way.[57] Policy, as a rule, bids her treat him with consideration and the outward signs of devotion as the breadwinner, as