Woman

by Anthony M. Ludovici

It is about this time that the young wife shows the eagerness described above in her attitude towards other men. These men may be, and usually are, a hundred times plainer, prosier and less potent than her husband; but this does not disturb her. She looks into their faces as if in their countenances alone she expected to find a spark of intelligence or manliness. Her husband’s superior witticisms fall flat, while at the grossest pun from his friends she contorts herself with laughter. She organizes games, picnics, excursions, and even summer holidays, in which some of her husband’s friends always contribute their share to the entertainment. Quiet lanes in Devonshire alone with her husband are no longer her ideal. She wants to organize a “jolly” party for the holidays, and learn to dive and swim with the other girls and young men of the party.

It is usually at this juncture that some prize fool of a man comes forward, who, in his superlative vanity and his crass ignorance of the true state of affairs, sets all the young woman’s restless eagerness, and particularly her attentiveness to himself, down to the credit of his own irresistible charm.

This sums up the psychology of all co-respondents. They are fatuously vain, they are criminally ignorant of female psychology, and they eagerly place to the credit account of their wit, their good looks, their intelligence, and their virility, a so-called conquest in which the part they have played is no more than that of an old horse’s leg that is taken into a stagnant pond to catch hungry leeches with.

At all events, if such a dangerous fool happens to be in the neighbourhood at such a juncture, and the young wife is thrown much into his company, the chances are that, encouraged by his eager acceptation of a situation in which his personal characteristics count for nothing, she is likely to imagine herself both “loved” and “in love”; and then nothing can save her from matrimonial ruin.

Her blind manœuvres will have achieved what her reproductive equipment most ardently desired; they will have removed her from a male who abused without satisfying this equipment, and will have thrown her into the arms of a man who, though possibly inferior to her husband in every respect (as she herself would have realized had her reproductive organs been content), or at any rate not so very much superior to him to justify all this fuss, was at least holding out to her reproductive equipment a fresh promise of fertilization.[88]

And since fertilization is what the will of the species insists upon, and woman is that will, she must be forgiven if, in the circumstances, she goes over to the vain ass who imagines he has captivated her affections. At any rate, she herself is in no way to blame. She has been true to the power to which she owes all her fidelity. The blame, if any, lies, in the first place, with her husband for having deprived a positive and desirable woman of her full sexual experience for a number of years, and for not having realized that this was her trouble when she first became restless; and secondly, with the co-respondent for having mistaken an exasperated woman’s longing for fertilization—not for “companionship,” for “understanding” or for a “kindred soul” as she has declared—for a triumph attributable to his irresistible attractions. The illicit lover in this case, besides being a vain fool, betrays his own sex in the man whose wife he robs.

In such cases a little knowledge of sex psychology will, as a rule, save the situation. But so long as the world continues to be thronged with jackasses who are ready to go hot all over with pride at every woman’s smile, the ridiculous spectacle of a co-respondent in every way the inferior, or at least no more than the equal, of the wronged husband, will continue to be common in our midst.

The strange part of the whole affair is that the young wife’s notion of promised bliss with the co-respondent is based entirely upon her unconscious or bodily hope that fertilization is now sure to follow. Unless it do follow, therefore, she finds herself a twofold dupe; for she has exchanged a man to whom she is at least legally attached for a man who in nine cases out of ten is either no more than her husband’s equal, or his inferior; and she is no better off; because, the moment the novelty of the situation will have died down, the same dissatisfaction that takes its root in her rebuffed reproductive organs will make itself felt again.

Now the above analysis of the workings of a positive married woman’s mind in all cases of adultery resulting from physiological disappointment, is typical, and may stand as the unalterable frame or pattern which all similar cases may be made to fit. For it matters not whether the marriage is a childless one, or whether it be one in which, from motives of economy, child-birth has been stopped after the birth of one, two, or three children; the phases which mark the approach to adultery are always the same. And it may be said with perfect accuracy that, where positiveness persists in the woman, and child-birth is stopped while she is still too young for her reproductive equipment to tolerate idleness gladly, some kind of unhappiness is bound to enter the home, and as a rule this unhappiness will lead to adultery.

When we note in the statistics of divorce the comparatively high figures shown for marriages in which there have been one or two children only, therefore, we may take it that unhappiness began to enter the home in the third, fourth, or fifth year after the birth of the last child—that is to say, at a period when the idleness of her reproductive organs was beginning to prove a source of intolerable exasperation to the young female. And in these cases, as in the classical instance detailed above, the same phases occur. There is the same sudden interest in matters outside the home—either golf, tennis, acting, bridge, dancing, a new religion, a new philosophy, or a Cause. This brings the young wife into touch with a number of strange men, and as her interest in these increases, she begins to be aware of a vague feeling of irritation concerning certain aspects of her husband’s person or behaviour, of which theretofore she had not been conscious. Finally, she becomes infatuated with one of the strange men, and her feelings for her husband suffer a corresponding change for the worse. Then only cowardice, caution, or extreme devotion to her small family, can possibly prevent her from compromising herself.