What, then, are the main elements of his reactions?
In the first place, the husband of a frigid woman generally has a great store of repressed resentment toward his wife. This is quite understandable, of course. He has been the chief recipient of her very strong negative feelings toward life, people, love, and sex.
As we have seen, the frigid woman has a strong tendency to blame others for her difficulties. Her husband, doubtlessly, has received his full quota of such irrational blame from her. He has also been the main victim of all the other neurotic components of frigidity—the envy and mistrust she has of the entire male sex, the endless complaints she directs against her household duties, her general inability to handle even the trivia of every woman’s everyday life with any grace or ease.
In addition to her quarreling and complaints he has had to accept a tremendous amount of emotional frustration. Frigidity does not permit much honest or real interpersonal warmth, and the male has had to do without a normal amount of affection. His sexual frustration, too, is great. We saw in the case of the clitoridal woman just how laborious and boring the act of love can become to the man. It is not necessary to labor the point of how cumulatively bleak sexual intercourse with an unresponding partner can become.
All this (and more) that a man has gone through with a frigid wife must have a very definite effect on him. He builds up attitudes and develops defenses which allow him to preserve his equilibrium within the framework of his marriage as it is.
Some of these defenses are psychological, some external.
The chief psychological defense he uses is a general withdrawal; he pulls back from “caring” about the unhappy circumstances of his married life. He may cease to react, either to his wife’s attacks on him or to her general complaints. He may cease, too, to care very much about the failure of their sexual life. His withdrawal from the problem may be marked by actual sexual impotence with his wife. Or he may, in response to his wife’s rejection of sex, take a purely mechanical attitude toward intercourse, getting it over with as quickly as possible, taking it like a hurried but necessary meal.
His external defenses against his home life may be a withdrawal from it. He may reorganize his social life around a men’s social or athletic club, spending a great deal of time with “the boys.” He may take to drinking at bars in the evening, forming a circle of cronies whom he likes to be with. He may do any of a number of things that take him out of his home in the evening and give him substitute pleasures.
Now of course there is nothing the least bit reprehensible about the erection of such defenses if one’s marriage and home life are unsatisfactory. Indeed, such defenses may keep a marriage together by allowing the man to get some compensatory pleasures out of life.
One husband said just this in so many words to me recently. “If I hadn’t taken a firm stand within myself,” he told me, “the marriage would have broken up long ago. I simply decided that, if things were to work out at all, I just had to pull back from her and not take what she said to me seriously. If I went on believing half of the attacks she made on me I couldn’t have lived with myself. And since sex was no fun, what was there left between us? I’ve made up a social life of sorts outside of the family for myself. At least I get a little fun out of life, and since I’m not around mainly I’m not boring her so much and she’s not boring me so much.”