Basic Writings

On Women, Love, and Marriage

On Women, Love, and Marriage 222 It is characteristic of first love that we do not understand how other people before us could have loved, since they had no knowledge of the only object that appears to us worthy of love. 223 Few have loved.With most, a mixture of sensuality and vanity occupies the place of love. 224 Dangers and women are like nettles—not be grasped cautiously. 225 Women need only a little wit to be regarded as witty. 226 Every wife prizes most highly the qualities in men that are lacking in her husband. 227 Every wife is unhappy with her husband and knows another man with whom she would be happy. 38 part 1: psychological observations 228 If, having come to know a noble, intelligent, and deeply sympathetic woman, we finally also achieve an intimate possession of her, we always lose more than we win. 229 Whoever has the wish to be loved by as many people of the other sex as possible—without wanting to seduce,marry,or violate them or to achieve any positive advantage—is a coquette. This wish is either visible in glances and gestures or invisible, and further, either conscious or unconscious. Conscious coquetry is usually invisible, and unconscious coquetry usually visible. When conscious coquetry is visible it offends, whereas unconscious coquetry has something attractive about it. One subtle kind of visible coquetry is that which seems unconscious and is conscious. The way in which coquetry expresses itself is thus manifold, and yet its strength is not very different in different persons. One takes pleasure in coquetry partly because it is pleasant to see people of the other sex at one’s feet, but especially because one wants to be envied by persons of the same sex for one’s conquests. 230 Girls always attribute the successes of other girls to coquetry. 231 Beautiful women are proud of their conquests, ugly women of their virtue. 232 Women never appear more incomprehensible to us in their taste than when they prefer others to us. 233 Lifelong marriage is a useful but unnatural institution. 234 The degree of married happiness stands in an inverse relation to the amount of shared daily life. 235 In the marriages of our time, no feeling plays such a minor role as love. 236 It is delightful not to seduce a girl who stands on the point of giving herself to us: for our vanity is satisfied by her consent, and we exchange the fleeting enjoyment of love for the pleasant feeling of our high chivalry. 237 In love one makes the other’s coldness a reproach in order to conceal one’s own coldness. 238 The tactic that wives use in defending their assertions is extremely sensible . First of all, they express the assertion, perhaps with the addition of a weak argument.When the husband has comprehensively refuted this argument,they express their assertion for a second time in a somewhat more annoying tone, without adding anything to it. The husband, rather surprised at still having made no progress, explains his refutation from as many points of view as possible , but the wife merely repeats her assertion or, when she is sick of the subject ,complains of migraine and nervous exhaustion,upon which the Red Cross flag is brought out and any further attack is forbidden by international law. 239 The female sex is by nature no more flirtatious than the male; but whereas the ambition of men can motivate them in various directions, there exists for all the ambitious strivings of women only one direction: conquests. 240 Coquetry is the ambition of the female sex. on women, love, and marriage 39 40 part 1: psychological observations 241 When a man marries, he has usually already possessed dozens of women ; since his fantasy and his desire for variety has ceased to be felt,he stays faithful to his wife from exhaustion. In contrast, the fantasy of woman is first aroused by married life, and even though she loves her husband more in the first stage of marriage than before, she nevertheless soon becomes tired of him and longs for variety. 242 Normally the unfaithfulness of a young wife arises less out of inclination for her lover than from being tired of her husband. 243 When one can no longer love, one thinks about marriage. 244 Girls are less pained by having no husband than...