She had married a vulgar man; and, though she had not become like the man, she had become vulgar.

Adultery breathes new life into marriages which have been left for dead.

EMMA:
You know what I found out ... last night? He's betrayed me for years. He's had... other women for years.

JERRY
No? Good Lord.
(Pause)
But we betrayed him for years.

EMMA
And he betrayed me for years.

JERRY
Well I never knew that.

EMMA
Nor did I.

Somehow she had thought of him so much that when she actually saw him again her affection seemed cooler. Had she worn out the passion by dint of constancy?

Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp; but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn’t come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words “bliss,” “passion,” and “rapture” - words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books.

She was by that time tired of men, or she imagined that she was; for she was not prepared to be certain, considering the muckers she saw women coming all round her over the most unpresentable individuals. Men, at any rate, never fulfilled expectations. They might, upon acquaintance, turn out more entertaining than they appeared; but almost always taking up with a man was like reading a book you had read when you had forgotten that you had read it. You had not been for ten minutes in any sort of intimacy with any man before you said: ‘But I’ve read all this before.…’ You knew the opening, you were already bored by the middle, and, especially, you knew the end.…

He took it for granted that she was content; and she resented his settled calm, his serene dullness, the very happiness she herself brought him.

In short, marriage, particularly for a woman, was about as much fun as a lingering illness.

It was just easier. She understood now why adults lied to children. It wasn’t love. It was exhaustion.

She felt the lurch of a head rush. The boy who had not paid attention to her; the man who’d embarked on an affair knowing she could never be his; at the last moment he was asking for more. A piece of her was elated. But she was also struck by his selfishness.

Married life had taught him the futility of arguing with a female in a dark-brown mood.

How she had cheated herself with her integrity and nice honor, which had girt her round with the empty joys of piety! No, no; she had had enough of it; she wished to live!

He exulted in the possession of himself once more; he realized how much of the delight of the world he had lost when he was absorbed in that madness which they called love; he had had enough of it; he did not want to be in love anymore if love was that.

For all that she’d had no great expectations for it, sex was turning out to be even more squalid, tawdry, and cynical than she had suspected it would.