Not all love is comprehended in such a description, but the sickening obsession which thrills the nervous frames of the heroines of great love-affair… - Germaine Greer

When the choice lies between the ultra-feminine and the virago,
Shakespeare’s sympathy lies with the virago. The women of the
tragedies are all feminine — even Lady Macbeth (who is so often
misinterpreted as a termagant), especially Gertrude, morally unconscious,
helpless, voluptuous, and her younger version, infantile
Ophelia, the lustful sisters, Goneril and Regan opposed by the warrior
princess Cordelia who refuses to simper and pander to her
father’s irrational desire. Desdemona is fatally feminine, but realizes
it and dies understanding how she has failed Othello. Only Cleopatra
has enough initiative and desire to qualify for the status of female
hero.

The hallmark of egotistical love, even when it masquerades as altruistic
love, is the negative answer to the question ‘Do I want my
love to be happy more than I want him to be with me?’ As soon as
we find ourselves working at being indispensable, rigging up a
pattern of vulnerability in our loved ones, we ought to know that
our love has taken the socially sanctioned form of egotism. Every
wife who slaves to keep herself pretty, to cook her husband’s favourite
meals, to build up his pride and confidence in himself at the expense
of his sense of reality, to be his closest and effectively his only
friend, to encourage him to reject the consensus of opinion and find
reassurance only in her arms is binding her mate to her with hoops
of steel that will strangle them both. Every time a woman makes
herself laugh at her husband’s often-told jokes she betrays him. The man who looks
at his woman and says ‘What would I do without you?’ is already
destroyed. His woman’s victory is complete, but it is Pyrrhic. Both
of them have sacrificed so much of what initially made them lovable
to promote the symbiosis of mutual dependence that they scarcely
make up one human being between them.

The most unpardonable privilege that men enjoy is their magnanimity.