Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release. The problem of… - Germaine Greer

Self-sacrifice is the leit-motif of most of the marital
games played by women, from the crudest (‘I’ve given you the
best years of my life’) to the most sophisticated (‘I only went to bed
with him so’s he’d promote you’). For so much sacrificed self the
expected reward is security, and seeing that a reward is expected it
cannot properly speaking be called self-sacrifice at all. It is in fact a
kind of commerce, and onein which the female must always be the creditor. Of course, it is also
practised by men who explain their failure to do exciting jobs or risk
insecurity because of their obligations to wife and/or children, but
it is not invariable, whereas it is hard to think of a male/female relationship
in which the element of female self-sacrifice was absent. So
long as women must live vicariously, through men, they must labour
at making themselves indispensable and this is the full-time job that
is generally wrongly called altruism. Properly speaking, altruism is
an absurdity. Women are self-sacrificing in direct proportion to their
incapacity to offer anything but this sacrifice. They sacrifice what
they never had: a self.

Even crushed against his brother in the Tube the average Englishman pretends desperately that he is alone.

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.