The most holy band of society is friendship. Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’, - Germaine Greer

The cry of the deserted woman, ‘What have
I done to deserve this?’ reveals at once the false emotional economy
that she has been following. For most men it is only in quarrels that
they discover just how hypocritically and unwillingly their women
have capitulated to them. Obviously, spurious altruism is not the
monopoly of women, but as long as women need men to live by,
and men may take wives or not, and live just the same, it will be
more important in feminine motivation than it is in male. The misunderstood
commandment of Aleister Crowley to do as thou wilt is
a warning not to delude yourself that you can do otherwise, and to
take full responsibility to yourself for what you do. When one has
genuinely chosen a course for oneself it cannot be possible to hold
another responsible for it. The altruism of women is merely the inauthenticity
of the feminine person carried over into behaviour. It
is another function of the defect in female narcissism.

I know as little about the nature of romantic love as I knew when I
was eighteen, but I do know about the deep pleasure of continuing
interest, the excitement of wanting to know what somebody else
thinks, will do, will not do, the tricks played and unplayed, the short
cord that the years make into rope, and in my case, is there, hanging
loose, long after death.)
And so he lived with me for the last four years of his life. Not all
of that time was easy, indeed some of it was very bad, but it was an
unspoken pleasure that having come together so many years before,
ruined so much and repaired a little, we had endured. Sometimes I
would resent the understated or seldom stated side of us and,
guessing death wasn’t too far away, I would try for something to
have afterwards. One day I said, ‘We’ve done fine, haven’t we?’
He said, ‘Fine’s too big a word for me. Why don’t we just say
we’ve done better than most people?

The patterns of gratification are simple, and seem to fall into two patterns, the Great Bitch and the Poison Maiden.