Women have been charged with deviousness and duplicity since the dawn of civilization so they have never been able to pretend that their masks were a… - Germaine Greer

The love object occupies the thoughts of the person diagnosed as 'in love' all the time despite the probability that very little is actually known about it. To it are ascribed all qualities considered by the obsessed as good, regardless of whether the object in question possesses those qualities in any degree. Expectations are set up which no human being could fulfill. Thus the object chosen plays a special role in relation to the go of the obsessed, who decided that he or she is the right or the only person for him. In the case of a male this notion may sanction a degree of directly aggressive behavior either in pursuing the object or driving off competition.

The new ideology of marriage needed its mythology and
Shakespeare supplied it. Protestant moralists sought to redeem
marriage from the status of a remedy against fornication by underplaying
the sexual component and addressing the husband as the
wife’s friend.

In a sane society no woman would be left to struggle on her own with the huge transformation that is motherhood, when a single individual finds herself joined by an invisible umbilical cord to another person from whom she will never be separated, even by death.