#206

“Now I am sure that many of the young women (...) who set themselves up as specialists in loving hadn't a very clear idea of how strong a charge their emotions got from the instinct of survival – or how much those emotions arose out of the yearning to own and be owned rather than from a reservoir of pure and selfless love that was the special property of themselves and their gender. After all, how lovable are men? Particularly men “unable to love”? No, there was more to all that talk about “permanent relationships” than many young women (and their chosen mates) were able to talk about or able at that time fully to understand: the more was the fact of female dependence, defenselessness, and vulnerability” (id, 171).