It is said that affairs are failures, and they fail for reasons which are demonstrably important. In her search for a truthful union, the emancipated and independent woman, comes up against the phenomenon of a certain kind of male anxiety, which is in effect a fear of engulfment.
For a man dominated or circumscribed by this anxiety, it would seem that the greatest victory is to make love to a woman (or to be thought to be making love to her – and then to get away.
There is a certain male ethic which decrees this to be right: such behaviour will ensure a man credit in the eyes of his peers, (homosocial as Eve Sedgwick would have it)
more important, it will safeguard what he feels to be his essential integrity.
Such a man will make an initial and proprietory raid on a woman but will turn away once he has elicited the maximum response, for it is precisely this maximum response which he neither wants nor needs.
As one refined and educated woman put it, in one of those insights that leap out at you
‘with my intelligence I knew that this man was repeating a pattern over and over again: courting a woman with his intelligence and sympathy, claiming her emotionally; then, when she began to claim him in return, running away. And the better a woman was, the sooner he began to run.’
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