Either she will repress her cravings for physical love, which her too mature mate is unable to gratify, and she will develop anxiety states or hysteria.
Or she will be too healthy to repress her desires, and her disappointment may change her love into scorn, especially when conversation with other women or a clever suitor opens her eyes to what is lacking in her life.
A separation, sometimes complicated by the usual triangle situation, may become unavoidable.
There are cases in which both mates are frankly neurotic and were drawn together as invalids and weak-minded often are, by the similarity of their predicament.
=The Plight of Two Neurotics.= Both of them may, as I observed it once, seek safety in a mock-incestuous relationship, the older mate, seeking safety in a union with an immature human being, the younger mate in a union with the parent image. In one case which I have in mind, the husband, fifty-five years old, had been several times on the verge of exposure for unlawful "liberties" he took with very young girls. The wife, a few days after her father's death, married the old man who had been her father's associate and who had tried to seduce her when she was barely ten.
She visited me when a new scandal in which her husband became implicated caused her to leave him. She was considerably "mixed up" for, while young men had begun to attract her, she felt extremely self-conscious in their presence and could only enjoy herself in the company of elderly men who, in turn, reminded her too much of the nightmare thru which she had lived for two years.
A pious Catholic, she solved the conflict prematurely, before I had time to bring insight into her mind, by fleeing from all sorts of men and into a convent.
Other cases have a less tragic history: A young woman of twenty-eight who had never been happy with her husband, (thirty), took advantage of the numberless opportunities war work and war drives gave to women, to become faithless to her husband. She had four short-lived affairs with men twice her age, then "broke down" when her husband secured a divorce for adultery. Analysis gave her insight into her father fixation which was not very deep and might never have driven her into overt acts but for the unusual conditions in which she found herself.