Their obsessive fear, however, does not allow them to enjoy the affair very long. Small physical details which a normal man would not notice suddenly fill them with fear or disgust. A masculine gesture, a raucous intonation, a slight growth of hair on the upper lip or the limbs may suggest unavoidably the sex from which they are fleeing in panic. Their love cools off and safety has to be sought, altho it is never found, in the arms of some other woman of very feminine appearance, who is in turn discarded for the same absurd reasons.
As fixations and fetishism have infinitely more importance for men than for women (see Chapter III) the male neurotic is naturally more "promiscuous" and faithless than the female neurotic.
=Messalina.= Every psychoanalyst, however, has met the Messalina type, who is constantly seeking the "love that will endure." Like her masculine counterpart, the Don Juan, she is in the majority of cases seeking safety and trying, by conquering many men, to reestablish her self-confidence which every little disappointment and humiliation destroys so easily.
However loving and worshipful the neurotic's mate may be, he or she cannot hope to save the neurotic from further love entanglements. One of the most striking neurotic traits is a craving to disparage everything and everybody in his environment.
The praise of the most affectionate husband or lover, wife or mistress, is insufficient to raise the neurotic's self-esteem. With all neurotics, familiarity breeds contempt and it must be from the lips of a new man or new woman that they must hear their praise sung before their feeling of inferiority is deadened and allows them to enjoy that praise.
"American Medicine" commenting upon the fact that divorces have increased twenty per cent in eight years and that, if the rate of increase continues, there will be as many divorces as marriages in thirty years from now, reaches the conclusion that "the individual has moved on far in the past two thousand years, while the institution of marriage has remained unaltered through the centuries.... The basis of marriage as it was originally conceived was entirely a racial one in which the individual counted for little; it was meant as a means of building a family and conserving it. Nothing else counted and the primitive individual exacted little else.... The modern man and woman demands in his mate more than that and it is here that the marriage institution is most defective in that it does not yield to these greater demands."