Here's my favorite piece of dialogue from the movie MOONSTRUCK, where an adult, once-widowed daughter is telling her mother that she intends to marry again:
Rose (the mom): Do you love him, Loretta?
Loretta Castorini (the daughter): No.
Rose: Good.
[She looks at Cosmo, her unfaithful husband]
Rose: When you love them they drive you crazy because they know they can.
Such a woman--or, as we see here, the daughter of such a woman-- hurt by an earlier sense of abandonment or loss, might be driven to find a new man who she believes will never leave her.
Psychologists refer to man in this arrangement as a "second-choice husband."
The "second-choice husband" is a sort of consolation prize awarded to--or seized by-- a woman who cannot win the man she truly or originally desired. The second-choice husband is a stand-in, a substitution for the "real thing."
"In this pattern," explain researchers, "The wife lived an adventurous, sexually free life while single. Then, for some reason, perhaps pregnancy of an unhappy love affair, she lowers her sights to select a sturdy, responsible, dependable husband, who is probably thought physically unattractive."
She will therefore choose a man who is less than attractive or less than charming in order to feel as if he couldn't "do better" than her. This quiet, passive and unusually kindly man is meant to stick around since everyone knows he doesn't really "deserve" his attractive, vibrant and lively wife. The marriage is based on her acceptance of his man as a husband as a sort of talisman against greater pain.
My other favorite movie embodiment of the folly of this kind of choice is Scarlett O'Hara's first marriage to Charles Hamilton in Gone With the Wind. This union-the Southerns will pardon the expression--is the paradigm of a woman's deciding to marry a "second-choice" husband.
Scarlett's behavior fits the pattern described above perfectly. Scarlett, the impetuous, impatient, and passionate young woman she is, has just declared her undying love to longtime family friend, Ashely Wilkes. Wilkes, a gentleman of the old school, knows that he and Scarlett are mismatched, however attracted to each other as they might be. Ashley gently explains to Scarlett that he is engaged to Melanie, and they must never speak of love again.
Scarlett is infuriated, slaps Ashley, and smashes a piece of china against a wall. She then runs out of the room and accepts Charles Hamilton's proposal of marriage.
Author Margaret Mitchell makes it clear that Scarlett is in no way attracted to Charles Hamilton, whom she considers unworthy of even the usual run-of-the-mill teasing. Instead, Scarlett wants to prove a point to herself and to everyone around her by marrying immediately after being rejected by the man of her dreams. Scarlett tells herself "And if I married [Charles Hamilton] right away, it would show Ashley that I didn't care a rap-that I was only flirting with him."
Wanting to reassure herself of her attractiveness, and longing for both self-control and revenge, Scarlett regards her future husband with calculated clarity, with a "coolness" which indicates Scarlett's unwillingness to make herself vulnerable emotionally.
"A frost lay over all her emotions and she thought that she would never feel anything warmly again," Mitchell tell us. Scarlett considers the proposal from wealthy, unencumbered Hamilton, (who is about to leave for the war anyway), and thinks "Why not take this pretty, flushed boy? He was as good as anyone and she didn't care. No, she could never care for anything again, not if she lived to be ninety." Of course, we know that Scarlett is misjudging herself here, and lives to regret her marriage.
In this, too, she is like many women who decide to marry a "second-choice husband."
According to researchers, the strategy often backfires. "The wife is pretty, impulsive, competitive with other women, and not very sexually interested in her husband," argue psychologists. When one partner is more attractive or sexually motivated than another, obviously the relationship becomes unstable.
The woman who makes such a choice is hedging her bets, and basing her choice on fear, not love. The come to resent their mates, and heap upon them their own feelings of inadequacy, self-punishment and rage. Resentment will, in some cases, turn not only into contempt, but into hatred.
