In his "Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis," Freud explains, (presumably a straight face) that "A man of about thirty strikes us as a youthful, somewhat unformed individual, whom we expect to make powerful use of the possibilities for development opened up to him by analysis. A woman of the same age, however, often frightens us by her psychical rigidity and unchangeability."
Is Freud suggesting that the best thing offered to a man by a woman is the fact that she was born the year the guy got his first car? It's of course ridiculous to accept that's there's any truth behind the old joke that a man's definition of the perfect woman is "an 18-year-old virgin nymphomaniac whose father owns a liquor store."
So is it that women--say, around 30?--seem to be psychically inflexible because they 1. Can no longer put their knees up to their ears (a lot of guys overlook the whole "psychically" part of any phrase that includes the word "flexible"). 2 Start to answer back; 3. Start to resent being mere functionaries in terms of a shared domestic life; 4. Stop faking it-whatever "it" is (anything from orgasms to an interest in ice-hockey or ice-cream making can be faked during the courtship phase).
"She became a functionary in my life. I swear that if I had learned to use a computer ten years earlier, I probably never would have married her. God forgive me, but I knew that I couldn't make it through graduate school without somebody like her. But, you see, it didn't have to be her exactly--anyone like her would have been just as good," confessed one aging colleague in genuine repentance. "I saw her, at first, as a lovely woman who was my helpmate. Then I began to regard her as a collection of the tasks she performed--typist, cook, social organizer--and I stopped seeing her as a full person. She became valuable not for who she was but because of what she did for me. I despised myself for what I felt. I left her when my own self-loathing became too difficult to live with."
No doubt by the end of her marriage this woman felt that the quickest way to a man's heart was is a knife through his back.
Such a wife is a causality of the sort of response savored by many artist men, which is to respond in the vein of Ernest Hemingway--who, when asked how he could leave his devoted wife and young children, replied "Because I am a bastard."
To stay with literary types, one of Philip Roth's heroes-or anti-heroes, depending on your perspective-- becomes increasing frustrated by his wife's insistence that she is as responsible for his work as he is; he resents her absorption of his talents. At a publishing party, he is asked by a young woman about his editor. He names a man at the publishing house, and suddenly his wife provokes a hideous scene. "'What about me?'" she shrieks. "'I'm your editor--you know very well I am! Only you refuse to admit it! I read every word you write, Peter. I make suggestions. I correct your spelling.'" Peter pleads with her, "'Those are typos, Maureen,'" to which his wife, at once pathetic and terrifying, cries "'But I correct them!'"
So women are in danger of losing the attention, affection, and respect of men as they age-the pronoun "they" can be seen include both men and women, of course.
And yet men over 30 should not believe entirely that they will be loved for themselves alone and not their yellow hair (as Yeats might have said). They, too, are examined and judged by the world.
One account of a wedding in England between a lord and a woman nearly forty years his junior, for example, was announced in the London Times with a mention of the fact that "The bridegroom's gift to the bride was an antique pendant."
