int, do not run in proportion
to his deserts; beyond that he ceases to be a good husband. Hence the
pursuit of him is chiefly maintained, not by women who are his peers,
but by women who are his inferiors.

Here we unearth another factor: the fascination of what is strange, the
charm of the unlike, hliogabalisme. As Shakespeare has put it, there
must be some mystery in love--and there can be no mystery between
intellectual equals. I dare say that many a woman marries an inferior
man, not primarily because he is a good provider (though it is
impossible to imagine her overlooking this), but because his very
inferiority interests her, and makes her want to remedy it and mother
him. Egoism is in the impulse: it is pleasant to have a feeling of
superiority, and to be assured that it can be maintained. If now, that
feeling he mingled with sexual curiosity and economic self-interest, it
obviously supplies sufficient motivation to account for so natural and
banal a thing as a marriage. Perhaps the greatest of all these factors
is the mere disparity, the naked strangeness. A woman could not love a
man, as the phrase is, who wore skirts and pencilled his eye-brows, and
by the same token she would probably find it difficult to love a man who
matched perfectly her own sharpness of mind. What she most esteems in
marriage, on the psychic plane, is the chance it offers for the exercise
of that caressing irony which I have already described. She likes to
observe that her man is a fool--dear, perhaps, but none the less damned.
Her so-called love for him, even at its highest, is always somewhat
pitying and patronizing.

27. The Charm of Mystery

Monogamous marriage, by its very conditions, tends to break down this
strangeness. It forces the two contracting parties into an intimacy
that is too persistent and unmitigated; they are in contact at too many
points, and too steadily. By and by all the mystery of the relation is
gone, and they stand in the unsexed position of brother and sister. Thus
that "maximum of temptation" of which Shaw speaks has within itself the
seeds of its own decay. A husband begins by kissing a pretty girl, his
wife; it is pleasant to have her so handy and so willing. He ends by
making machiavellian efforts to avoid kissing the every day sharer
of his meals, books, bath towels, pocketbook, relatives, ambitions,
secrets, malaises and business: a proceeding about as romantic as having
his boots blacked. T