- scious attempt to hide from the world, and from herself, her
real problem.
She was thirty years old, had been married for seven years, and had a five-year-old son. For the past two years she had had severe migraine headaches, sometimes as often as three times a week. These headaches had started at about the same time that serious marriage difficulties had developed between herself and her husband. The problem, she stated honestly, had originated with her. Rather quickly she seemed to have lost all respect for her husband. Looking at him one day, she said, she suddenly saw that he had no ambition of any kind and was "insufferably smug and complacent." He had not the slightest desire to better his lot, she realized, but was content to putter around in his cellar workshop with "inane and useless projects" or to spend his evenings "glued to the television set" or playing poker with a few "useless men."
This passivity on the part of her husband had inexplicably enraged her. "I realized in that moment that we could rot, socially and financially, if it were up to him," she told me bitterly. "I can't stand such pointlessness in a man."
I now asked her what their social life together had been like, and she told me that it had been very active until two years before. "Most of our friends were my friends originally. His friends just seemed to fall away in the first year of our marriage. They weren't very interesting anyhow, and I was just as glad. But after I began to lose interest in my husband, to lose my respect for him, I began to withdraw socially myself. My husband didn't seem to care about that either. He doesn't seem to care about anything."
Further inquiry elicited the fact that Toni was extremely successful in the business world. She had been through a leading woman's college and had been the president of her class and very prominent in extracurricular activities. "I was
