wife. This is quite understandable, of course. He has been the chief recipient of her very strong negative feelings toward life, people, love, and sex.
As we have seen, the frigid woman has a strong tendency to blame others for her difficulties. Her husband, doubtlessly, has received his full quota of such irrational blame from her. He has also been the main victim of all the other neurotic components of frigidity—the envy and mistrust she has of the entire male sex, the endless complaints she directs against her household duties, her general inability to handle even the trivia of every woman's everyday life with any grace or ease.
In addition to her quarreling and complaints he has had to accept a tremendous amount of emotional frustration. Frigidity does not permit much honest or real interpersonal warmth, and the male has had to do without a normal amount of affection. His sexual frustration, too, is great. We saw in the case of the clitoridal woman just how laborious and boring the act of love can become to the man. It is not necessary to labor the point of how cumulatively bleak sexual intercourse with an unresponding partner can become.
All this (and more) that a man has gone through with a frigid wife must have a very definite effect on him. He builds up attitudes and develops defenses which allow him to preserve his equilibrium within the framework of his marriage as it is.
Some of these defenses are psychological, some external.
The chief psychological defense he uses is a general withdrawal; he pulls back from "caring" about the unhappy circumstances of his married life. He may cease to react, either to his wife's attacks on him or to her general complaints. He may cease, too, to care very much about the failure of their sexual life. His withdrawal from the problem may be marked by actual sexual impotence with his wife. Or he
