may, in response to his wife's rejection of sex, take a purely mechanical attitude toward intercourse, getting it over with as quickly as possible, taking it like a hurried but necessary meal.
His external defenses against his home life may be a withdrawal from it. He may reorganize his social life around a men's social or athletic club, spending a great deal of time with "the boys." He may take to drinking at bars in the evening, forming a circle of cronies whom he likes to be with. He may do any of a number of things that take him out of his home in the evening and give him substitute pleasures.
Now of course there is nothing the least bit reprehensible about the erection of such defenses if one's marriage and home life are unsatisfactory. Indeed, such defenses may keep a marriage together by allowing the man to get some compensatory pleasures out of life.
One husband said just this in so many words to me recently. "If I hadn't taken a firm stand within myself," he told me, "the marriage would have broken up long ago. I simply decided that, if things were to work out at all, I just had to pull back from her and not take what she said to me seriously. If I went on believing half of the attacks she made on me I couldn't have lived with myself. And since sex was no fun, what was there left between us? I've made up a social life of sorts outside of the family for myself. At least I get a little fun out of life, and since I'm not around mainly I'm not boring her so much and she's not boring me so much."
But the danger is that such defenses and such compensatory activities will be held onto even if the marriage has been given a chance to turn from a meaningless one into a deeply meaningful and joyful one. A husband who wishes to help his wife in her struggle to become a woman, who
