@Intrepid,
Intrepid wrote:Never having been married, you probably know nothing about a loving married relationship.
Well, I observed those of my relatives, including several extended families.
The only girl with whom I was in love having rejected me (after enticing me in the first place),
I did not have that "loving married relationship"
but I have had chicks whom I liked live with me, for years at a time.
Intrepid wrote:Rape is seldom an issue in such a relationship.
It is the abusive, controlling married relationships that are prone to rape and such.
What about extortion? Vengeance?
I'm gonna try to build a bridge here, to an experience in the 1970s.
I might fail, amid complaints of:
"what-does-that-off-topic-stuff- have-to-do-with-anything??"
but I 'll try to make my point:
an old friend named Jane invited me to her house for Christmas Day.
Her children had their own places to go; she was gonna be alone.
Jane was a lay office manager for a law firm.
She was very proud of her work, how
cleverly she did her job
and solved problems on-the-job, exceeding the expectations
of the partners of the firm. She ofen spoke to me of her achievements.
Jane had recently been wounded in her emotions by her employers'
failure to tangibly recognize her. On several prior occasions,
she poured her heart out to me on this topic.
I arrived for Christmas around 11 AM. Jane was roasting a turkey
and cooking and drinking all day.
Late in the afternoon, Jane 's husband innocently called from
his house in another town; by then, Jane was impaired by her alcohol.
Jane's husband was a businessman who was financially stressed.
Jane was very insistent, most
redundantly emotionally insistent, that he begift her
with a mink stole. She harassed him for about half an hour on the fone, beating him up on the fone about this.
To
ME, it was more than obvious that this represented displaced aggression,
displaced vengeance for Jane 's perception of injustice on-the-job.
I strongly suspect, from the tenor of the conversation,
that if it had then been legally possible for a husband to rape
his own wife, she 'd have used that to extort his compliance.
I was silently glad to be safe
from that sort of thing that I witnessed.
David