man. Many men who are highly successful in the world often have,
as with Zeus, an appealing, emotionally immature little-boy element
that can touch the Hera woman when combined with the power she
finds so attractive. He may lack close friends, may not have been
privy to the private grief of others, and may not have developed a
capacity for empathy.
The man’s emotional immaturity is also responsible for his seeking
variety rather than depth with women and for his consequent
tendency to have affairs, which the Hera woman cannot tolerate.
He may be a businessman who enjoys pleasant one-night stands
when he goes out of town on business. He enjoys the conquest and
the excitement of sex for the first time with a new woman, figuring
that what his wife doesn’t know won’t hurt her. He hates having
talks about the relationship or having confrontations about his beha-
vior—so a Hera woman avoids both.
If a Hera woman marries a man who turns out to be a philanderer
and a liar, like Zeus, and if she takes him at his word—fairly charac-
teristic of Hera women who want to be reassured—then she will be
repeatedly wounded. Many Hera women are handicapped because
they have difficulty in assessing underlying character or in realizing
patterns of behavior. When sizing up people, such women perceive
surfaces rather than possibilities (like looking at a house for sale and
seeing just what is there, not what it used to be or what it could be-
come). Finally, the Hera woman’s disappointment and pain are
proportional to the discrepancy between her archetypal expectations
of fulfillment and reality, and the gap may be great.
SEXUALITY
A Hera woman assumes that sexuality and marriage go together.
Thus she may have stayed virginal until she was engaged or married.
Inexperienced before marriage, she depends on her husband to
arouse her sexually. If he does not, she will nonetheless regularly
have intercourse as part of her deeply felt role of wife. The idea of
dutiful sex probably first arose with Hera women.
It is not unusual for a Hera woman to be inorgasmic in
Hera: Goddess of Marriage, Commitment Maker and Wife