You don't love the man you're with but don't think you'll do any better?

Leave him. Do yourself and the poor guy a favor.

If you stay with a man because you're afraid to be alone, you'll end up ruining two lives. The woman who makes such a choice is hedging her bets, and basing her choice on , not love.

Women who marry men they don't love come to resent their mates, and heap upon them their own feelings of inadequacy, self- and .

Resentment will, in some cases, turn not only into contempt, but into hatred.

"On Women Who Hate Their Husbands," a paper originally read at the New Orleans Society, dealt with the phenomena of women who married in order to "play it safe."

Discussing patients who married "second-choice husbands," Dr. David Freedman argues that in each case the woman's "choice of mate had been based on the specific defect of her own ego system implied by inability to see herself as a person of sufficient potential significance and ability to hold a man she really admired." In effect, the women in question believed that they were not worthy of fully desirable husbands, and so chose mildly undesirable men instead.

"She had chosen someone who combined the contradictory, but for her safe, qualities of substantial but not outstanding ability in his own professional sphere, and a passive, dependent, and placatory orientation to the significant female in his life." But this proved to make such women dreadfully unhappy because "Rather than satisfying, the relationship proved inevitably to be fraught with and frustration."

I knew one woman who, having resigned herself to marring a "second-choice husband," then made a out of belittling any sign of between two other people. "Those love-birds are headed for a fall," she cluck over any new couple, palpably longing for disaster. She couldn't stand the idea that anyone might actually have a relationship based on passion, fun, or even simply the promise of an equal match between the partners.

When her own daughter wanted to marry an interesting, handsome and devoted man, this woman was torn. She wanted her daughter to be happy, of course. But, on some level, she was also tormented by seeing her own compromised and diluted life pale in comparison to the promise held by daughter's union.

If this was playing it safe, I thought to myself, I can't abide the payoff.

To marry a man simply because he seems a "safe bet" is cheating: it cheats the woman out of actually working through towards a real understanding of herself and what she needs, and it cheats a man out of being the real love-object for a woman who believes he is the best man she could find.