The twelve Animal Signs

for Women

Monkey woman
Her love behavior

Isn't it strange for a female like the Monkey woman, who is so provokingly cerebral and so suspicious of everything involving emotions, to be so romantic-minded when it comes to love? Her behavior would become perfectly comprehensible should one realize that incongruity and contradiction are the hallmark of her entire life.

The native of the Monkey sign, like any "bourgeois" adolescent, dreams of marvelous love affairs, regardless of her age or the condition she may find herself in. Always in quest of her prince charming, she avidly reads matrimonial advertisements in newspapers and stays vigilantly on the lookout for good opportunities.

The kind of prince charming she is after should be a man whom she can admire unreservedly - a great artist, great thinker, great scientist, great statesman, great military man, or the like. Of course, she is much more often disappointed than satisfied in her quest.

Not rarely does her deception come only after she has got deeply involved with a man whom she had believed to be an ideal choice. The disillusionment then renders her unpleasant, harsh, even spiteful with her mate: She behaves as though it were he, not her lack of realism and discernment, who is responsible for her misfortune.

At the courtship stage in this woman's love the part of romanticism appears surprisingly important. She delights in drawn-out relationships, a certain kind of "intellectual" coquetry, flirtations on the telephone, passionate exchanges of letters, and the like. Perhaps her elaborate gimmicks spring from her need to prove to herself that she is irresistible to men, and this need itself stems from her obscure doubt about her appeal as a woman.

But in love as in all other areas of her life, inconsistency is the general rule rather than an exception. She may be quite sweet and sentimental with her mate and then become her aggressive self again, allow her dreams to take second place to his and then let loose her provocative feminism, choose to stay with the man she no longer loves, remarry the one she dropped by sometime ago, extol the virtue of loyalty and at the same time indulging in infidelities or condoning her husband's unfaithfulness, insist on absolute candor while not detesting ambiguous relationships. One may indefinitely enumerate her contradictions, which she finds perfectly normal since they are the very texture of her character.

The men involved with the Monkey female would be well advised not to lose sight of her cerebralism despite her more or less extended fits of romanticism and self-abandonment. She is never quite convinced she is in love, even when she is head over heels interested in a male. On the other hand, this is not a woman overflowing with sensuality and eroticism - she tends toward excessive impersonality and a lack of emotional warmth and responsiveness. In sum, she is the exact opposite of her Goat sister.

The Monkey woman's cerebralism is most apparent in her insistence on the part of friendship in love. To her, true love must begin with friendship. She expects more friendship than love from her lovers throughout all her involvement with them. Whatever the cause for separation, she always wants to remain a friend to her former mates. "Pure" love is in her eyes either a fiction or a monstrosity.

What, specifically, is her sexual behavior? First of all, she is a bit too matter-of-fact, to the point of being able to draw a clear line between love and sex as well as between love and marriage. Second, sex does not make sense to her if its way has not been paved with intellectual satisfactions. Third, she does not surrender herself until the man she loves gives sufficient proof that she is really desirable. Lastly, her approach to lovemaking is complicated and perhaps lacking in naturalness and spontaneity.

This woman, who views marriage as a necessary evil, is understandably callous about it. But she can be purely and perfectly faithful to one man if she chooses to and if she is sure she is not missing anything. It would need a miracle, however, to induce her to make her man the center of her life. Unless he is broad-minded enough, her husband may find cause for jealousy as she has so many friends of the opposite sex - in fact, of either sex - and gets involved in so many outside activities: He simply could not shut her away for himself.

However romantic her love for a man might be initially, she is certain to change rather abruptly around her menopause: The lover in her irrevocably fades away to leave room exclusively to the friend. But this new friend she is from now on has a new trait in addition to the old ones - she tends to become so garrulous and loquacious that her husband would need Job's patience to bear her.

The Monkey woman never displays much enthusiasm for having children. Nevertheless, few women would be better mothers than she is. Believing in the natural goodness of man, she shows herself tolerant, understanding, and reasonable, giving her offspring the possibility to develop as free and responsible individuals. Here as elsewhere, she lays emphasis on friendship.