What then are the alternatives that face a woman who marries, and then finds her husband disappointing because he does not satisfy her ideal of love? Well, her choice is either to make the best of it, and accept her husband as he is and abandon her ideals, or else admit her disappointment, and seek a “truer love” which she hopes will fulfil her dreams, elsewhere. It is an unenviable position. On the one hand, she is probably being false to her best self, allowing her consciousness to become corrupted. On the other hand, she is being false to her word, and the man she has chosen. In addition her efforts to find a truer love are unlikely to be successful. Be this as it may, the most brilliant description of a woman who chose the second alternative is contained in Flaubert's novel, Madam Bovary.
Emma, or Madam Bovary, was a country girl who dreamed; and no doubt there was to begin with just sufficient gallantry and romance about her husband to persuade her, to deceive her, into thinking that he would fulfil her hopes. He didn't. He loved her of course. To think that he did not, is to miss the whole point of the book. It was an egotistical sort of love, but he loved her with all his heart; and it broke him when she died, in spite of the debts she left for him to pay. And when he discovered the truth about her, and felt able to love her no longer, it killed him. What more cogent proof that he had loved her with single minded devotion? But he never for one moment even began to make her dreams come true.
She dreamed that love was the grand passion, and like so many lovers projected onto her lover the qualities she hoped to find in him. First her husband, then the others. The experienced philanderer found her easy to deceive, because she was her own worst enemy; she wanted to be deceived. But she believed in her love for him (if not his for her) sufficiently to keep his letters to her after their affair had ended.