Science Quote by Mary Catherine Bateson

It lands like a champagne-bubbly compliment, then leaves a bitter aftertaste. Bateson frames marriage not as romantic completion but as a social arrangement that doesn’t cancel appetite for recognition. The line’s engine is the pivot from “happily married” to “it always pleases her,” a sly insistence that contentment and craving can coexist. That’s the intent: puncture the tidy story that a woman’s desires are morally upgraded into permanence once she’s chosen.

The subtext is less about adultery than about status. A “really nice man” is carefully selected: not a predator, not a cad, but the kind of person whose interest reads as validation rather than threat. And “wishes she were not” married turns her wedding ring into a public credential - proof she’s desirable enough to have been claimed, and still desirable enough to be contested. The pleasure isn’t merely sexual; it’s the flattering recalibration of one’s market value in a culture that scores women on desirability while simultaneously demanding they perform contented loyalty.

As a scientist-anthropologist figure, Bateson’s provocation feels observational, almost ethnographic: she’s describing the quiet incentives built into heterosexual social life, where women are socialized to be chosen and then to be reassured they remain choose-able. The cynicism is aimed at the institution as much as the individual. Marriage promises closure; the quote notes the lingering need for an audience, a scoreboard, a second opinion.