In The Unicorn Hunt (1993), the fifth book of Dorothy Dunnett’s cycle of historical novels of early Renaissance Europe, the House of Niccolo, Dunnett tells of the deficiencies of wealthy merchant Anselm Adorne’s relations with women thus:

His wife Margriet could have warned him. He was familiar with motherly wives and the skittish ways of other men’s mistresses. For the rest of womankind, he relied on his knowledge of poetry. It was not a very reliable guide.

That was in the 1460s–perhaps today, when poetry is no longer anything like the sole province of men, it might serve as a better guide? Perhaps a few lines from Jane Unrue’s Life of a Star might alert Adorne to the complexities his limited acquaintance hides:

This decorated face, this body clothed–these plainly and emphatically express the three selves of the woman: mental, physical, emotional. Descending it, the curving staircase leading to the Public Garden, or ascending it, it doesn’t matter.
Yes, there is a fountain in that garden just beyond the walkway through the high symmetrical beds displaying lively contrasts: form and color, pleasing variations of particularity of movement, density and
Exiting again, I headed home.

you’re gone.

I saw ahead of me both unfamiliar and familiar spaces
opening up so wide I was afraid of who I had become.

More likely, however, the only remedy is better, more humane, more appropriate gender and power relations–of a sort that weren’t common in the fifteenth century. Looking back on the worldview represented by an Anselm Adorne–if I may take some lines from Brenda Iijima’s “Tertium Organum” completely out of context–

I see why she screams
systematically
velocity of thudding
dimensionality full
of tension