Getting even – repaying one's debts and getting repaid when owed – is legally and technically a matter of satisfaction. Debts must be satisfied. It is still perfectly normal English to speak of claims, debts, and obligations as being satisfied. The church also employed the notion of satisfaction to represent the retributive and punitive phase of the sacrament of penance, and we still speak of making satisfaction, or a bit more archaically of receiving satisfaction regarding a point of honor. Although its earliest recorded sense in English relates to debt discharge and repayment, satisfaction very soon extended its semantic range to indicate a feeling, the sensation of being satisfied, of having desires fulfilled.

Release of Pressure, or Filling the Void Up Full?

Satisfaction thus became a key idea in various conceptions of the emotions, drives, and passions. The underlying metaphor of debt discharge seemed to fit sexual passion so aptly that we have not yet succeeded in breaking away from the metaphor. But before satisfaction applied to sexual fulfillment, it applied to sexual obligation; it was about not begging off via headache or lack of desire; it was about the claim another had to your services and duties. It's an old story. Wyclif's fourteenth-century translation of the Bible renders Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians (7.3) thus: “The hosebonde Ʒelde [must yield] dette to the wijf, and also the wijf to the hosebonde.”