It so was, and yes, forced marriages in general are bad, forced marriages directly against one's sexuality even more so. The irony is, on paper, Philippe/Minette should have worked out better than Philippe/Liselotte, because they had far more in common. Not just because they were first cousins. They'd grown up knowing each other, in the same cultural environment, they were close in age, they were both committed Catholics. If Minette/Madame de Monaco really was a thing, they even shared the experience of being attracted to your own gender, even if Minette otherwise seems to have been attracted to men. Whereas Liselotte was a Protestant complete stranger who'd grown up very differently, and made little secret of her initial impression that most people at Versailles were nuts. What's more, the Philippe/Minette marriage seems to have been at least partly his idea. In Jude Morgan's novel, he does it to compete with Louis (wanting to marry a Princess of impeccable degree as well) and because Minette has turned from a thin teenager to the new It Girl of the French Court, so he'll be envied, at least that's why (biased) Jemmy believes he wants to marry her. Antonia Fraser thinks it was more that the mothers - Anne of Austria and Henrietta Maria - were keen on the match (well, Henrietta Maria would have preferred Minette/Louis, but since that wasn't on the table...) - but also that Philippe was in love (as much as he ever would be with a woman) with Minette for all of five minutes, basically right unto the wedding. And you know, it's not impossible. They were both very young, and in the homophobic times they lived in, with a very different understanding of sexuality, he might not yet have figured out he really did not like to have sex with women. He already had had m/m sexual experiences, but even centuries later, this would not necessarily have meant to him he couldn't like women as well, let alone in an environment which saw m/f as the absolute. So why not pretty cousin Minette? He could have persuaded himself he really was in love with her.

Like I said, in theory, this should have at least stood a chance of working, instead of being the non-stop disaster it turned in to from their wedding night onwards. And I think the difference in wedding nights already points to a difference as to why Philippe/Liselotte, while anything but harmonious, was less of a disaster. We know from a remark that Charles makes in a letter to Minette about his own wedding night that Minette menunstrated on her wedding night and that Philippe reacted badly to this reveal about the female body. (And not Charles but we might add, never stopped his remarks about how disgusting women were during his first marriage.) Whereas as we know from Liselotte's letter about her own wedding night where he hung up pictures of the Virgin Mary (including in "places they really ought not to contact" to strengthen him to go through with the consumation, she had to laugh, he first said that as a former Huguenot, she did not understand these things, but then had to laugh as well. The ability to laugh together is already a good foundation to make it through a bad situation.