The paradox here is that we want freedom, the sexual satisfactions that ever unpredictable Eros can bring and that so many others so publicly seem to enjoy. In our post-traditional culture, we feel they constitute part of the quest towards self-fulfilment. Affairs, great or casual loves, make the story we tell ourselves about our lives rich and varied. They proffer meaning. And the pleasures of passion.
Yet we also want a predictable steadfastness, security, that path of continuous intimacy with its satisfactions of history and progeny, its promised gift of exclusive specialness to the other. Perhaps that exclusive specialness does not always and ever have to run alongside total possession. After all, the love that sees us through life is a gift freely given by the other, not a form of enslavement.
Truth and lies
Truth, lies and deception circle adultery like vultures waiting to feed on the body of intimacy. Can there be a just measure of transparency about affairs? And what measure feeds what purpose? Our confessional culture prompts individuals to be truth-tellers, though few have totally open arrangements; and spouses, unlike priests, find it difficult to forgive. Most therapists believe in disclosure, but then in certain cases they share a redemptive agenda with religion.
Men, it seems, prefer their settled partners eventually to find out about their straying: they leave signs to be found, as if unconsciously they want their wives, perhaps now maternal figures, to admire their prowess. A new conquest, they seem subliminally to feel, adds to their status and desirability. As the old joke goes, ‘Better a 50 per cent share in a good business, than a 100 per cent share in a bad one.’ Others want discovery because they simply can’t bear the guilt of their treachery and a secrecy which in time has utterly distanced them from their home, their ‘real’ lives. Straying wives, though also some men, seem to prefer secrets and lies, a state which adds to the desirability of their affair and produces additional excitements. Others, who have drawn different lines between privacy and togetherness, seem quite happy not to know about their partner’s extracurricular doings, particularly if sexual interest has run its course.
The balance of truth and lies will work its way out differently in every couple that becomes a threesome, and can change through the life of a marriage, just as it has done historically. In the 1940s the Woman’s Own agony aunt regularly advised her straying women readers that ‘far more harm is done by morbid “honesty” than by sane concealment’. Thirty years later, in more individualist times and with divorce more accessible, agony aunts were advising openness, talk, and visits to the Marriage Guidance Council.
After many years of marriage and as many in the consulting room, Freud, who as a jealous young lover had insisted on full honesty at all costs from his fiancée, grew rather more measured about the value of truth. On 10 January 1910, he wrote to his younger colleague Sándor Ferenczi, who was enmeshed in complicated affairs, that when it came to sexual honesty in marriage he had become more pragmatic: ‘Truth is only the absolute goal of science, but love is a goal of life which is totally independent of science, and conflicts between both of these major powers are certainly quite conceivable. I see no necessity for principled and regular subordination of one to the other.’
Never a great one for absolute principles, Freud also belonged to an older social order than Ferenczi. Here, the weather of marriage had different storm patterns. Straying was a given for men in return for a stable security for wives. The more experimental Ferenczi looked forward to different kinds of sexual and marital settlements. Indeed, his work has been taken up by contemporary therapists who focus on the relational and intersubjective underpinnings of our lives. Here honesty within intimacy is key.
Bucking the therapeutic tide for total transparency in relationships as the only possible ground for ‘rebuilding intimacy’, Esther Perel evokes cultures where ‘respect is more likely to be expressed with gentle untruths that aim at preserving the partner’s honor. A protective opacity is preferable to telling truths that might result in humiliation. Hence concealment not only maintains marital harmony but also is a mark of respect.’
Young and old
Today, if those who grew up in the tide of sixties permissiveness aren’t dependably certain that what they most want from their partners (or from themselves) is predictable steadfastness, their children and perhaps grandchildren definitely know they want it from their parents–and project this wish on to their own future committed partnerships.
Amongst my interviewees in their twenties, disapproval of infidelity was unanimous and adamant. Georgia, a high-spirited young graduate, explained to me that her generation had ‘normative ambitions’: of course, they might not live up to them, but that didn’t make them the less important. They were children of ‘sixties generation’ parents. So they had grown up with the sequelae of parents who had disastrous affairs from which they, the children, had to pick up the pieces. Gallivanting fathers whose girlfriends were always twenty-one, no matter how old and pot-bellied those fathers grew; distraught, weeping mothers, left to take care of children who then had to take emotional care of them; meetings with dumb paternal girlfriends who would rather drown one than meet; a slew of short-lived stepsiblings, each unhappier than the last. None of this was the way to run a life, all her friends, women and men alike, agreed–although the men might not be so resolute about the horror of future infidelities, fearing that they might somehow trip up and slip into their father’s footsteps. But that fear didn’t lessen their condemnation of their fathers, whose behaviour was treacherous and altogether unseemly.
Her generation, Georgia told me, knew that children were more important than sex. They’d had enough of it young to realize that much. Affairs had transgenerational repercussions and, for some mysterious reason, their parents didn’t seem to have considered that. As for girlfriends who got involved with men old enough to be their fathers, or simply with fathers of young families, that was just stupidity or madness. Didn’t they know that they’d be dumped as soon as their boobs began to sag! And meanwhile the poor wife, the poor children forced to shuttle between home and their father’s new set-up…! The whole thing was irresponsible and destructive.
So, she concluded, far better to have normative ambitions about fidelity, which put the family before personal desires. With a sweet, softening smile, she added, ‘Of course, we’re grateful to your generation for opening the doors and allowing us to have sex before marriage, sex before ultimate commitment. Best to get all that promiscuity out of the way and maintain fidelity once we have families.’
Georgia may well be right and her generation may well establish more successful, long-lasting unions. There is wisdom in the notion that some early promiscuity may lead to more grounded marriages–as if they were already remarriages.
Nonetheless, she made me think of a scene in Philadelphia Story in which principled, idealistic Tracy has laid down the law and told her mother she is to have nothing to do with her philandering, unfaithful father. Cowed into not allowing her husband home, her mother is not totally convinced. When Tracy’s father returns, to reassert his conjugal claims on his wife and his paternal role in the family, there is a wonderful scene of confrontation between young and old–between him and Tracy in the presence of her mother. The family drama, the tugs and pulls one generation exerts on another, are all to be found here. Tracy asks what he’s doing at home and upbraids him for his dancer friend. He states vehemently that his straying–if that’s what it is–has nothing to do with her, nothing to do with them.
Men have a reluctance to grow old, that’s all. And their best mainstay should be a daughter–a devoted young girl who gives her father the illusion that youth is still his. A girl of his own, possessing warmth, an unquestioning affection, an understanding heart. Tracy hasn’t given him that, so he went to look for it elsewhere.
‘So I’m to blame for the dancer!’ Tracy says, enraged. And her father, undoubtedly a little unfairly but underlining the Oedipal point, acknowledges that in a way she i
s. Echoing Dexter’s earlier comments about her personal sense of inner divinity pre-empting any regard for human frailty, he calls Tracy a prig, a ‘perennial spinster no matter how many marriages’. Worse, he tells her, she has been behaving like a jealous woman.
And so she has.
By the end of the film, having recognized her own human failings, Tracy has developed a more ‘understanding heart’. ‘I’m glad you’ve come back,’ she says to her father. ‘I’m sorry I’m a disappointment to you.’ And he answers, ‘I never said that, daughter. I never will.’ Tracy can now remarry Dexter, following her father into his own ‘remarriage’ with her mother. The Oedipal jealousy–which, it has to be assumed, runs both ways–is put to rest. One might go so far as to say that both Tracy and her father have grown up–never, after all, a once-and-for-ever process.
The values of the young rarely remain untainted through the vagaries of life. Though, without their ‘normative ambitions’, we might well be in a sorrier state.
Georgia’s ambitions also reminded me of another film, one set not amidst the disappearing upper crust of America’s East Coast but in the less than glamorous post-war Midlands. David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) is a slice of ordinary life raised to the level of tragedy by the incursion of romance and unconsummated sexual passion. Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) meets Dr Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) at a railway station. Both have families and children. They talk, they meet again, they fall in love. They kiss. They dream of togetherness, but the real beckons and constrains. And in that constraint–not the denial but the conscious refusal of romantic passion–they achieve a kind of grandeur, a heroism beyond the mundane. Zadie Smith puts it well. It is not that Laura and Alec are ‘morbidly repressed’. ‘The film offers a different hypothesis: that the possibility of two people’s pleasure cannot override the certainty of other people’s pain. Primum non nocere is the principle upon which the film operates. As a national motto, we could do a lot worse.’
It is heartening to think that at least some of our idealistic young have a will to make the underpinning of love reside in that first principle of doing no harm to others, rather than in the carpe diem of instant gratification.
The answers to why people commit adultery are as various as the people themselves. Some will do it because they feel satisfaction is their due and it hasn’t been provided by their existing partner. Others will fall into it, simply because the opportunity presents itself: the thrill is too great to be resisted. Some want a new intensity, a new meaning in their lives: in the self-absorbed excitements of secrecy far from the mundane cares of bills and children, the ordinary self flourishes in the eyes of the other. Still others find their home lives have grown imprisoning, sex has grown stale or vanished, or partners no longer show them the needed affection or attention. The reasons for the latter are various, too. One is too great a preoccupation with work: according to one report, the recent ‘credit crunch’ has apparently made wives disenchanted with preoccupied husbands and provoked them into secret flings. Alternatively, a young mother’s attention to a new baby displaces her interest in ‘Dad’. Or attentiveness to ageing parents or even social life can make a partner feel removed from the core relationship. Or like Tracy’s father, a man may simply need a sense of renewal, and find it in the adoration of the young. Or it may be several of these at once.
People, Adam Phillips says, have affairs because there is some deprivation in their primary union, or a deprivation in themselves–one that may have followed them from childhood’s unmet needs. The problem is that they believe that the next woman or man will do the trick, as if they inhabited a magical universe that carried rewards, as if the deprivation weren’t also already a part of them. Though we may think there is one, there is no simple solution to the fact of human frustration.
Looking In
In Couples, his hugely popular novel of 1968, John Updike, like some zoologist graced with mordant irony, traces out the ingenious nesting habits of the residents of Tarbox, a small New England town where extramarital couplings come in dizzying permutation. Frank Appleby is having a fling with Marcia little-Smith. Janet Appleby is at it with Harold little-Smith. Through the vehicle of wife-swapping, Eddie Constantine and Roger Guerin are in fact working out homosexual desires. Meanwhile Piet Hanema… and so on, in a version of musical beds which brings some sexual rapture, some divorce, some remarriage and a great deal of child negligence. In this corner of American civilization, all couplings are intramarital.
What this particular zoology leaves out of the equation of adultery is the solitary third party: lover or mistress. Historically, lovers have been young unattached men, uninterested in displacing the husband in the married couple. This is a less usual pattern today, since changing sexual mores have made unmarried women more accessible than their married sisters. For those who may be worried about ‘commitment’, the latter may, however, seem fair game, though the initiating party is more likely to be the woman than the man.
The Balzacian code of the woman providing the youth with a ‘school in life’ is also sometimes still in play, though rarely. Unlike the French, the Anglo-American axis resists thinking of sex in terms of an ars erotica. The slang word ‘milf’, meaning ‘mum-I’d-like-to-fuck’ and much in use by my children’s cohort, is a case in point, with its smutty, derogatory associations. It’s somewhat diminishing to think of Stendhal’s Madame de Rênal or Madame de Staël as mere sex objects–milfs–when they are palpably women of substance who give their young lovers lessons in sensibility and more.
In his short story ‘Strangers When We Meet’ Hanif Kureishi dissects a contemporary love affair between a slightly older married woman, Florence, and a young working-class actor, Rob. Florence advises Rob on his acting, initiates him into cinema, helps him put words to his ‘melancholy’. Though he has wept over and hated her inaccessibility, he has assumed that he doesn’t care enough about her ‘to worry about her husband’, who seems irrelevant to the twosome that they are. But when instead of joining him to take a holiday together, she appears on the train with a man he recognizes from a picture as her husband, everything changes. Finding himself in the planned-for hotel in the room next to them, despair looms. He listens obsessively through the wall. ‘I want her to want me–and me alone. I must play the lead and not be a mere walk-on,’ he thinks. As Florence’s husband takes on substantial life for him, jealousy, rivalry and love enter the adulterous dance in varying permutations. And Rob realizes that for reasons he can’t altogether understand, though one of them is security, Florence, however much she may want him alone, will not leave her husband.
Far less uncommon–if anything can be measured with certainty in this field of rampant human vagary–is the continuing presence of mistresses, or simply single female lovers, as the triangulating party to a marriage. The historic lists of great royal mistresses, such as Madame de Maintenon, Madame du Barry, Madame de Pompadour, supplied the Sun King with children and often functioned as courtly advisers. But aristocratic examples hardly translate easily here into contemporary mores, emphatically less so if one remembers that these ‘affairs’ were conducted openly. In the nineteenth century, the ‘mistresses’ of the French social elite were also openly ‘kept’. The contractual rules which bound the famous horizontales to their roles as erotic playmates were firm. Paid for the ‘entertainment’ they provided, they might work their way up the social ladder and, if they were lucky, eventually find their position regularized with another man.
If the French are still more tolerant of the position of the mistress as an adjunct to marriage–as the revelations about various politicians make clear–it is in part due to this long tradition of keeping marriage and the erotic in relatively separate spheres.
The doublings of secret ‘bigamy’ which so haunted the Victorians, the shocks of two separate families emerging at a man’s death, still occasionally occur. But most ‘mistresses’ today are, in fact, likely to be wives-in-waiting: a shift of the kaleidoscope, and the
roles change. Many women at some point in their lives have been ‘the other woman’. Usurpers from the wife’s point of view, from their own they are the sexual partners of men whose marriages are erotically, but sometimes also otherwise, lacking. They may well be rapturously in love, though sometimes they hide it, and are waiting for the oft-promised divorce–which comes rarely enough.
Kathy Lette, whose comic novels trace the ways in which love and sex go right–though mostly wrong–through the various phases of women’s lives, stated in an interview:
In Sydney when I was in my twenties, all the men were married or gay, or married and gay… It was impossible to find a man who didn’t think monogamy was something you made dining room tables out of. So you invariably found yourself, at some stage, having an affair with a middle-aged married man… Of course you didn’t know he was married until you found the teething ring in his pocket. But by that time it was too late because you were in love and believed him when he said that his wife didn’t understand him. Which simply means he wants you under, not standing. I thought love was in the air–but it turned out to be the exhaust of his Meno-Porsche as he sped back to his wife.
Women who are hardly interested in cultivating the role of mistress can easily find themselves on the outside of a marriage looking in. Once they have reached their late twenties or thereabouts and haven’t settled into long-term coupledom, or have separated from an earlier union and have a child, that hoary age differential between the sexes rears its head. Despite social change, being in love with another who ‘belongs’ to someone else still happens to women more often than to men, who continue to have access to ever new generations of women. Gay men repeat the same generational scenario.
All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion Page 31
