AFFAIRS
AFFAIRS
Published in 2019 by The School of Life
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Copyright © The School of Life 2019
Printed in Belgium by Graphius
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ISBN 978-1-912891-34-4
CONTENTS
A Brief History of Affairs
When Does an Affair Begin?
How to Spot a Couple That Might Be Headed for an Affair
The Role of Sex in Affairs
The Essence of What We Feel Upset About
The Pleasures of Affairs
The Pains of Affairs
How to Reduce the Risk of Affairs
How Can an Affair Help a Marriage?
What Ideally Happens When an Affair Is Discovered?
How to Handle the Desire for Affairs?
What Does It Take to Be Good at Affairs?
Affairs and High Horses
A BRIEF HISTORY OF AFFAIRS
An affair is a romantic or sexual story between two people, one of whom (at least) is ostensibly committed to someone else. Most importantly, in our times, an affair is a catastrophe, pretty much the greatest betrayal that can befall us, a harbinger of untrammelled suffering, frequently the end of the marriage it has violated and almost always an occasion for fierce moralising and the division of participants into ‘goodies’ (those who have been betrayed) and ‘monsters’ (those who have betrayed).
However, in trying to understand affairs and make sense of their pains, as well as their less frequently confessed attractions, we should grasp that the way in which we interpret affairs today is very particular to our own times; we are remarkably contorted about the whole business, as judged against the long span of human experience. People have always had affairs, but what an affair means has been subject to huge changes across societies and eras. In order to gain a deeper picture of what we are doing when we look beyond our primary relationships, we need to glance backwards into the history – as well as briefly forwards into the future – of affairs:
Quito, modern-day Ecuador, 1532
The Inca sun-king Atahualpa owns private harems scattered across his empire; he is said to have had affairs with 3,000 women. Few subjects appear to think any less of him for this. All nobles have hundreds of concubines. There are official regulations concerning the number of mistresses that anyone in government is allowed: a provincial governor can have up to twenty, the administrator of a small village, eight. Having affairs is no sinful slip; it is a central indicator of dignity and status.
Versailles, France, June 1745
The 35-year-old French king Louis XV has been married for twenty years, since the age of fifteen, to Marie Leszczyńska, daughter of Stanisław I, the deposed king of Poland, a woman whom no one expected him to love – and whom he duly doesn’t. Now, Louis has developed a passion for the beautiful and gracious 25-year-old Madame de Pompadour, who is herself married. She quickly becomes the most prominent in a long list of Louis’s lovers. The court is delighted for Louis and no one feels especially sorry for the queen, who devotes herself to music and reading and in time takes a few lovers of her own. A royal marriage is understood in terms of political and dynastic considerations, just as at other levels of society it is seen in terms of property or business interests: a way of uniting two pieces of land or of bringing a useful son-in-law into the family workshop. To marry for love is judged an entirely irresponsible eccentricity as well as a wasted strategic opportunity. The idea that a person should spontaneously want to have sex with their spouse once children have been conceived is deemed bizarre and – in essence – perverted.
Leipzig, Germany, April 1774
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe publishes The Sorrows of Young Werther, which becomes the most popular novel in Europe for the next thirty years. It is the preeminent expression of certain new Romantic ideas around marriage: that we should only marry for love and that to sleep with someone outside of marriage is a grave offence, emotionally rather than religiously or socially. Nevertheless, the novel acknowledges that it can be deeply tempting to have an affair and that desire doesn’t neatly follow legal rules. The hero of the novel has a flirtation with a married woman, but, because he cannot go further with her and yet is overwhelmed by his own longing, ends up seeing no other option but to kill himself. The novel emphasises that an affair or even the prospect of one can be both a source of extraordinary delight and the harbinger of calamity. The stakes feel a lot higher now that marriage is meant to be so much more than a practical alliance.
Paris, France, 7th February 1857
The French writer Gustave Flaubert is narrowly acquitted on obscenity charges brought against his novel Madame Bovary, the first detailed fictional description of sexual infidelity. The heroine of the novel, Emma Bovary, is driven to have an affair for a reason which her society now thoroughly condemns (though it would have been wholly unsurprising to Louis XV): She no longer sexually desires her husband, Charles. We are firmly in the era of Romantic marriage, and affairs have become appalling phenomena because of the expectation that marriages should be lifetime unions based on enduring love and continuous sexual enthusiasm. By insisting that a marriage partner should be everything to their spouse (coparent, domestic manager, erotic companion and soulmate), Romanticism turns an affair from a problem into a tragedy. Infidelity becomes the core theme of all the great novels of the second half of the 19th century. From Anna Karenina to Middlemarch, heroes and heroines have to die or grievously compromise their social positions following any forays outside of their vows.
Miami, United States, Sunday 3rd May 1987
The Miami Herald runs a story revealing that the married Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart has been having an affair with Donna Rice, a sales representative for a pharmaceuticals company. Up to this point, Hart has been the frontrunner in the presidential race, but his campaign is upended by the revelation of his affair and after a week of meek protestations and contrite apologies, he withdraws. The leadership of the world’s most powerful country has largely been decided on the issue of infidelity. An affair is not simply a private matter – it has become one of the sternest tests of a person’s moral worth.
World Wide Web, May 1992
The Usenet newsgroup alt.polyamory is created and polyamory is formally defined for the first time as ‘the practice, state or ability of having more than one sexual loving relationship at the same time, with the full knowledge and consent of all partners involved.’ Polyamory suggests a remarkable break with the uncomfortable tensions of the Romantic theory of marriage. Rather than having to love only one person and then lie about any subsequent desires, one can – as a polyamorist – be transparent and enjoy multiple sources of affection. The whole idea of ‘an affair’ promises to disappear in a new wave of psychological openness. However, a central objection to polyamory is soon raised: that it has, with naive utopianism, entirely forgotten about the primordial power of jealousy.
The world’s largest extramarital affair dating site, Ashley Madison, is hacked and 25 gigabytes of customer data is stolen. The hack provides the media with an occasion to consider the prevalence of affairs, and the response is one of predictable outrage. Analysis of users of the site reveals the line of reasoning behind why affairs appeal. Firstly, people love their spouses and are properly committed to their relationships. Secondly, they cannot help but be drawn to other people out of a mixture of boredom, passion and desire (the slogan of Ashley Madison is: ‘Life is short. Have an affair.’). Thirdly, they know well enough that their partners could not take this on board without fury and immense hurt and therefore have to be deceived (unlike what polyamorists would hope for). For millions around the world, the dilemma is clear: We both desperately want to be married and equally badly need to experience sexual intensity with new people; neither complete fidelity nor singlehood quite work. In the wake of the data hack, the consequences of this secret tension become especially acute: On 24th August 2015, a pastor and professor at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary commits suicide after being exposed as a user of the site.
It becomes evident that under the aegis of Romanticism, humans have, collectively, evolved a very lovely but also very demanding set of thoughts: the view that a relationship should be founded on love, but also that having an affair must be a direct denial of this love – and therefore one of the worst and most hurtful things a person can do. At the same time, quite a lot of otherwise admirable people keep having affairs, or at least very much wanting to. Humankind is at an extremely difficult impasse. What, then, of the future of affairs?
Hellas Basin, Mars, 2150
Humanity, which has now colonised other planets, has moved to a new stance on affairs. An implant into the left temporal lobe of the brain has removed any tendencies towards feelings of sexual exclusiveness and jealousy. It is now, thanks to neurosurgery, possible to contemplate our partner having a little sex and some intimacy with another person without being totally destroyed by the notion. It has finally become possible actually to believe the phrase ‘It didn’t mean much’.
Like Romantics, people still get married for love, enjoying the continuity and deep intimacy the tradition allows; and at the same time, like Louis XV of France or the Inca king Atahualpa, they can enjoy affairs without tragedy. From their condominiums on the red planet, humans look back with pity at the risks that used to accompany straying lovers in the Romantic age, as well as shuddering at the mercenary coldness of marriages in the era before people got betrothed because they genuinely cared for one another. They feel, quite rightly, that they have evolved something far more complex and humane.
But for now we remain, in our earth-bound state, a long way off from such a frictionless utopia, and with plenty still to be tortured by.
WHEN DOES AN AFFAIR BEGIN?
Once an affair has been uncovered, we often ask – in the position of the betrayed, pained party – when it began. Pinpointing the precise moment promises to shed light on its motivations and on possible ways to prevent any further such disasters in the future.
There is, understandably, a hunt for the exact time when the two straying individuals met and physical contact began. We think of how two people had a drink after a business dinner or met online or flirted at a party and agreed to meet up a few days later. We concentrate on exact details: when their knees touched under the table, when one of them lightly put their arm round the other’s waist and when they first lied about where they were going or to whom they were sending a message.
This kind of detective work feels obvious, but it overlooks a complexity: The start of an affair should not be equated with the moment when two straying people meet. Affairs begin long before there is anyone to have an affair with. Their origins lie with certain, initially minute fissures that open up within a subtly fracturing couple. The affair predates, possibly by many years, the arrival of any actual lover.
There is a somewhat parallel intellectual issue to which historians are trained to be alert. It is common to ask when a cataclysmic event like, for example, the French Revolution began. A traditional response is to point to the summer of 1789, when some of the deputies at the Estates General took an oath to remain in session until a constitution had been agreed upon, or to a few days later when a group of Parisians attacked and broke into the Bastille prison. But a more sophisticated and instructive approach locates the beginning significantly earlier: with the bad harvests of the previous ten years, with the loss of royal prestige following military defeats in North America in the 1760s or with the rise of a new philosophy in the middle of the century that stressed the idea of citizens’ rights. At the time, these incidents didn’t seem particularly decisive; they didn’t immediately lead to major social change or reveal their solemn nature, but they slowly yet powerfully put the country on course for the upheavals of 1789. They moved the country into a revolution-ready state.
Likewise, affairs begin long before the meeting at the conference or the whispered confidences at the party. It is not key to fixate on the trip to Miami or the login details of the website. The whole notion of who is to blame and for what starts to look immensely more complicated and less clear cut. We should be focusing on certain conversations that didn’t go well in the kitchen three summers ago or on the sulk in the taxi home five years before. The drama began long before anything dramatic unfolded.
This is how some of the minute but real causes might be laid out by a partner who eventually strayed:
Unending busyness
It was a Sunday morning, our beloved’s time had been taken up for months on a big project and we’d been very understanding. Now it was over and we were looking forward to some closeness and a trip to a café. But there was suddenly something new that they needed to look at on their phone. We glanced over at their face, lit up by the glow of the screen; their eyes looked cold, determined and resolutely elsewhere. Or else they hatched a sudden firm plan to reorganise the kitchen cupboards just when we might, at last, have had a quiet time in the park together. That’s perhaps when the afternoon of passion in Paris really began: with the need to stop everything in order to swap around the crockery and the glasses.
Neglect
We were away on an exhausting trip and in a break between meetings we fought for the chance to call them. They picked up, but the television continued on in the background; they had even forgotten we’d had to give a speech and it felt a little humiliating to have to remind them and to hear their lacklustre ‘great’ in response.
Shaming
We were with some new friends, people we didn’t know too well, and we wanted to create a good impression. Our partner was looking to amuse them and, having cast around for options, opted to tell everyone a story about how we once showed the wrong slides in a presentation at work. They know how to tell a good story and there was a lot of laughter.
Ownership
Without discussing it, our partner arranged that we’d both go and have lunch with their parents. It wasn’t so much that we minded going; it was the fact that they didn’t feel the need to ask us if we minded and if the timing was convenient. On another occasion, without even mentioning it, they bought a new kettle and got rid of the old one; it was as if we had no say at all. Sometimes they’d just tell us what to do – ‘take the bins out,’ ‘pick up some dinner from the supermarket,’ ‘put on different shoes’ – without adding ‘please’ or ‘would you mind’ or ‘it would be lovely if …’. Just a few words would have made a very significant difference.
Flirting
We were at a party with them and we saw them from across the room in deep conversation with another person. They were bending towards this person, saying something; they were laughing charmingly; they put their hand on the back of the other person’s chair. Later they said it had been a very boring conversation.
One too many arguments
It wasn’t the basic fac
t of having disagreements; it was the sheer number of them and their unending, repetitive nature. One that sticks in the memory was when we were at the seaside and things should have been happy for once – and yet they chose once again to ramp up the tension about a Thai takeaway that had been ordered. We remember arguing and, at the same time, one part of our mind disassociating, looking down upon the two of us standing on the pier with cross faces and wondering, ‘Why?’
Lack of tenderness
We were walking in the street together near the antiques market and we reached out to hold their hand, but they failed to notice. Another time they were doing something at the kitchen table and we put an arm round their shoulder, but they said sharply, ‘Not now.’ In bed we’re always the one to turn towards them and kiss them goodnight; they respond, but they never, ever initiate. This rankles more than it seems normal or possible to say.
Erotic disengagement
There was a sexual idea we’d been getting interested in, but we felt awkward about mentioning it to them. We tried to give a few hints, but they didn't give out the impression that they were curious; they didn’t encourage us to expand. They gave us the sense that it would be a lot more convenient if we just kept whatever it was that tickled us to ourselves.
Individually, none of these things may be very dramatic. Some little version of one or other of them may be happening pretty much every day. And it’s not all one-way: Both parties are probably doing some of these things quite regularly, without particularly noticing or meaning to.
Yet a careful historian of infidelity might pinpoint any one of these as a moment at which – in a true sense – an affair began. Long before the party or the conference, the feeling was implanted deep in someone's mind (perhaps beyond the range of their conscious awareness) that there was something important missing in their relationship that another person might, perhaps, be able to supply.
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