All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (38 page)

Those repeated stories of cross-generational love in which the older partner is thrust into agonies of jealousy for the younger, is envious, too, of his or her tantalizing and unpossessable youth, may serve as admonitory exempla in the history of rampant emotions–though they rarely seem to stop lovers themselves. There is a kind of psychic vampirism at work in all this, the old lover feeding on the energies of the younger to revitalize himself. Some rejuvenation may indeed take place, but often with eerie sequelae. A young woman who loves an older man for his father-like properties may feel an urge to compete in the illness stakes, just when her lover needs her to step in as the caring nurse he may subliminally have hoped for while feeding on her desirable youth. In order to carry on being daughter, she falls ill, and the ailing, ageing man finds himself uncared for, having, instead, to look after
her
. Enviable illness, instead of enviable youth, now encircles the couple. In an alternative and too familiar scenario, the besotted old lover cuts off his own children–the embodiment of his mortality–in his will, leaving everything instead to the envied life force his new beloved seems to be. In the process, he hopes to buy his young lover, fully possess her, so that her (potential) straying and his jealousy can be put to rest. But it is only he who is put to rest. Death makes fools of us all.

In writing about jealousy, Freud posits three layers, or grades: competitive or normal, projected, and delusional. Normal jealousy, however, he adds, is by no means completely rational, in other words ‘derived from the actual situation, proportionate to the real circumstances and under the complete control of the conscious ego’. He describes it as being rooted in the ‘earliest stirrings of the child’s affective life’. It can also share aspects of the other forms of jealousy–projected or delusional. Made up of grief, the ‘pain caused by the thought of losing the loved object and of the narcissistic wound’, jealousy is compounded by enmity for the rival. Some people, he also notes, experience it bisexually: a man will feel pain about the woman he loves and hatred of the rivalrous man, but also grief about the man, whom Freud states he ‘loves unconsciously’. In this unconscious scenario–one elaborated in Harold Pinter’s
Betrayal–
it is the woman who becomes the hated rival for the other man’s affections. Some men go so far as to imagine themselves in the position of the faithless woman with their rival. The sense of helplessness makes the pain unendurable.

Projected jealousy Freud describes as being derived from the sufferer’s own actual unfaithfulness in real life or impulses towards it that have been repressed. The jealous person achieves some alleviation of the repression by projecting faithlessness on to his partner. Delusional jealousy, which shares much with paranoia, functions in the same way, but the impulses that have been repressed are towards the third party of the same sex: in a man the formula would go ‘
I
do not love him,
she
loves him.’

The adamant disavowal of same-sex love can hover over many of our couplings, inspiring the most vehement jealousy and the most ardent philanderings. Friends pursue the other’s partner, finding rapturous passion only in a friend’s mate. In a comic vein Sir Harcourt Courtley, in Dion Boucicault’s
London Assurance
(1841), quips that when his wife left him for his best friend, it was the friend he really missed. Alternatively, the most potent of relations for Don Juan, that icon of seductive masculine promiscuity, seem to be with the fathers or husbands from whom he pilfers the women on his ever lengthening list–and certainly with his servant, Leporello.

Contemporary Infidelities

During the first wave of women’s liberation in the 1970s, infidelity was often understood as a necessary journey towards independence, at once a way of constituting female desire and owning it. Traditional feminine dependence on marriage had to be shed, together with its psychological constraints. This came hand in hand with an attack on romantic love. Its mythical exaltations were exposed as mere sex and masochistic postures. Its idealizations of the transgressively domineering, seductive male, whether sung in the pages of women’s magazines or in D.H. Lawrence’s novels, were debunked and exposed as power politics.

Erica Jong’s hilarious
Fear of Flying
(1973) charts the journey of her writer heroine from a constricting marriage gone cold, through dreams of a great and anonymous ‘zipless fuck’, into a passionate, but not as passionate as she’d hoped, affair with Adrian, a Laingian-style English psychoanalyst. Through the process, her
femme moyenne sensuelle
discovers a self that is stronger and more capacious, one who doesn’t try to adapt herself to the theories men have of women. She also recognizes the fallacy underlying her vision of romantic love. Sitting in a Paris café after Adrian has left, she watches a couple kissing on a street corner.

She doesn’t want to ‘screw up’ her life in another great self-destructive passion. So she returns to her husband, not her lover, though it’s an open-ended question whether she will stay with him.

Some forty years have now passed during which women’s sexual and social freedoms have grown far greater. Our hopes of romantic love leading to marriage have acquired a healthy scepticism, without ever being altogether obliterated or undermining passion’s existence, even if short-lived. Yet our own times of greater equality with their later commitments have re-emphasized the value of fidelity in a new way, internalizing it, so that it becomes an inner moral injunction for each member of the couple–as if belief in fidelity could itself sanctify the endangered institution of marriage that we so want to preserve as an island of coupled safety in a lonely world; to preserve alongside the individualist desires for ever more love and experience, so palpably antagonistic to long-term fidelity. This has had the result of making male adultery as havoc-inducing an act as it was historically for straying women: marriages break down on the basis of infidelity, creating the attendant fall-out for children. Though in that private rebalancing of relationships which couples have ever been prone to whatever the social aegis, people may also forgive, realign and go on.

Yet, despite the increasingly liberal social consensus in the West–one in which acceptance of homosexual unions, cohabitation and pre-marital sex has risen dramatically in recent decades–infidelity remains an act that garners large-scale disapproval. In fact, it would seem that the more emphasis we put on the value of marriage as a key life relation–one that fulfils our desires of love, companionship, sexual pleasure and family life–the less tolerant we publicly grow of infidelity.

In 1951, Geoffrey Gorer found that infidelity was infrequently perceived to be the worst ‘crime’ that a spouse could commit, and only a small minority of his sample thought it should trigger the end of a marriage. In Britain, a YouGov and
Sunday Times
poll of January 2007 showed that 84 per cent of men and women considered infidelity always or mostly wrong, much the same as in the early 1980s, though more than in the less liberal fifties. If men were slightly less disapproving than women, the young were slightly more condemnatory than the over-forties.

A 2008 Gallup poll in the US revealed that almost two-thirds of Americans would not forgive their spouse for engaging in an extramarital affair, while 62 per cent claimed they would get a divorce if they discovered their spouse had been cheating. The International Social Survey Program, which monitors attitudes in twenty-four largely Western and industrial countries, had most people stating that extramarital sex was ‘always wrong’, with the US coming near the top of the charts at 80 per cent, a figure comparable to conservative Catholic populations such as Ireland (80%), Northern Ireland (81%) and the Philippines (88%). Other countries were less adamant in their condemnation: Australia (59%), Austria (67%), Bulgaria (51%), Canada (68%), Czech Republic (43%), Germany (data reported separately: East Germany, 60%, and West Germany, 55%), Great Britain (67%), Hungary (62%), Israel (73%), Italy (67%), Japan (58%), Netherlands (63%), New Zealand (75%), Norway (70%), Poland (74%), Russia (36%), Slovenia (57%), Spain (76%) and Sweden (68%). Most people–a majority of Russians apart, it would seem–today support sexual exclusivity between husbands and wives: an average of only 4 per cent of respondents believed that extramarital sex was ‘not at all wrong’.

Moral attitudes about monogamy, however, are hardly in synch with the figures for actual infidelity. As ever, it seems, our publicly expressed wishes and hopes exceed our ability or desire to live up to them. Investigating adultery in post-war Britain, the historian Claire Langhamer noted that ‘a hardening of attitudes towards infidelity accompanied increasing incidences of it’. So, too, for our own times. In America, if politicians act as indicators of the people they purportedly represent, then the harder the line on fidelity and marital values taken, the more likely it would seem that potentially scandalizing infidelities have been engaged in.

In a 2006 BBC survey of forty-six thousand respondents, 43 per cent of them married, one in five men admitted to straying, as did one in ten women. The smaller percentage for women, though not altogether to be trusted, may argue that women still bear a larger responsibility for children and the security of home life, so stray less. As for America, experts agree that despite the emphasis on Christian values, infidelity is even more prevalent. The consensus for the US is that between 50 and 65 per cent of husbands and between 45 and 55 per cent of wives become ‘extramaritally involved’ by the age of forty. Statistics here are inevitably inexact and to be treated with some scepticism, since we are often dealing with secret matter, hardly always to be revealed, even anonymously.

According to
Vanity Fair
journalist Melanie Berliet, when you factor in the number of unmarried people in committed relations who are cheating on their mate, the percentage increases to between 75 and 80: ‘If you take an average of the infidelity studies, statistics, surveys and polls from the last 5 to 7 years, it becomes clear that infidelity in one form or another (physical or sexual infidelity, emotional infidelity, online or internet infidelity, female infidelity, same-sex infidelity, workplace infidelity) affects an estimated 80% of all marriages and committed relationships today.’

In France, where sex is rarely in the first instance a moral category, straying politicians rank high in approval ratings, unlike their kin in Britain and the US. Here there is a long tradition of relatively acceptable adultery, while the arts of seduction rank amongst life’s pleasures. According to the French Institute of Public Opinion, however, only an estimated 39 per cent of men and 25 per cent of women cheat on their partners, though the figure for women has tripled since the seventies. Again, the first of these figures–relatively low–may say more about in what circumstances it is honourable to lie in France than about real infidelities, while the rise of the second statistic may have as much to do with the growing culture of public revelation as it does with actual figures. Figures are higher for those who engage in illicit virtual romances, where imaginary pornography is lived out at a click: ‘Infidèle’ is a common pseudonym. French lawyers report a growth in divorce cases citing Internet infidelities. This rush to divorce is a recent phenomenon on the French scene: traditionally, divorce counted as a far graver sin than straying.

In the US, one-third of divorces are apparently sparked by online affairs. Virtual betrayals can have real consequences–hardly surprising, perhaps, given the obsessional nature of our fantasy lives and the old-fashioned spur of secrecy they feed on, which nonetheless sparks altogether real jealousy in partners. Adultery social-networking sites have sprung up in America to follow on the success of singles sites, which it appears already find 30 per cent of their users amongst the married. Having had an affair she relished with a married man for two years, Melanie Berliet posed as a wayward wife and signed up, under a pseudonym, with Ashley Madison, a site whose tagline reads ‘Life is Short. Have an Affair.’ The entrance cost was $49. She wanted, as her
Vanity Fair
article on the experience states, to find out what kind of men went in for illicit relations online; whether adultery could be a way of fulfilling one’s needs without alienating one’s partner; and whether cheating was really as bad as society makes it out to be.

Her mailbag numbered a hundred within a few days: she later discovered that the ratio of men to women on the site was nine to one. It is worth noting that on singles sites the balance sways in the other direction: there seem to be more attractions for men in a contractually delimited affair than in a relationship between unattached beings in which ‘commitment’ hovers in the background.

After getting to know a few select respondents through email, Melanie met one in the flesh: a fetching young Englishman who was a ‘big believer in monogamy through adultery’–an attitude he said he shared with his wife. Though the affair went on pleasantly enough, Melanie Berliet decided not to take it to its sexual conclusion, but it proved to her that it was perfectly possible to ‘have an affair cavalierly, rationalize it easily, and live happily’.