All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (39 page)

Her second chosen partner was more problematic. Handsome, well educated and successful, as his profile had suggested, he was however intensely guilty about cheating. He had three children he was devoted to. The problem was his wife simply didn’t want sex and had never been very good at it. He told Melanie he had singled her out from the other women he had met on the site because they were weird: wanted to have their husbands watch, or wanted to be peed on. Melanie didn’t take up his offer for a weekend away together but consented to a few rounds of real-time cybersex.

Her final ‘test subject’ was a non-starter. He had lied on his profile and he turned out to be ‘arrogant and clueless’.

Without wanting to champion adultery, Melanie concludes from the experiment and from her prior experience that the ‘notion that strict monogamy is the right path for everyone strikes me as narrow-minded, even holier than thou… affairs don’t have to destroy the lives of everyone involved. A successful dalliance, if such a thing exists, requires candor and discretion–two things Ashley Madison specializes in.’

A brief trawl through the private world of the Internet provides an instant sense that the old Catholic sin of adultery in the mind, not only in the body, is alive and well. And the real-life partners of these virtual cheats may suffer from their solitary sex escapades just as much as those of non-virtual adulterers do. The partner’s experience of absence and non-attentiveness is the same. The caveat may be that the fantasy world the Web provides never offers the three-dimensional challenges and resistances of an embodied other. So Web affairs can last longer and be far more addictive than embodied ones, even though these latter, needless to say, contain like all loves, an element of fantasy.

Amongst my cohort of married or once married interviewees, all professionals, many, particularly those in a first marriage, had engaged in infidelities: the longer the marriage, the more likely the occasional surreptitious straying. Most of these ‘affairs’ were short-lived, a casual instance of away-play during a time of dearth in togetherness. Few had told: it was simply a way of fulfilling a lack in themselves as much as in the couple, a short-term reinvention of the self and a way of reestablishing a needed separateness. Most assumed or knew that their partners had too, and an equalizing of the partnership entered into the inner dynamics.

In one case, the woman had engaged in an affair with another woman, though her long-term partner was a man. The lover was a new friend, a woman of her own mid-years, and one thing simply led to another. She thought the timing might have had something to do with the fact that her mother had recently died and she felt a need for the ‘softness’ she didn’t get with her husband.

If short-term affairs didn’t result in break-up, longstanding arrangements with another emphatically did–though in two cases, after a period of separation, the couples came together again. Interestingly, the timing of the break-ups coincided with the children having left home.

If many continue to disapprove of affairs within established relationships based on a promise of monogamy, it is not only because they can provoke rampant sexual jealousy and the possible break-up of the couple. Trust is the fundamental glue of all partnerships. In a long-running secret affair a breach of allegiance, of primary loyalty, has taken place: the betrayed partner can no longer trust the other. In an insecure and isolating competitive world where trust is already at a premium, betrayals within hearth and home make existence even lonelier and more precarious. The betrayed feels she has passed her sell-by date and can be disposed of in the dustbin of life, no longer even recyclable. She is catapulted into a retrospective agony of hunting out the chapter and verse of duplicity: ‘So when we were celebrating Anna’s birthday, you were busy texting X and setting up a meeting’; or ‘When you insisted on taking a holiday in Cornwall, it was because X was nearby’; or ‘When I rang you to say Anna was ill and you couldn’t come home early from your sales conference, it was because there
was
no sales conference’–and so on and on, until every moment of settled life and the betrayed one’s place within it becomes a wasp’s nest of lies. All security is gone. Vertigo ensues; the ground opens up. Rage, vindictiveness, despair follow. If a separation ensues, the betrayed partner enters a state akin to mourning, but the partner is still alive, so peace of any kind can be hard to find; for some, even after years.

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 is. 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.’