A divorced male friend of mine recently said to me, “When I was married, I spent perhaps twenty percent of my time getting laid. Now that I’m divorced, I spend eighty-five to ninety-percent of my time getting laid.” There’s the problem in its essence: Putting together one perfect man out of two, three, or four slightly imperfect candidates is just too time-consuming and tiring. We are finally driven to monogamy not by morality but by exhaustion. One candidate wins out over the others, and we succumb to the blandishments of one (hopefully) perfect man. This solution has on its side: convenience, honesty, simplicity, and stability. But
does
it have stability on its side? Our divorce statistics show that our monogamies tend to be serial; that sooner or later both spouses begin playing around; that most children born today can expect to grow up in single-parent households by and by (or to become somebody else’s stepchildren). The old European system—if one can call it that—of stable marriage, accompanied by a series of fairly stable liaisons, starts to look better and better when we consider the wreckage of our lives, and our children’s lives, under our present shambling system of serial monogamy.
A beguiling young man once said to me, “Marry as often as you like, but promise me I’ll be your only lover.” He was paraphrasing Oscar Wilde, but his wistful plea had true longing in it: the longing for some stability in an unstable world. If marriage no longer provides that, then perhaps our love affairs will. I treasure the fantasy of marrying and marrying and marrying, yet having only one lover through it all. But fantasy it is. I am neither young enough, nor foolish enough, nor unscathed by divorce enough, to want to endure the psychological wreckage of splitting up yet again. That leaves me, like everyone else, in search of the Holy Grail of the perfect man—wherever, and whoever, he may be.
Knowing full well that life is too surprising, rich, and strange for love ever to come in the form of a prearranged, predictable, prefabricated model, I nonetheless feel the temptation to put together a sort of police composite of the perfect man.
Okay. He’s beautiful—but not without some craggy imperfection in his features: a nose that once was broken, or slightly crooked teeth. He’s enormously intelligent but never pedantic; his intelligence is suffused with humor. Most important of all, in fact, is his sense of humor. He can laugh in bed. And though he’s indefatigable in bed, he’s not obsessive about sex. He doesn’t think of it as a performance, and he doesn’t berate himself if he doesn’t have a constant erection, nor does he expect his woman to berate him. He’s relaxed about sex; has a sense of fun about it; is passionate without being priapic.
These qualities are rare enough in a world where sexual performance has become as obligatory as sexual abstinence—or the pretension to it—once was. The worst by-product of the so-called sexual revolution is the substitution of performance for passion. For many men, sex has become yet another area of dire competition. One young man of twenty-four—the son of a writer friend of mine—confessed to me that from ages sixteen to twenty-one he never “allowed” himself to have an orgasm with a woman, because he was so concerned with pleasing his partners. “Here were all these women like you and my mother writing all these books and articles about how men were so insensitive to women’s needs. So I figured that the main thing was to give the girl as many orgasms as possible. I got so
controlled
I couldn’t even come myself. Now I just say ‘fuck it.’ Let’s bring back the John Wayne image of manhood, when men could prematurely ejaculate and not care!”
What this young man didn’t consider in his supposed nostalgia for the John Wayne image is that
no
man of John Wayne’s generation could have been sitting at a dinner party (at his mother’s house) having such an intimate conversation with his mother’s friend. Something
has
changed forever in men as a result of the sexual revolution and the women’s movement, and that change can be summed up as greater openness. Not only are men able to talk to women about sex, but men of twenty or so and women of thirty-five or so often wind up talking themselves right into bed—an explosive combination long celebrated by French novelists and moviemakers but curiously neglected in the supposed land of opportunity. Even so, no one (of any age) seems quite immune to performance mania. Our society, having collectively decided that sex is acceptable, if not quite optimal, without love, seems to have replaced the desideratum of endless love with the desideratum of endless erection. When sex becomes as competitive as racquetball or the stock market, surely some essential quality has been lost.
My perfect man, then, is not a slave to performance. He doesn’t ask, “How’m I doing?” in bed. He doesn’t have a nervous breakdown if he can’t get it up one night, and he is secure enough to know that he is liked for his brains and humor and not just his cock.
What other qualities does he have? Generosity, tenderness, a willingness to be wrong occasionally, a sense of playfulness, a recognition that the best sex happens when the partners are playmates and share each other’s fantasies. He doesn’t have to be rich; his generosity can take the form of making eggs Benedict on a Sunday morning or chopping firewood, or sending roses when I feel rotten. He is not judgmental; he doesn’t throw fits about stupid stuff—like the wrong turns I take in the road or the way I have my canisters lined up on the kitchen shelf. He is mature enough to know that life is too short to spend in acrimony over trivia. He doesn’t borrow my classic car and wreck it; he gives me a back rub if I’ve had a lousy day. He doesn’t run off and fuck my best friend if I’m neglecting him because I have a deadline, and he can amuse himself happily, not spitefully, if I’m on a business trip. He adores children and dogs but doesn’t necessarily try to woo me through my child (my dog is altogether another matter). He doesn’t demand fidelity of me if he isn’t prepared to give it himself, and he doesn’t get involved in sex games he can’t handle (like telling me it would turn him on if I fucked his best friend, then clobbering me—or leaving me—because I fucked his best friend). An honorable man, he has that old-fashioned quality: integrity.
He is reasonably unambivalent emotionally, so you know where you stand with him, and he doesn’t blame others for his own fears and inadequacies. Does this paragon exist? “Actually, the perfect man is Mel Diamond—a dry cleaner in Flatbush,” said a friend of mine, “but he doesn’t want it generally known for fear he’ll be ravished by swarms of hungry women.” (If anyone named Mel Diamond is reading this, rest assured that my friend’s choice of your name was pure coincidence. Lie back and enjoy the swarms.)
“The perfect man is someone you love who also loves you,” said psychologist Mildred Newman.
“If I had to single out one quality,” said singer-songwriter Carly Simon, “I’d say it was a sense of joy.”
“There is no such thing as a perfect man, and no one even gets close,” said Helen Gurley Brown. “The way to be a happy person is never to even try to attain perfection! It is totally absurd to think there is such a thing. Having said that, I’ll say the perfect man overtips, undercriticizes, and would not run the air conditioner in January.”
“The perfect man is in touch with his vulnerability and love; he has softness and tenderness and is not afraid of his feminine side,” said Diane Von Furstenberg. “Also, you only find him when you’re not actually looking.”
I agree with all these definitions of perfection. “Perfection is terrible; it cannot have children,” wrote Sylvia Plath in one of her
Ariel
poems. She was alluding, I think, to the fact that perfection is final, closed, and leaves no room for growth. And certainly when we search for the “perfect” man, we know full well that if we found perfection it would be quite inhuman. We love people, ultimately, for their humanity; not because of their perfection but in spite of their imperfection. A man who was a “perfect ten” in looks would terrify me. When I think of the men I have loved most, and the things I found most endearing about their appearance at the height of our passion, I always remember their small imperfections: a crooked front tooth, slanting or shaggy brows, eyes of slightly different hues. Even Quasimodo would be lovable if he had the right smell and touch.
Which brings us to another one of the great imponderables of life: Why does one person’s scent turn you on, while another person’s smell repels? Is it all a question of pheromones or of decisions made in the DNA before our conscious minds even have a chance to consider them? (Pheromones are substances long recognized in the insect world and now beginning to be isolated in humans, which account for otherwise unaccountable attractions between one individual and another.) For that matter, why does one person’s touch excite while another’s does not? These things baffle me more and more as I continue through my life. Surely I have chosen my mates capriciously or badly, since three of my marriages proved perishable. Or
have
I chosen badly? Was it just that I chose different traveling companions for different stages of my journey, and because my calling as a writer made that journey complicated, the traveling companions could not necessarily be permanent ones? This last, fairly optimistic explanation pleases me more than the notion that I am ever doomed to bad, or neurotic, choices.
My first husband was a fellow college and graduate student at a time in my life when my studies were of paramount importance to me. We read Shakespeare together in bed and immersed ourselves in medieval history, eighteenth-century literature, and old movies. We were soul mates at one period of our lives, but then our souls changed. My second husband represented stability, order, and sanity at a time when I was diving down into my unconscious to retrieve my first real poems. I needed him to haul me up when I felt I was succumbing to the rapture of the deep, and he fulfilled that function well. Once I learned how to do it for myself, his role became more and more artifact, and his deficiencies—humorlessness, in particular—more and more apparent.
My third husband shared with me the longing for a child, the passion to create a life around reading and writing novels while rearing our daughter. For a time, we also were powerful soul mates, but then, too, our needs and our souls changed. Is this failure, or a complex kind of destiny? I prefer to think of it as the latter. Each of these choices had its own peculiar logic at the time it was made. The fact that the union could not endure doesn’t really invalidate the choice. Each of the three marriages had its joys. The third had six years of great happiness before the final terrible year of pain.
Perhaps my life has been more complex because of the blessing/ curse of becoming a celebrated writer, a public figure, a woman whom the media have sometimes chosen to see as scandalous. But in essence I believe my fate (and the stages of development through which I found it, or it found me) has not been so very different from that of other women of my generation.
Raised to believe we needed men as parental figures, we grew up into a world where we had to assume burdens our mothers would have thought of as masculine: earning a living, managing money and taxes, not to mention shoveling snow and changing tires. We found ourselves more capable of nurturing men than of finding men who could nurture us. Raised to believe ourselves weak (hence in need of male support), we increasingly found ourselves strong. The men in our lives, we discovered, depended on us more than we did on them. We started out looking for daddies and wound up finding sons. We were ready to enjoy the deliciousness of this kind of relationship, but saw, too, that it did not come without a price tag attached. What eluded us, most often, was finding true partners.
In this odyssey from the search for daddies to the finding of sons, I have been very much like many women of my time. In my twenties, unfledged in my career, I married a father figure; in my thirties, well established in my career, I felt free to choose a man merely for his “sense of joy.” When even that proved to have its own problems, I hesitated and stayed single for eight years. I still regard this as the most critical period of my life. When I remarried, I was ready for a true partner and I married someone I had come to consider my best friend. It was a marriage unlike any other I had made. It continues to grow in unpredictable ways.
I think it is usual for women in their twenties, especially ambitious, committed career women, to marry men less for their sexiness and joie de vivre than for their sustaining, supportive, daddylike qualities. Once having achieved professionally, though, we chafe under the commitments we’ve made to Daddy, and we want playmates, soul mates, beautiful boys, luscious young men, without regard to whether or not they can pick up the lunch tab or remember to telephone when they say they will. Some cynics see this as a role reversal, women taking the prerogatives men had for years, but I see it as a logical development of women’s growing emancipation. For centuries women had no choice but to sell their sexuality for social status. Now that we can earn our
own
social status, our sexuality has suddenly become very precious to us and not a thing to be bartered.
“Does this mean that women have their own version of the whore/madonna split?” Nancy Friday asked me when I discussed this theory with her. Must it always be either/or? I wonder. The perfect man would surely
combine
beautiful boy and steady daddy, but alas, that combination rarely turns up. “The sort of men who buy one life insurance are never much fun in bed,” my novelist friend Fay Weldon said.
Ah, but one wishes they were! True, most successful women will opt for joie de vivre and sex appeal over life insurance—we can buy our own life insurance—but every long-term relationship still requires reliability as well as a sense of joy. There are problems with all relationships not based on true equality; sooner or later an unequal partnership has to become equal or break down. (If, for example, a woman gets involved with a much younger or much less successful man, either he has to grow to become an adequate mate for her or the relationship will founder.) Some of the loveliest love affairs seem doomed from the start, and maybe their savor comes from their essential brevity, but it is easier nonetheless to make things last with a true partner.