All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (40 page)

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 c
arpe 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:

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.

In
Where the Serpent Lives
, Ruth Padel depicts a single mother who is passionately in love with a married man, a philanderer, so enthusiastic about women he can’t keep his hands off any of them–except his own wife. Naive, faithful, romantic, this mistress believes his repeated exclamations that she is ‘the only one’ and that he will marry her. She also believes over the years the various excuses he makes for not being able to disengage from his wife, about whom, post-feminist that she is, she also feels guilty. She puts up with perpetual lateness, with broken engagements and desolate holidays. The sex is so great, she convinces herself, that he can only eventually be hers. Only when the tissue of lies is dramatically revealed does she pick up the reins of her own life… eventually to find a man who isn’t attached elsewhere.

In the merry-go-round that modern marriage is, people get on or off at various points. Meanwhile, unless she loves her liberty more than her man and prefers independence to the messy dailiness of intimacy, the single woman is prey, erotic satisfactions apart, to all the downs of love–plus loneliness. There is rarely anyone there at the end of the telephone.

‘Sure, there were times when I felt lonely, exploited, and neglected,’ the journalist Melanie Berliet says of her affair with her married lover. ‘But I knew what I was getting into.’ Others don’t, and wait and hope. The odds, apparently, are against them. In
Quiet Desperation: The Truth about Successful Men
, Jan Halper investigated 4100 men from the Fortune 100 lists and found that only 3 per cent eventually married their lovers. Seventy-five per cent of these went on to divorce them. The old adage, most recently attributed to Jimmy Goldsmith, that men who marry their mistresses automatically create a job vacancy, has its truth.

Yet there are few easy answers to coupled life in a world saturated both with sexual temptation and a wish for a forever of monogamous fidelity. It may be as well to remind ourselves that the triangle is always present in one way or another in our twosomes–even in that publicly vowed social contract which is marriage. It’s there in our memories, in our flirtations with others, in our fantasies, in our desires, in the books we read and the films we watch. Imaginative beings are not by nature monogamous, or not for long, even under the aegis of romantic passion. The presence of the shadowy third can help reinvent the distance that keeps the erotic sparks flying. It can, of course, also destroy.

It’s as well to remember that, although in our society we tend to think of sex as a good, it is also a force that consumes. Robert Stoller concluded a chapter of his
Sexual Excitement
on the pungent note: ‘Humans are not a very loving species, especially when they make love. Too bad.’

But people also try to make good of the bad. They weave their own paths through the difficulties of relationships, and negotiating the twists and turns as they come. A proportion endure the pains of infidelity, the anguish of mid-life crises, and find a way back to each other in a new settle ment. Home, after all, can be a warm and capacious place, far more resilient and capable of transformations than we sometimes imagine.

In other quarters, some, like those ardent nineteenth and early-twentieth century utopian seekers who set up colonies where love and sex were differently lived, are trying to reinvent conjugal models. Gays are experimenting with new codes: couples in civil marriages talk of a mix of emotional exclusivity, a committed relationship admingled with a degree of sexual freedom.

Welcoming in the third, where possible, may make us more generous to our partners and to ourselves.

It’s rarely easy. In a cultural regime that champions marriages triggered by an ever-fleeting romantic passion, one that will allow each partner to be transfigured, realize individual as well as coupled hopes and last in fidelity for ever, even less so. Couples in trouble these days often enough turn to that other third party, the counsellor or therapist. Here all the configurations of love can be lived out and sex talk can displace the straying fact of it. The biographical narrative can be reconstructed in the presence of another who isn’t quite a lover. In a different historical moment with other social arrangements, the priest would have played a similar role: every virtuous married woman of a certain class had one to hand, or to dinner.

Yet the couples therapy that so many turn to–and there are some fifty thousand couples therapists in the US–can sometimes exacerbate the difficulties of married life, as much or more so than a straying infidelity. Picking at lacks and faults, putting these into language that always has its own performative aftermath, can be as damaging as it is illuminating. Words hastily spoken take on their own substance and rumble through our coupled lives with unintended consequences. It’s hard to pick yourself up off the floor after a verbal attack and get on merrily with the joys of sex–if it’s still a possibility–or with the laughter at your own or the other’s foibles which helps enliven daily domesticity. Working at relationships, as the jargon goes, can turn married life into a ‘domestic gulag’, as Laura Kipnis deftly names it in her bracing invective
Against Love.
And where there’s a regime of hard and earnest relational labour complete with production and success targets, it’s hard to re-imagine or re-create either the romance or more often the playfulness and interest that keep coupledom alive.

Luckily for many loving couples, the first marital triangle is completed by the arrival of that most generally welcome of intruders and today, arguably, the most romantically endowed: his majesty, the child.