How to Think More About Sex (The School of Life)

i. The Pleasures of Adultery

1.

We are unlikely to be able to get a grip on this notorious subject if we don’t first allow ourselves to acknowledge just how tempting and exhilarating adultery can be, especially after a few years of marriage and a couple of children. Before we can begin to call it ‘wrong’, we have to concede that it is also very often – for a time, at least – profoundly thrilling.

So let us imagine yet another scenario. Our man, Jim, is in his office, interviewing candidates for a freelance graphic-design job. He has already spent a few hours meeting with a succession of young, goatee-bearded men when the final prospect arrives. Named Rachel, she’s twenty-five (Jim is almost forty, and feeling very aware of death) and is wearing a pair of jeans, trainers and a dark-green V-neck jumper over nothing much else, calling attention to her androgynous upper body. They talk of printing costs, margins, paper weights and fonts – but of course, Jim’s thoughts are elsewhere. We would have to fear for the state of mind of the man who did not respond to this picture of youth, health and energy.

There is in Rachel none of the sullenness of the supermodel, none of the resentment towards their own good looks that beauty sometimes generates in ambitious and intelligent young women, and which causes them to take offence at just how much more interested most of the world is in their physique than in their ideas. Instead she has the guileless, innocent enthusiasm of someone brought up by two loving, elderly parents on a remote farm and who has never watched television or been to secondary school.

To describe what Jim wants as ‘sex’ is severely to foreshorten the roots of his excitement. The old English synonym for the noun is unusually apt in this case, for in essence Rachel is provoking in Jim a longing to know her – know her thighs and ankles and neck, naturally, but also her wardrobe, the titles of the books she has on her shelf, the smell of her hair after a shower, the nature of her character when she was a little girl and the confidences she exchanges with her friends.

In this instance, as in woefully few others in Jim’s life, fate takes an unusual turn. Several months after Rachel’s project with his firm is finished, he is asked to go on an overnight trip to Bristol, to attend an awards ceremony with one of his clients at a Holiday Inn off the M4 – and discovers in the lime-green foyer at the start of the evening that Rachel happens to be there too. She has forgotten him entirely, but after a few clues she is customarily effusive and rapidly agrees to his suggestion that they meet up in the bar after the ceremony. Like a first-time murderer who intuitively knows how to distribute stones in a body bag, Jim sends an email to Daisy, wishing her and their two children good night and warning that he may not have a chance to call her later – as he usually does in the circumstances – because the evening threatens to drag on.

They have a glass of wine together in the otherwise deserted bar around midnight. Jim’s flirtation is precise and to the point. The boldness displayed by middle-aged married men when they are trying to seduce other women should never be confused with confidence: it is just the fear of death, which breeds an awareness of just how infrequently they are ever going to have the opportunity to sample such moments again. It is this that gives Jim the energy to press on in ways he never would have dared to do when he was young and single, when life seemed like a limitless expanse stretching out before him and he could still afford the luxury of feeling shy and self-conscious.

Their first kiss takes place in the corridor leading to the lifts. He presses her up against the wall, next to a poster advertising a discounted rate for a family stay with a free brunch for the kids on Sunday. Her tongue greets his eagerly; her body pushes rhythmically up against his. This quickly enters the pantheon of the greatest moments of Jim’s life.

2.

After he returns home from Bristol, everything continues as it was. He and Daisy put the children to bed, go out for supper, discuss their need for a new oven, quarrel and have as little sex as before.

Of course, Jim lies about the whole thing. We live in moralistic times. Our age allows most things to happen before marriage but accepts nothing much thereafter. The newspapers publish a rolling succession of stories about the sexual indiscretions of footballers and politicians, and readers’ comments on these reflect the kind of response that Jim’s activity could be expected to provoke from most fellow citizens. He would be branded a cheat, a scumbag, a dog and a rat.

These labels terrify Jim, but at the same time, part of him wonders why he should have to submit to such easy moralism. We might follow him in his scepticism. Let’s take the view, for a moment, that what happened between Jim and Rachel was not especially wrong. For that matter, let’s go even further and venture that (contrary to all public verdicts on adultery), the real fault might consist in the obverse – that is, in the lack of any wish whatsoever to stray. This might be considered not only weird but wrong in the deepest sense of the word, because irrational and against nature. A blanket refusal to entertain adulterous possibilities would seem to represent a colossal failure of the imagination, a spoilt imperturbability in the face of the tragically brief span we have been allotted on this earth, a heedless disregard for the glorious fleshly reality of our bodies, a denial of the power that should rightly be wielded over our more rational selves by such erotic triggers as the flirtatious enlacing of fingers under a conference table during a meeting and the surreptitious pressing-together of knees at the end of a restaurant meal, by high-heeled shoes and crisp blue shirts, by grey cotton underwear and Lycra shorts, by smooth thighs and muscular calves – each a sensory high point as worthy of reverence as the tiles of the Alhambra or Bach’s Mass in B minor. Wouldn’t the rejection of these temptations be itself tantamount to a sort of betrayal? Would it really be possible to trust anyone who never showed any interest at all in being unfaithful?

3.

Society holds that married people who discover that their spouses are having affairs have every right to be furious with them and throw them out of the house, cut up their clothes and massacre their reputations in front of their friends. Adultery is seen as providing ample grounds for the cheated-upon party to feel incensed and outraged, as well as abundant cause for the cheating party to apologize in extreme ways for his or her horrid actions.

But here again, might we not suggest that however hurt the betrayed party may feel, fury at the news of the other’s infidelity is not entirely warranted. The fact that the straying spouse has had the temerity to imagine, let alone act on the idea that it might be of interest to push a hand inside an unfamiliar skirt or pair of trousers should not truly come as such a surprise after a decade or more of marriage. Should there really be a need to apologize for a desire that could hardly be more understandable or ordinary?

Rather than ask their ‘betrayers’ to say they are sorry, the ‘betrayed’ might begin by saying sorry themselves – sorry for being themselves, sorry for getting old, sorry for being boring sometimes, sorry for forcing their partners to lie by setting the bar of truthfulness forbiddingly high and (while we are at it), sorry for being human. It can too easily seem as if the adulterous spouse has done everything wrong, and the sexually pure one nothing. But this is an abbreviated understanding of what ‘wrong’ entails. Certainly adultery grabs the headlines, but there are lesser, though no less powerful, ways to betray a partner, including not talking to him or her enough, seeming distracted, being ill-tempered or simply failing to evolve and enchant.

4.

A spouse who gets angry at having been betrayed is evading a basic, tragic truth: that no one can be everything to another person. Rather than accept this horrific thought with dignified grace and melancholy, ‘betrayed’ spouses are often encouraged to accuse their ‘betrayers’ of being morally in the wrong for finding fault with them. However, the real fault in the situation lies in the ethos of modern marriage, with its insane ambitions and its insistence that one person can plausibly hope to embody the eternal sexual and emotional solution to another’s every need.

Taking a step back, what distinguishes modern marriage from its historical precedents is its fundamental tenet that all our desires for love, sex and family ought to reside in the selfsame person. No other society has been so stringent or so hopeful about the institution of marriage, nor ultimately, as a consequence, so disappointed in it.

In the past, these three very distinct needs – for love, sex and family – were wisely differentiated and separated out from one another. The troubadours of twelfth-century Provence, for example, were experts in romantic love. They were well versed in the ache inspired by the sight of a graceful figure, in the anxious sleeplessness suffered at the prospect of a meeting and in the power of a few words or a glance to invoke an elevated state of mind. But these courtiers expressed no wish to link such prized and deeply felt emotions to parallel, practical intentions – no wish, that is, to raise a family, or even have sex, with those they so ardently loved.

The libertines of early-eighteenth-century Paris were just as devoted, but in their case to sex rather than romance: they worshiped the delight of unbuttoning a lover’s garments for the first time, the excitement of exploring and being explored by another at leisure by candlelight, the subversive thrill of seducing someone covertly during Mass. But these erotic adventurers also understood that such pleasures had very little to do with either love or the rearing of a nurseryful of children.

For its part, the impulse to raise a family has been well known to the largest share of humanity since our earliest upright days in East Africa. In all this time, however, it seems to have occurred to almost no one (until very recently, evolutionarily speaking) that this project might need to be fused together with constant sexual desire as well as frequent sensations of romantic longing at the sight of a fellow parent across the breakfast table.

The independence, if not the incompatibility, of our romantic, sexual and familial sides was held to be an untroubling and universal fact of life until the mid-eighteenth century, when, among the members of one particular segment of society in the more prosperous countries of Europe, a remarkable new ideal began to take shape. This ideal proposed that henceforth, spouses ought not to be satisfied with just tolerating each other for the sake of their children; instead, and in addition, they were to regard it as their due to deeply love and desire each other. Their relationships were to wed the romantic energy of the troubadours to the sexual enthusiasm of the libertines. Thus was set before the world the compelling notion that our most pressing needs might be solved all at once, with the help of only one other person.

It was no coincidence that the new ideal of marriage was created and backed almost exclusively by a specific economic class: the bourgeoisie, whose balance of freedom and constraint it also uncannily mirrored. In an economy expanding rapidly thanks to technological and commercial developments, this newly emboldened class no longer needed to accept the restricted expectations of the lower orders. With a little extra money to spare for relaxation, bourgeois lawyers and merchants could now raise their sights and hope to find in a partner more than merely someone who could help them to survive the next winter. However, their resources were not unlimited. They didn’t have the boundless leisure of the troubadours, whose inherited wealth had ensured that they could, without difficulty, spend three weeks writing a letter in celebration of a beloved’s brow. The bourgeoisie had businesses to run and storehouses to manage. Nor could they permit themselves the social arrogance of the aristocratic libertines, whose power and status had bred in them a confident nonchalance about breaking others’ hearts and shattering their own families, and given them the means to mop up any unpleasant messes that their antics might leave behind.

The bourgeoisie was hence neither so downtrodden as not to have time for the luxury of romantic love nor so liberated from necessity as to be able to pursue erotic and emotional entanglements without limit. The idea of achieving fulfilment through an investment in a single, legally and eternally contracted partner was a fragile answer to their particular balance of emotional need and practical constraint.

The bourgeois ideal rendered taboo a host of faults and behaviours that previously would have been, if not completely ignored, then at least not seen as automatic cause for ending a marriage or breaking up a family. A barely tepid friendship between spouses, adultery, impotence – all of these now took on a new and grave significance. The notion of entering into a loveless or indifferent marriage was as much anathema to a bourgeois as the concept of not having outside affairs would have been to a libertine.

The progress of bourgeois romantic ambition can be usefully traced through fiction. Jane Austen’s novels still feel recognizably modern to us because her aspirations for her characters mirror, and helped to create, the ones we have for ourselves. Like Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice and Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, we long to reconcile our wish for a secure family with a sincerity of feeling for our spouse. But the history of the novel also points to darker aspects of the romantic ideal. Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, arguably the two greatest novels of the European nineteenth century, confront us with a pair of heroines who, in accordance with their eras and social positions, long for a complex set of qualities in their partners: they want them to be at once husbands, troubadours and libertines. In both cases, however, life gives them only the first of the three. Emma and Anna are caged within economically secure yet loveless marriages that in earlier ages might have been a source of envy and celebration, but which now seem intolerable. At the same time, they inhabit a bourgeois world that cannot countenance their attempts to conduct extramarital affairs. Their eventual suicides illustrate the irreconcilable nature of this new model of love.

5.

The bourgeois ideal is not entirely an illusion. There are some few marriages that perfectly fuse together the three golden strands of fulfilment – romantic, erotic and familial – and which will never be troubled by adultery. We cannot say, as cynics are sometimes tempted to do, that happy marriage is a myth. It is infinitely more tantalizing than that: it is a possibility, yet a very, very rare one. There is no metaphysical reason why marriage should not honour all our hopes; the odds are just stacked overwhelmingly against us – a tragic truth we should calmly face head on, before life drives it home to us in its own brutal way, and at a time of its choosing.