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

ii. The Stupidity of Adultery

1.

But let’s flip the coin once more: if seeing marriage as the perfect answer to all our hopes for love, sex and family is naive and misguided, so too is believing that adultery can be an effective antidote to the disappointments of marriage.

What is ultimately ‘wrong’ with the idea of adultery, as with a certain idea of marriage, is its idealism. While it may look at first sight like a cynical and unhopeful activity to engage in, adultery in fact suggests a conviction that we might somehow magically rearrange the shortcomings of our marriage through an adventure on the side. Yet to credit this notion is to misunderstand the conditions life imposes on us. It is impossible to sleep with someone outside of marriage and not spoil the things we care about inside it – just as it is impossible to remain faithful in a marriage and not miss out on some of life’s greatest and most important sensory pleasures along the way.

2.

There is no answer to the tensions of marriage, if what we mean by an ‘answer’ is a settlement in which no party suffers a loss, and in which every positive element that we care about can coexist with every other, without either causing or sustaining damage.

The three things we want in this sphere – love, sex and family – each affects and harms the others in devilish ways. Loving a person may inhibit our ability to have sex with him or her. Having a secret tryst with someone we don’t love but do find attractive can endanger our relationship with the spouse we love but are no longer turned on by. Having children can imperil both love and sex, and yet neglecting the kids in order to focus on our marriage or our sexual thrills may threaten the health and mental stability of the next generation.

Periodically, frustration breeds an impulse to seek a utopian solution to this mess. Perhaps an open marriage would work, we think. Or a policy of secrets. Or a renegotiation of our contract on a yearly basis. Or more childcare. All such strategies are fated to fail, however, for the simple reason that loss is written into the rules of the situation. If we sleep around, we will put at risk our spouse’s love and the psychological health of our children. If we don’t sleep around, we will go stale and miss out on the excitement of new relationships. If we keep an affair secret, it will corrode us inside and stunt our capacity to receive another’s love. If we confess to infidelity, our partner will panic and never get over our sexual adventures (even if they meant nothing to us). If we focus all of our energies on our children, they will eventually abandon us to pursue their own lives, leaving us wretched and lonely. But if we ignore our children in favour of our own romantic pursuits as a couple, we will scar them and earn their unending resentment. Marriage is thus a bit like a bed sheet that can never be straightened: when we seek to perfect or ameliorate one side of it, we may succeed only in further wrinkling and disturbing the others.

3.

What more realistic mindset, then, might we take with us into a marriage? What kinds of vows might we need to exchange with our partner in order to stand a sincere chance of mutual fidelity? Certainly something far more cautionary and downbeat than the usual platitudes would be in order – for example: ‘I promise to be disappointed by you and you alone. I promise to make you the sole repository of my regrets, rather than to distribute them widely through multiple affairs and a life of sexual Don Juanism. I have surveyed the different options for unhappiness, and it is you I have chosen to commit myself to.’ These are the sorts of generously pessimistic and kindly unromantic promises that couples should make to each other at the altar.

Thereafter, an affair would be a betrayal only of a reciprocal pledge to be disappointed in a particular way, not of an unrealistic hope. Spouses who had been cheated upon would no longer furiously complain that they had expected their partner to be happy with them per se. Instead they could more poignantly and justly cry, ‘I was relying on you to be loyal to the specific variety of disappointment that I represent.’

4.

When the idea of a love-based marriage took hold in the eighteenth century, it replaced an older and more prosaic rationale for betrothal, whereby couples got married because they had both reached the proper age, found they could stand the sight of each other, were keen not to offend both sets of parents and their neighbours, had a few assets to protect and wished to raise a family.

The bourgeoisie’s new philosophy, by contrast, legitimated only one reason for marriage: deep love. This condition was understood to comprise a variety of hazy but totemic sensations and sentiments, including the lovers’ being unable to bear being out of each other’s sight, their each being physically aroused by the other’s appearance, their being certain that their minds were in perfect tune with each other, their wanting to read poetry to each other by moonlight and their desiring to fuse their souls together into one.

In other words, marriage shifted from being an institution to being the consecration of a feeling, from being an externally sanctioned rite of passage to being an internally motivated response to an emotional state.

Justifying the shift in the eyes of its modern defenders was a newly intense dread of what was known as ‘inauthenticity’, a psychological phenomenon whereby a person’s inner feelings differed from those expected of him or her by the outer world. What the old school would have respectfully called ‘putting on a show’ was now recategorized as ‘lying’, while ‘faking things to be polite’ was more melodramatically recast as ‘betraying oneself’. This emphasis on achieving congruence between inner and outer selves required strict new qualifications about what a decent marriage would have to entail. To feel only intermittent affection for a spouse, to have mediocre sex six times a year, to keep a marriage going for the wellbeing of the children – such compromises were considered abdications of any claim to be fully human.

5.

As young adults, most of us start out by feeling an intuitive respect for the idea of a love-based marriage. We can hardly avoid this reverence, given our cultural bias towards it, and yet as we get older, we will usually begin to wonder whether the whole thing might not be just a fantasy dreamt up by a group of adolescent-minded authors and poets a few hundred years ago – and whether we mightn’t be better off under an older, institution-based system that served humanity well enough for most of its history theretofore.

Such a re-evaluation may be prompted by an awareness of how chaotic and misleading our feelings can be. We may, for example, see an attractive face at a street crossing and want to turn our life upside down as a result. When a tempting person with whom we have been having an erotic exchange in an internet chat room suggests a meeting at an airport hotel, we may be tempted to blow up our life in favour of a few hours’ pleasure. There are times when we feel sufficiently angry with our spouse that we would be happy to see him or her knocked down by a car; but ten minutes later, we may be reminded that we would die rather than go on alone. During the longueurs of weekends, we may be desperate for our children to grow up, lose their interest in trampolining and leave us alone for ever so that we can read a magazine for once, and enjoy a tidy living room – and then a day later, at the office, we may want to howl with grief because a meeting looks like it’s going to overrun and we realize we’ll miss out on putting them to bed.

The defenders of feeling-based marriage venerate emotions for their sincerity and authenticity, but they are able to do so only because they avoid looking too closely at what actually floats through most people’s emotional kaleidoscopes in any given period: all the contradictory, sentimental and hormonal forces that pull us in a hundred often crazed and inconclusive directions. To honour every one of our emotions would be to annul any chance of leading a coherent life. We could not be fulfilled if we weren’t inauthentic some of the time, perhaps even a lot of it – inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires to throttle our children, poison our spouse or end our marriage over a dispute about changing a light bulb.

Romanticism highlighted the perils of inauthenticity, but we will face no fewer dangers if we attempt always to bring our outer life into line with our inner one. It is giving our feelings too great a weight to want them to be lodestars by which the major projects of our lives may be guided. We are chaotic chemical propositions, in dire need of basic principles that we can adhere to during our brief rational spells. We should feel grateful for, and protected by, the knowledge that our external circumstances are often out of line with what we feel; it is a sign that we are probably on the right course.

6.

We can welcome marriage as an institution that endures from day to day without seeming to pay too much mind to what its members are feeling. Such benign neglect may in fact better reflect the individuals’ long-term wishes than a system that would hourly take their emotional pulse and adjust their status accordingly.

Marriage happens also to suit children well. It spares them anxiety over the consequences of their parents’ arguments: they can feel confident that their mum and dad like each other well enough to work things out, even though they may bicker and fight every day, as kids themselves do in the playground.

In a well-judged marriage, spouses should not blame each other for occasional infidelities; instead they should feel proud that they have for the most part managed to remain committed to their union. Too many people start off in relationships by putting the moral emphasis in the wrong place, smugly mocking the urge to stray as if it were something disgusting and unthinkable. But in truth, it is the ability to stay that is both wondrous and worthy of honour, though it is too often simply taken for granted and deemed the normal state of affairs. That a couple should be willing to watch their lives go by from within the cage of marriage, without acting on outside sexual impulses, is a miracle of civilization and kindness for which they ought both to feel grateful on a daily basis.

Spouses who remain faithful to each other should recognize the scale of the sacrifice they are making for their love and for their children, and should feel proud of their valour. There is nothing normal or particularly pleasant about sexual renunciation. Fidelity deserves to be considered an achievement and constantly praised – ideally with some medals and the sounding of a public gong – rather than discounted as an unremarkable norm whose undermining by an affair should provoke spousal rage. A loyal marriage ought at all times to retain within it an awareness of the immense forbearance and generosity that the two parties are mutually showing in managing not to sleep around (and, for that matter, in refraining from killing each other). If one partner should happen to slip, the other might forgo fury in favour of a certain bemused amazement at the stretches of fidelity and calm that the two of them have otherwise succeeded in maintaining against such great odds.