The Course of Love

Sex and Parenthood

“Let’s do it tonight; what do you think?” says Kirsten as she puts on her makeup in the bathroom before heading downstairs to prepare the children’s breakfast.

“You’re on,” says Rabih with a smile, adding, “I’ll put it in my diary now.” He’s not joking. Friday night is a favored slot and it’s been a while.

On his way to work, he thinks of Kirsten’s dark, wet hair, which beautifully offset her pale skin when she stepped out of the shower. He takes a moment to appreciate his extraordinary good fortune that this elegant, determined Scottish woman has agreed to spend her life beside him.

The day turns out to be rather stressful and it’s not till seven that he reaches home again. He’s longing for Kirsten now, but he has to be diplomatic. There can be no rush and certainly no demands. He is going to try to tell her with particular honesty what he feels beneath the everyday turbulence. The plan is hazy, but he is hopeful.

The family are all in the kitchen, where there’s a tense discussion unfolding about fruit. Both of the children are flatly refusing to have any despite Kirsten having been out to buy some blueberries especially and laid them out on a plate in the shape of a smiling face. William accuses his mother of being mean, Esther wails that the smell of the fruit is making her ill.

Rabih attempts a joke about having missed being in the asylum, ruffles William’s hair, and suggests it might be time for stories upstairs. Rabih and Kirsten alternate reading to them in the evenings, and tonight it’s her turn. In their room she pulls them close to her, one on each side, and begins a story, translated from the German, about a rabbit pursued by hunters in a forest. Seeing them huddled against her reminds Rabih of how it used to be with his own mother. William likes to play with Kirsten’s hair, pushing it right forward, just as Rabih used to do. When the story is over, they want more, so she sings them an old Scottish lullaby, “Griogal Cridhe,” which tells the tragic tale of a young widow whose husband was taken prisoner and executed in front of her by her own clan. He sits on the landing, moved, listening to Kirsten’s voice. He feels privileged to have witnessed his wife’s evolution into an exceptionally competent mother. She, at this point, would above all love a beer.

Rabih goes to lie down on their bed. Half an hour later he hears Kirsten enter the bathroom. When she emerges, it is in the tartan dressing gown that she has had since she was fifteen and which she used to wear a lot when the children were very small. He is starting to wonder how he might begin when she mentions a phone call she had that afternoon with a friend in the United States whom she knew as a student at Aberdeen. The poor woman’s mother has been diagnosed with esophageal cancer; the verdict came out of the blue. Not for the first time he senses what a good friend Kirsten is and how deeply and instinctively she enters into the needs of others.

Then Kirsten mentions that she has been thinking about the children’s university education. It is a long way off still, but that’s exactly the point. Now is the time to start putting something aside: not much—they are squeezed—but enough to build into a useful sum eventually.

Rabih clears his throat and, somewhere inside, becomes a little desperate.

We might imagine that the fear and insecurity of getting close to someone would happen only once, at the start of a relationship, and that anxieties couldn’t possibly continue after two people had made some explicit commitments to one another, like marrying, securing a joint mortgage, buying a house, having a few children, and naming each other in their wills.

Yet conquering distance and gaining assurances that we are needed aren’t exercises to be performed only once; they have to be repeated every time there’s been a break—a day away, a busy period, an evening at work—for every interlude has the power once again to raise the question of whether or not we are still wanted.

It’s therefore a pity how hard it is to find a stigma-free and winning way of admitting to the intensity of our need for reassurance. Even after years together, there remains a hurdle of fear around asking for a proof of desire. But with a horrible, added complication: we now assume that any such anxiety couldn’t legitimately exist. Hence the temptation to pretend that reassurance would be the last thing on our minds. We might even, strangely, have an affair, an act of betrayal that is all too often simply a face-saving attempt to pretend we don’t need someone, an arduous proof of indifference that we reserve for, and secretly address to, the person we truly care about—but are terrified of showing that we need and have been inadvertently hurt by.

We are never through with the requirement for acceptance. This isn’t a curse limited to the inadequate and the weak. Insecurity may even be a peculiar sign of well-being. It means we haven’t allowed ourselves to take other people for granted, that we remain realistic enough to see that things could genuinely turn out badly—and that we are invested enough to care.

It is getting very late now. The children have swimming practice early the next day. Rabih waits until Kirsten has finished her consideration of where Esther and William might eventually study, then reaches over and takes his wife’s hand. She lets it lie there unattended awhile, then gives it a squeeze, and they begin to kiss. He opens, and starts to stroke, her thighs. As he’s doing so, his gaze strays to the night-table on which Kirsten has placed a card from William: “Happy Bithrdey Mumy,” it says, alongside a drawing of an extremely good-natured and smiley sun. This makes him think of William’s impish face and, strangely, also of Kirsten taking him on her shoulders around the kitchen, which she did only the previous week, when he’d dressed up as a wizard after school.

One part of Rabih very much wants to press on with seducing his wife; he’s been wanting this for so long. But another side of him isn’t so sure if he’s properly in the mood now, for reasons he finds hard to pin down.

It’s a well-known thesis: the people we are attracted to as adults bear a marked resemblance to the people we most loved as children. It might be a certain sense of humor or a kind of expression, a temperament, or an emotional disposition.

Yet there is one thing we want to do with our grown-up lovers that was previously very much off-limits with our reassuring early caregivers; we seek to have sex with the very individuals who in key ways remind us of types with whom we were once strongly expected not to have sex. It follows that successful intercourse depends on shutting down some of the overly vivid associations between our romantic partners and their underlying parental archetypes. We need—for a little while—to make sure our sexual feelings don’t become unhelpfully confused with our affectionate ones.

But the task becomes trickier the moment children arrive and directly call upon the specifically parental aspects of our partners. We might be aware at a conscious level that our partner is of course not a sexually forbidden parent—they’re the same person they always were, the one who, in the early months, we once did fun and transgressive things with. And yet the idea is put under ever greater strain as their sexual selves grow increasingly obscured beneath the nurturing identities they must wear all day, exemplified by those chaste and sprightly titles (which we might even occasionally mistakenly use to refer to them ourselves): “Mum” or “Dad.”

What his wife’s breasts might look like was once a subject of inordinate concern for Rabih. He remembers casting surreptitious glances at them in the black top she wore the first time they met, then later studying them beneath a white T-shirt which hinted at their fascinatingly modest size, then brushing against them ever so slightly during that initiatory kiss at the botanical gardens and then finally circling them with his tongue in her old kitchen. His obsession with them in the early days was constant. He wanted her to keep her bra on during lovemaking, alternately pushing it up and pulling it down, so as to keep at a maximum pitch the extraordinary contrast between her clothed and unclothed selves. He would ask her to cup and caress them as she might if he weren’t there. He wanted to place his penis between them, as if mere hands were not enough and a more definitive indicator of possession and possibility were required to mark out this previously taboo territory.

And yet now, some years later, they lie next to each other in the marital bed with about as much sexual tension between them as there might be between a pair of leathery grandparents tanning themselves on a Baltic nudist beach.

Arousal seems, in the end, to have very little to do with a state of undress; it draws its energy from the possibility of being granted permission to possess a deeply desirable, once forbidden yet now miraculously available and accessible other. It is an expression of grateful wonder, verging on disbelief, that in a world of isolation and disconnection, the wrists, thighs, earlobes, and napes of necks are all there, finally, for us to behold; an extraordinary concept that we want to keep checking up on, perhaps as often as every few hours, once more joyfully touching, inserting, revealing, and unclothing, so lonely have we been, so independent and remote have our lovers seemed. Sexual desire is driven by a wish to establish closeness—and is hence contingent on a preexisting sense of distance, which it is a perpetually distinctive pleasure and relief to try to bridge.

There is very little distance left between Rabih and Kirsten. Their legal status defines them as partners for life; they share a three-by-four-meter bedroom to which they repair every evening; they talk on the phone constantly when they are apart; they are each other’s automatically assumed companions every weekend; they know ahead of time, and at most moments of the day and night, exactly what the other is doing. There is no longer very much in their conjoined existence that qualifies as distinctively “other”—and there is therefore little for the erotic to try to bridge.

At the close of many a day, Kirsten is reluctant even to be touched by Rabih, not because she no longer cares for him, but because she doesn’t feel as if there is enough of her left to risk giving more away to another person. One needs a degree of autonomy before being undressed by someone else can feel like a treat. But she has answered too many questions, forced too many small feet in too many shoes, pleaded and cajoled too many times. . . . Rabih’s touch feels like another hurdle in the way of a long-delayed communion with her neglected interior. She wants to cleave tightly and quietly to herself rather than have her identity be further dispersed across yet more demands. Any advance threatens to destroy the gossamer-thin shell of her private being. Until she has had sufficient chance to reacquaint herself with her own thoughts, she can’t even begin to take pleasure in gifting herself to another.

We may, in addition, feel embarrassed and almost intolerably exposed when asking for sex of a partner on whom we are already so deeply dependent in a variety of ways. It can be an intimacy too far, against a backdrop of tense discussions around what to do with the finances and the school drop-off, where to go on holiday and what kind of chair to buy, also to ask that a partner look indulgently upon our sexual needs: that they put on a certain article of clothing, or take a part in a dark scenario we crave, or lie down in a particular pose on the bed. We may not want to be relegated to the supplicant’s role, or to burn up precious emotional capital in the name of a shoe fetish. We may prefer not to entrust fantasies which we know can make us look ludicrous or depraved to someone before whom we otherwise have to maintain poise and authority, as required by the daily negotiations and standoffs of conjugal life. We might find it a lot safer to think about a complete stranger instead.

The week before, Kirsten is alone in the house, up in the bedroom, one mid-afternoon. There’s a program on the television about the North Sea fishing fleet based at Kinlochbervie in the northwest. We meet the fishermen, hear about their use of new sonar technology, and learn about a worrying decline in various piscine populations. At least there’s a lot of herring about and the supply of cod isn’t too bad this year, either. A fisherman named Clyde captains a boat called the Loch Davan. Every week he goes out on the high seas, often venturing as far as Iceland or the tip of Greenland. He has a brutish, arrogant manner, a sharp jawline and angry, impatient eyes. The children won’t be back from their friends’ for another hour at least, but Kirsten gets up and shuts the bedroom door tightly nonetheless before taking off her trousers and lying back on the bed.

She’s on the Loch Davan now, assigned a narrow cabin next to the bridge. There’s a fierce wind rocking the boat like a toy, but above the roar she can just make out a knocking at the cabin door. It’s Clyde; there must be some emergency on the bridge. But it turns out to be a different matter. He rips off her oilskins and takes her against the cabin wall without their exchanging a word. The bristles of his beard burn her skin. He is, crucially, barely literate, extremely coarse, almost preverbal, and as utterly worthless to her as she is to him. Thinking about the sex feels crude, urgent, meaningless—and very much more exciting than making love in the evening to someone she cares about deeply.

The motif of a beloved taking second place to a random stranger in a masturbatory fantasy has no logical part in Romantic ideology. But in practice it is precisely the dispassionate separation of love and sex that may be needed to correct and relieve the burdens of intimacy. Using a stranger bypasses resentments, emotional vulnerability, and any obligation to worry about another’s needs. We can be just as peculiar and selfish as we like, without fear of judgment or consequence. All emotion is kept wonderfully at bay: there is not the slightest wish to be understood, and therefore no risk, either, of being misinterpreted and, consequently, of growing bitter or frustrated. We can, at last, have desire without needing to bring the rest of our exhaustingly encumbered lives into the bed with us.

Kirsten isn’t alone in finding it safer to partition off some bits of her sexuality from the rest of her life.

Tonight Rabih checks that his wife is asleep, whispers her name, and hopes she won’t answer. Then, when he is sure it is safe, he tiptoes out, thinking he might, after all, make a good murderer, and heads down the stairs, past the childrens’ rooms (he can see his son curled up with Geoffrey, his favorite bear) and to a little annex off the kitchen, where he navigates to his favorite chat room. It is almost midnight.

Here, too, things are so much easier than with his spouse. There’s no need to wonder whether another person is in the mood; you just click on their name and, given the part of the Web they’re in, assume they will be game.

He also doesn’t have to worry, in this milieu, about being normal. This isn’t the version of himself which has to do the school run tomorrow, or give a talk at work, or later host a dinner party with a few lawyers and a kindergarten teacher and his wife.

He doesn’t have to be kind to or care about others. He doesn’t even have to belong to his own gender. He can try out what it’s like to be a shy and surprisingly convincing lesbian from Glasgow taking her first tentative steps towards a sexual awakening.

And then, the moment he’s done, he can shut off the machine and return to being the person that so many other people—his children, his spouse and his colleagues—are relying on him to be.

From one perspective, it can seem pathetic to have to concoct fantasies rather than to try to build a life in which daydreams can reliably become realities. But fantasies are often the best thing we can make of our multiple and contradictory wishes: they allow us to inhabit one reality without destroying the other. Fantasizing spares those we care about from the full irresponsibility and scary strangeness of our urges. It is, in its own way, an achievement, an emblem of civilization—and an act of kindness.

The imaginary incidents on the trawler and in the chat room aren’t an indication that Rabih and Kirsten have ceased to love one another. They are signs that they are so engaged in each other’s lives that they sometimes no longer have the inner freedom to make love without self-consciousness or an inhibiting sense of responsibility.