Behind the Curtain

It’s hard to find anything quite as silly as the little blue curtain with which BA separates its ‘Club Class’ clientele from its economy passengers on short haul flights. Once in the air, the stewardesses draw this across the interior of the fuselage to separate the first few rows of seats from the rest of the cabin; as if this space at the front were in some way special. And yet we all know it’s not: we’ve just walked through it when we boarded. Its occasional occupant(s) will be sitting in similar dark blue seats, with no more luggage space or obvious luxuries. The toilet there is exactly the same as the ones at the back. We, too, can summon a stewardess to our personal assistance at the touch of a button, as well as they can. And more to the point, if those weird, synchronised safety procedures are ever actually needed, the flash buggers at the front are going to hit the ground a mile below at exactly the same bone-splintering speed as the rest of us. They get to board first – but if you really insist on being that sort of person, then you can do this on Easyjet for a few quid. They presumably get some sort of pre-packaged airline food, which one wouldn’t, under normal circumstances, offer a dog. And….oh yes – they get to sit behind a little blue curtain while we’re in the air.

On a recent flight I took from Mallorca, BA then managed to make this whole business even more ludicrous by announcing to ‘European Travellers’ (ie normal passengers) not once during the flight, but twice, that they should not pass through this curtain and cross the seating area beyond it without permission; nor, under any circumstances, use the toilet at the front. Yeah, that makes sense – one hundred people using the two loos at the back, some of them walking down the entire length of fuselage, which might be blocked by hostesses and their drinks trolleys, to do so – while a toilet a few metres away at the front goes unused, so that it’s available for the bladder of just one passenger in ‘European Club’! (What’s more, they’d abandoned nine passengers in Palma, who seemed to have been confused by 24-hour timetables, and turned up for this midnight flight the night after they should have flown (woops!) – leaving them behind even though there were so many empty seats at the front of the plane).

Anyway, it’s not all bad on BA – they throw in drinks – and just before I dozed-off under the influence of a whisky, it struck me that the curtain revealed more than it obscured. It revealed its own silliness, for starters: because, as a method of conferring a special status on passengers, it’s a pretty sorry attempt; drawn back during take-off and landing to reveal a section of fuselage identical to the rest. Why not give them little hats at boarding, with ‘VIP’ written on them – that ought to do the trick, surely; if they’re so anxious to stand out? Or put doilies on the seats, and rugs on the floor - even give them their very own cabin-crew, in extra-short skirts, (and lederhosen for the young men?), who’d give everyone in Club Class a neck-rub - then we might all want to shell out the extra!

As things stand, the sheer flimsiness and inadequacy of this rather token barrier betrayed the fact that the ‘privilege’ for which an extra fee had been paid (whether they’re designated First Class, Business, ‘European Club’, or whatever) wasn’t up to the mark; at least not in the sense of having a useful difference to the commodity or service the rest of us had purchased. Nor was it necessary to us that it existed – that was why it was virtually empty. It wasn't effective at conferring additional status, so that we didn’t aspire to be there; on the contrary, we’d have felt a bit daft if we were. And we’d probably far rather the airline had taken pity on the nitwit chavs stranded back at Palma and given them the seats. All in all, it looked like an unpardonable lapse in an otherwise smooth operation.

Perhaps the curtain and the other little rituals of ‘Club Class’ are a bit like the robes and crosses, hymns and paraphernalia of a church service, which those without faith are obliged to attend because of a marriage, a funeral or a christening. Few of us nowadays believe a sacred rite is taking place in the eyes of an omnipotent and omnipresent God on these occasions –- but we do acknowledge the appropriateness of the Church leading us through such an event with one of its services, structuring our experience with the empty ceremonies of faith. And we are willing, perhaps grateful, to let the minister and the faithful do the believing, the magic bit, on our behalf.

In the same way that aspects of a particular faith, its hymns and liturgies, are vaguely familiar to most of us from a communal past when we were obliged to regularly attend services – and perhaps actually participate in these rituals of belief – so BA’s corporate identity and advertising campaigns generally try to evoke a shared history of style and service during travel; one once enjoyed by the wealthy on planes, renowned liners, and trains bearing famous titles. (Their one attempt to try, instead, to re-brand as hip, global and demotic – the costly and disastrous ‘tailplane art’ debacle - has long been abandoned.) This is in common with a more widespread and consistent ploy of advertising to evoke a desirable past none of us actually shared – Ridley Scott’s ads for Hovis being the classic example – and it’s invariably an imagined past of profound (ie non-commercial) values, such as family, service and tradition, of which the product or service in question is supposedly a continuation.

Just like religious faith, most of us no longer believe in their structures and rituals of social hierarchy, which seem quaintly old-fashioned in the modern era of egalitarian, cut-price air travel; where we all get the equal right to destroy the world at a discount. (* see below) In fact, many of us probably think air travel is way too cheap: hell, we aren’t even confident we should be doing it at all. (Perhaps we should be embracing the travel of the past in fact, as well as in fancy; saving the planet by using ships and trains, or staying at home, instead of flying.)

Instead, BA does the believing, the magic bit, for us; or at least, they should do when they get it right. Whether you wish to consider it jaundiced or clear-sighted, we all know what’s actually happening around the modern traveller. That is, monstrously huge and largely unchecked capital interests - aided, abetted and subsidised by the craven and venal governments with whom they’re in cahoots - are burning damaging fossil fuels in sixty-year-old technology, in order to produce a profit from transporting a tiny and privileged fraction of the world’s population to an alternative location. (And we’re complicit; that profit may be made on our behalf, for our pension funds). For the time being, our foreign holiday-spot is probably slightly less fucked-up by capital’s domestic legacy of urban blight, rural despoliation, or industrialisation than our own locale. But once there, we’re more likely to have an adverse impact than a positive one. Perhaps the poorer residents will give better value in services for the traveller’s first world currency than (s)he could receive back home (often at the expense of their communities, long-term economic prospects, welfare and environment). Certainly, it’ll be a place where other capital interests and other venal governments can profit from the tourists’ brief presence. We all know this perfectly well, but needfully choose to behave as though we did not, most of the time.

Now and then, of course, the unseen workers in this crazy set-up are desperate enough to go on strike - the baggage-handlers, or the under-paid people who make those fancy in-flight meals - or one witnesses the airline refusing to assist passengers who’ve missed their flight. And then we see that it’s the surplus value of others’ (undervalued) labour, not magic, which keeps the whole shaky shebang in the air, literally and figuratively. Suddenly, you’re reminded what we’re really dealing with: just one more uncompromising, impersonal and ruthless mega-corporation; as their price-fixing fine has confirmed. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6925397.stm)

And while we may take air conditioning and iced drinks at 37,000 feet for granted, we also know that one loopy Jihadist, or one technical slip-up, and we’re all toast; as events this week at Phuket have reminded us. So that the real may rudely intrude into our phantasmagoric little universe at any time; a haunting awareness gnawing at a corner of our consciousness, which a whole raft of scare-in-the-air films has inevitably exploited. And all the while, like that ticking crocodile stalking Captain Hook, the melting ice-caps and broken levees remind us that the time is nearly up for our stay in consumerist Neverland – and it’s coming sooner than we think.

It isn’t only the silly curtain which is trying, rather ineptly, to eclipse such nagging doubts with some traditional sleight of hand: the slick television advertising campaigns, the badges, branding and logos, the professional smiles and crisp uniforms, the scrupulously clean, shiny airports, with their mechanised walk-ways and concourses turned into smart shopping malls of marble and glass, the consumer-led websites, the press campaigns and glamorous junkets for journalists; it’s a constant, frantic and continuous effort required to keep us dreaming that sweet day-dream of our life, like the future populace in the film The Matrix.

All these things are working so well, so hard, and a bit of cloth goes and lets them down! The curtain seemed worth remarking on, because it was so crude, old-fashioned and inept – as were the crass admonitions not to trespass beyond it - transforming the stewardess from attentive helper to corporate policewoman. (Airline executives getting together to fix prices is pretty crude, old-fashioned and inept, come to that!) And what happens in such a case, what such failures do, is inadvertently foreground the way that we’re constituted as (consuming) individual subjects and stitched into the social fabric; often by mechanisms which are imperfect and clumsy. We’ve come to expect services and commodities not only to believe implicitly in late capitalism on our behalf; but also, to exist and run things smoothly on the premise of this unquestioned belief, as if there was absolutely no imaginable alternative. Of course, the more we let people like BA executives run the world – and the more folk who take to the skies with them and their ‘competitors’ - the sooner we’re definitely going to have to start imagining some alternatives……

(*)
Although they run first class options, airlines and train operators recognise that few of us think some people should receive better treatment than others because of birth or funds, nowadays. So they tend to use slightly more ambiguous terms, like ‘Premier’, or ‘Business Class’; because we will happily accept that where a firm is paying, an employee may regard a bit of extra comfort as a legitimate perk of having to travel for work (and may also need enough space and quiet to get some work done in transit). ‘Club’ class is a particularly adept term; one suggesting exclusivity, while inviting us to want to include ourselves and ‘belong’.


Yet they can’t quite sell us a sense of ourselves as more glamorous, potent, or desirable, as the promoters of a brand like Gucci or Porsche might do; that’s left to the private jet operators. In fact, BA seem very keen to guard against any hint of elitist or class associations. They do this by setting their latest advertisements in Australia; a country we conventionally associate with a vigorous, no-nonsense, unpretentious approach to life; where no one would have any truck with snobbish or class-bound conventions. And in case we’re just too dense to get the message, the BA staff are assisting at some sort of ‘fun-day’ there. Stuffy? – not them!


Unable to mobilise elitist or glamorous incentives, BA has to fight the commercial threat of low-cost, no-frills operators with an ethos of ‘professionalism’. If only we could have the same level of helpful, professional assistance in the rest of our lives as we have on their flights, their new advertising campaign laments. If only every aspect of our lives could be so congenial and well-managed as a flight with them! Then our whole lives would be “up-graded”.


By metonymic implication, if we “upgrade to British Airways” (that is, from the low-cost operators), as we’re exhorted to do for the duration of a flight, not only will the rest of our lives receive an “up-grade”; but also, we (that is, we ourselves) will be “up-graded”. Presumably, we will become the sort of people who have both sufficient means to choose ‘the best’ (the airline with the most helpful personal service, the most professional staff, etc) - and the judgement to discern that the additional cost involved is justified.


Hang on a minute, though - there’s a contradiction here. An “up-grade” is not something you pay for: in popular parlance, it’s a gratuitous seat enhancement at the discretion of the airline, perhaps owing to over-booking in economy, or a problem with either your seat or neighbours; in other words, a freebie. Google it, and what comes up are helpful tips on what you can do in order to increase the chances of an airline moving you from your cheaper seat to first class, without paying any extra. One of these tips is to have yourself noted as a CEO or VIP of some sort by your travel operator when purchasing the ticket.


In other words, there’s a suggestion in the adverts that even economy class with BA is effectively an upgrade from low-cost carriers – and it may not necessarily cost you any more to do so. Usually it will, of course; but that’s okay, because upgrades are available to VIP’s: so by upgrading yourself, you’ll become one; become the sort of person who gets upgraded. And, presumably, this upgrade of yourself is gratis; not something you’ve worked for, or had to earn. What you’ve actually done is pay a bit more hard-earned currency for exactly the same thing – fast but environmentally-damaging and scary transport from A to B - and, it transpires, you’ve been paying through the nose on fuel surcharges. But the advert manages a Derren Brown moment; in which you’re encouraged to believe that they’ll throw in an extra: flying BA has the potential to transform you into a more impressive, important and significant person – and they’ll do this for you gratis.

PLAYING AWAY

Everyone is unfaithful – even if we’re only doing the dirty in our minds. And in everyday life, we all take a stroll down the primrose path; anything from a few tentative steps, to a single, irrevocable leap. Because, if we’re honest, there’s a fairly wide spectrum of behaviour between isolation by burqa and stoning, and being a fully-fledged love cheat: everything from the briefest eye contact with a passing stranger, or that drink with an old boyfriend which you forgot to mention, through to an apparently platonic friendship, which actually shares more warmth and rapport than you’re currently enjoying with your partner.

So most people don’t just fall head over heels in love with someone else, have an affair, then divorce or reconcile. They take tiny little steps - and they’re taking them every single day – it’s an irresistible dance, back and forth. Mostly, those tentative, initial moves are all that happens: at some point between straying fantasy and actually hopping into bed with someone else, we take a step back, hesitate and probably think better of it.

On the other hand, some of us clearly don’t do enough hesitating - apparently, four million married folk out there (and one in five people in long-term relationships) - have gone all the way and been unfaithful. And they’re just the ones prepared to blab – women, especially, are said to conceal their adultery, even from researchers (especially from researchers, I expect). So how and why do so many of us stray?

* * *

Some people may think they’re just so damn special/gorgeous and/or sexy that the usual rules simply don’t apply, and it’s a bit of a waste, only one person appreciating them. I think this definitely applies to some swinging; though to be fair, most are misbehaving by agreement, rather than cheating on anyone. There may, alternatively, be a mismatch of some kind: a few years in, some need unmet in their LTR becomes pressing; anything from boredom to a desperate and profound longing for an act or attitude lacking at home. (At a guess, I’d say this is the biggest factor and the one which motivates most of those using the mushrooming “married but looking” sites).

The idea of someone simply being caught off-guard is far less convincing: whether a chance meeting with an old flame; or encountering someone for the first time who’s so goddam attractive you feel you just can’t resist them. I think these are just people who were ‘married but looking’, without admitting it. There’s propinquity and opportunity (not to mention drink), offering a one-off diversion to which you wouldn’t otherwise have succumbed; the staples of the office party, the wedding and the conference. But even then, while men are opportunists, women are careful pragmatists and may well have decided beforehand. (I bet you could add a few more motives to this list, if you worked as a couples’ counsellor: revenge, for example; the destabilising effects of grief, or the very common compulsion to repeat a particular kind of relationship.)

* * *

Nowadays, we’re assaulted by a plethora of self-help advice, on the Web, on TV, and in countless books and magazines, all telling us how to put the zing back into our marriages and LTR’s. This keeps a lot of so-called sexologists, self-help ‘experts’, journalists, presenters, and therapists in funds. Good for them, if they can get away with it: let’s face it, this sort of easy gig beats putting in a proper day’s turn, like the rest of us, hands down. But it is also complete and utter bollocks.

It probably isn’t even necessary: on the one hand, any partnership worth its salt is always going to have its moments, now and then; whether in the bedroom, or out of it. Even in a partnership where the sex is generally rubbish, one partner (the one with the highest libido, at a guess) is going to make the extra effort required to ensure that some sort of more-or-less satisfactory how’s-your-father takes place on a reasonably regular basis. This role frequently falls to women. It may not always rock their world – and may occasionally give them the heebie-jeebies - but it’s important for their self-esteem, and they’re sensible enough to know that intimacy is the necessary cement for a relationship, which may have lots of other things going for it.

On the other hand, the idea that you can expect more than this in a LTR is just eyewash. Anything more is very very good going indeed. Desire, romance and passion may not always be the motivating forces at the start - more often they are – but either way, they’re not going to last. And the truth is, as a way of keeping desire alive, there just ain’t anything to beat adultery. You can be a wuss about the potential consequences – such caution makes a lot of sense, particularly if there are children. Alternatively, it may just be lack of opportunity, lack of interest, squeamishness, or an anything-for-a-quiet-life attitude. You may feel too fastidious about sharing someone, or being shared. Your faithfulness may be based on ethical or religious arguments; or just a do-as-you-would-be-done-by pragmatism. Fair enough – it’s your choice. But whatever it’s based on, this choice permanently rules out romance, passion and desire.

And serial monogamy isn’t “better”, or the “right” way to behave. The man who leaves a first wife and children because he’s “unhappy” and then re-marries, for example, can tell himself and everyone else he’s acting with “honesty” and “integrity”. But his first wife is no less hurt, I imagine, than the spouse of a two-timer who returns to her – and is definitely hurt a lot more than one who doesn’t even know. And no amount of honesty will prevent it adversely affectiing the children of his first marriage for the rest of their lives.

* * *

Now here’s a bit of honesty you don’t see too often, but I’m going to let the cat out of the bag: playing away puts passion back into your partnership, too; because it fluffs you up for him or her indoors. Not surprisingly, lovers won’t confess this to one another, but it’s no big surprise is it, now I’ve said it? After all, you’re happier, you’ve greater self-esteem, you’re more positive, you feel more alive. For the first time in years, you’ve a clear sense of yourself as a separate person, with an emotional and sexual life outside cosy coupledom. This makes you more attractive to your partner. You leave the house on an expectant high and you come home bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Inevitably, this feeds into every aspect of your life. And that often includes sex at home. When couples swing, it’s more overt; but I’m damn sure it’s true of any covert shenanigans as well. So-called experts suggest lack of interest in sex might be a clue to infidelity. Bullshit – it’s a sign someone’s lost their mojo – and the so-called ‘innocent party’ is probably to blame. In the first throes of an exhilarating affair, one might occasionally be irritated by the habitual, half-hearted clumsiness of a partner and pine for the novelty and passion of a lover. More often, the wronged partner is the unwitting beneficiary of all that pent-up desire stoked by an affair.


* * *

So much for why so many of us take the risk of straying - but how do some chumps get outed - and how should they play it? In my personal blog, I wrote a post called COCK http://manincrisis.blogspot.com/2006/12/cock.html, in which I talk about the ease with which the errant partner can stray; providing they don’t conform to clichés. I’d go further than this, though: I’d actually argue that partners who are caught cheating must want to get caught. It isn’t really very difficult to obey a few simple rules, exercise some self-discipline, and keep a watchful eye on your own behaviour at critical moments. There’s absolutely no need to leave texts on your phone after they’re received, or use cards instead of cash, or, heaven forbid, get seen together in some public place. Subterfuge as a necessary part of your lifestyle just doesn’t suit everyone – a bit like self-employment, or working on commission in a sales environment – so if this is you, don’t do it. You wouldn’t work for MI5 if you were a hopeless blabbermouth, would you, or take up medicine if you couldn’t stand the sight of blood? Getting caught is very unkind behaviour – and not just to your spouse - because it also means you weren’t having a sincere relationship with the lover in question. Not only did you hurt your partner unnecessarily, but you were only using your lover as a stick to beat them with, or as some sort of complicated negotiating ploy. This is all too common – and it’s not very nice.

You can actually make all sorts of little mistakes – it’s astonishing how many you do make, however careful you are – yet your partner overlooks them. (Of course they do – if they were more attentive, you probably wouldn’t be playing away!) So I suspect you really do have to try very hard to get caught out – even if it’s only your unconscious trying hard. Is this because those blinkered partners who don’t notice are just choc-a-bloc with trust and unquestioning, unconditional love? Nope - they make it easier because they do not want to know – and that’s a big help. They don’t want to know, because it would undermine their cosy sense of themselves, leading to a lot of uncomfortable questions about the way they conduct their life with you, forcing them to shape up. Isn’t this exactly what happens when some dope ‘confesses’? The pair of them hang around Relate offices for a few months, tastelessly airing a decade’s grievances, finally learn to get with the programme and meet one another’s needs – and subsequently go around annoyingly (and unconvincingly) telling everyone their relationship is stronger than ever. (Shorthand for the injured party putting in some long-overdue effort in the bedroom).

Yes, I’m afraid that’s right: read any agony column, article or book on the subject and it’s full of distressed spouses/partners, who having had some clue needlessly and cruelly thrust in their faces, then have to tolerate the ignominy, humiliation and emotional mud-wrestling of their partner confessing all the details to them. If you can cope with extra fun and romance, fine; but if you’re sincere about it, then why, oh why cause all that grief? Make it up, you divvy! You have not, repeat not, been shagging them at every opportunity for months. It was a one-off, never-to-be-repeated, stupid mistake, with someone you don’t even fancy. You were drunk/someone spiked your drink/you were on Rhohipnol/tequila slammers/E/some weird shit from Malawi. You were emotionally vulnerable after your best friend got diagnosed with something terminal, after that row with your partner last month you lost all your emotional bearings for one moment of utter and incomprehensible madness… And it was definitely not his best friend/your neighbour/little Jake’s mum – it was just someone you met – and will never never ever see again. . Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

One further point: it was crap. That’s important. I sort of like that Indecent Proposal film. I mean, the actual film is complete pants; but the premise is good. Yes it’s a silly idea (I mean, we’d all fuck someone ugly for a fraction of that sum, and without a moment’s thought – it’s just that we’d have the good sense to keep it to ourselves and say we’d won with Premium Bonds). On the other hand, the premise is just so potent, dirty and provocative that it more or less carries the whole rather shaky shebang; at least until Demi actually sells her ass. Anyway, why I brought this is up, is because Woody subsequently wants the details – I think this is accurate, and both the script and Clive Owen’s wonderful handling of it reflect this very well in the film Closer, too. So be warned, men do. (They want them, but they don’t want them – because it’ll probably give them a hard-on - and then they'll feel sick and weird - and it’s this which will upset them.) Anyway, finally badgered into doing so, dimwit Demi then tells Woody the sex was good – just sex, she emphasises, not love – but it was good sex. Big mistake, Demi! Huge. If you do get caught, it can have been lots of things, I’m sure: tawdry, insignificant, inept, unconsummated, boring, unsuccessful, brief; but best of all, bad (and I don’t mean that in a Black way).

Incidentally, I’ve asked women friends whether Sarah Jessica Parker was a whore in Honeymoon in Vegas, or whether Demi was in Indecent Proposal. Although Parker (as Betsy) tells Nicolas Cage:
I’m a whore, Jack! You made me into a whore!

and no one uses the w-word in IP, there was general agreement that Parker wasn't one – because she was forced into a date with professional gambler Tommy Korman (James Caan), to save her boyfriend from serious personal injury. Demi, on the other hand, has elected to become an expensive part-time escort. So she was unanimously declared a slut because she did have choice - and voluntarily chose to fuck for money.

Anyway, back to my theme… I’d go further still and say that people who get cheated on are, I suspect, people who do not make enough effort. Perhaps they’re people who - at least until it actually happens - would rather get cheated on than make enough effort. You may imagine you’re merely bound by ties of trust, faith and romantic love; but lasting partnerships, with their cargo of kids and property, shared responsibilities and family, are bound by covenant; by implicit mutual contracts. And if one party has taken it into their heads to break any part of this covenant, it may be because they feel, rightly or wrongly, that the other party betrayed their side of the bargain first. So wronged parties can say the other is shallow, selfish, uncaring and inconstant, if that helps any; but this may only mean that, as well as failing to understand how much something mattered, they’ve also failed to understand how much it hurt that it didn’t matter to them.

Perhaps they don’t stay in shape, or they’re dull or unambitious; they’re unimaginative at sex or unromantic. Perhaps they’re insensitive, miserable, joyless, moody or irritable; or they take their partners for granted. (I know this sounds like any average man – especially over forty - but I think I’m talking about both sexes – and it doubtless applies to same-sex couples, too). All this helps quite a lot with deceiving them: firstly, because they simply cannot understand how very important one or other of these things might be to their partner. (After years of their brain-washing, even their partner may not realise it, until they meet someone else). They don’t expect deceit, because they don’t understand how insulting and humiliating it can be to live with someone who seems to care too little to make the required compromises in any of these departments. As a result, they don’t see that there may be a long-held resentment (as well as some deep-seated need); which can then overcome caution, caring or guilt. Thirdly – and more significantly than either of these – they can get so stubbornly locked into their joyless, unfit, unromantic, or unsexy view of life, they’ve come to think of their partner as unusual and perverse; unable to imagine them finding someone simpatico, with whom they may share a different view of things.

* * *

Errant partners who cruelly blow the whistle on their own peccadilloes are, perhaps, re-negotiating the contract. Yet I wonder whether even those who continue to “get away with it” may actually only do so because, in some sense, their behaviour is just within, or on the boundary of, such an unwritten agreement. I’m sure I’m not doing him justice, but the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek gives the term “inherent transgression” to cultural practices which sanction some experiences usually prohibited in the everyday lives of civilised political subjects (sex, death, defecation, violence): “the temporary carnavalesque suspension of social rules which, far from being subversive, effectively sustains the existing social order.”
(http://www.umich.edu/~iinet/journal/vol6no2/zizek.htm)

Swinging, dogging - and the websites, party networks and rituals supporting antics of this kind - surely provide just such an enjoyable transgression of everyday rules and of the couple as social unit - “an alwayssexualised, alwaystransgressive enjoyment, at the limits of what subjects can experience or talk about in public” (http://www.iep.utm.edu/z/zizek.htm) - which, at the same time as ‘breaking the rules’ of conventional coupledom, actually sustain rather than subverting them. This must equally be true of all those “married but looking” websites, too; whose express raison d’etre is not finding a new marriage partner better suited to your needs and inclinations, but indulging those needs in brief and discreet liaisons which will not rock the marriage boat.

Is it also too much to suggest that, in fact, very many couples in successful and sustained relationships have worked out their own ways to allow each other some sort of licence? For many – perhaps most - people there’s a line on the far side of flirting, which they will not cross; for others, it may be emotional involvement which constitutes that line, which would break the covenant. The licence can be implicit, or overt: anything from a few days’ golfing holiday with his work-mates, right through to – in extreme but all-too-common cases - abusing a child within the family. I’ve experienced women in perfectly sound marriages, flirting really outrageously, right in front of their partners, in a way we'd never dream of doing. Yet we both countenance separate holidays, which those other couples don’t permit one another. I’ve noticed ‘happily married’ men and women routinely doing the wild thing with fellow conference delegates; but always waiting until the final night; as if to ensure this little perk of the conference season remains a safety valve which doesn’t get out of hand, or get misinterpreted.

In this sense, swingers may be seen, not as exceptional, but as representative. What differs, is that the swinging couple agree explicit codified terms of their licence – rather like that bizarre legal document between Redford and the couple in Indecent Proposal. So, they will see others together, but never alone; they’ll fuck observed by others who can’t participate; they’ll participate with others, but only with women; they can both fuck anyone, but only in the same room; partners will watch, but not participate, etc etc etc). I’ve been facetious at the expense of foolish spouses who play away and then out themselves; but in some ways this may, in all seriousness, be par for the course in that particular relationship (self-evidently, it is, if the relationships survives).

All this would put a new inflection on that dance, backwards and forwards, with which I started my piece: those hesitant steps towards and away from the possibilities and potentialities, from all the varieties of infidelity, which I claimed most of us make every day of our lives; even if the majority of these tentative, initial moves are all that happens. There are a thousand considerations at work, from our mood and hormone levels to physchological legacies of childhood. Yet while we may imagine that we are negotiating with our consciences, for and against, as free agents, perhaps we’re quite coolly assessing the bottom line, if push comes to shove: weighing up what we – and our partners – can or can't accommodate, within our existing relationship.

International Domestics

On a recent holiday, my neighbours tried to kill one another. At least, he tried to kill her. I’d been democratically elected to intervene, but found it more traumatic in a foreign tongue than I would have done in English; never quite certain whether, or when, to do so: unsure of the point when it passed from domestic row, with each side verbally giving as good as it got, to wife battery. Screaming, of course, is much the same in any language – and its onset invariably marks the stage where you definitely need to get involved - but I ran out only to find hotel security staff already on the scene.

Funnily enough, this is the first time in years that I’ve stayed in a two or three-star hotel – and on the last occasion, exactly the same thing happened! Can this really be mere coincidence? Do people who are unhappy with one another resent spending the extra money, or does holidaying on a budget cause seething resentment? On that previous occasion – a winter break on Cyprus – the walls were so thin, I’d considered asking to change the room right from the off. They hadn’t even bothered to plaster over the blockwork; they’d just painted it white, like campus accommodation back home.

Ominously, no sooner had I settled into my room, than noises from the neighbours had begun to be intrusive…….. "Why didn't you bring it with you?" a woman's voice was asking, petulantly."Why don't you eff-off," her partner retorted. Charming! Presumably the dour-looking young couple I'd encountered in the hallway soon after arriving. And on the other side, I guessed my neighbours must be the elderly Welsh pair seated near me at dinner: the old lady had a distinctive chirpy little voice, like a bird. I could hear her every exclamation. "Well, I wish I had your constitution," she was saying; "I really do. I can't eat chops like that. Say what you like, but I can't - and I never could."The old man's gruff, monosyllabic replies were less clear. It seemed a novel idea, to envy him - stooped, liver-spotted, pebble glasses perched on his bony beak of a nose - and yet I’d watched him put away two bottles of beer with his dinner, so age had its compensations, apparently."Now you're never going to manage those trousers like that, are you?" I could hear his wife saying to him. "Do you want me to help? Wait a minute, then, wait a minute - don't get in a fluster!"My momentary irritation dissolved into a kind of wonder at their tenacity - with life, with one another.

There was a small television usefully bolted to a bracket on one wall and I switched this on, in an effort to cover these adjoining conversations, while pouring a couple of fingers of the Barcadi I'd bought in the duty free at the airport. The tv was showing an old repeat of Friends, with subtitles. Oddly, the first break contained an advertisement for the ubiquitous building blocks which surrounded me. Their versatility was initially established in a series of close-ups, in which they were sawn in half, drilled and buttered with mortar - to rise, under competent male hands, into an ugly wall - and finally an ugly building of box-like simplicity. Then a genial, bearded man seemed to be recommending them to camera - before posing proudly with his young family in front of the imposing eye-sore which had presumably been erected on his behalf. "But they're not bloody sound-proof, mate!" I shouted at the family man on tv.

*

The fact that the walls were thinner in that Cyprus hotel – and the rucks at once longer and less dramatic - made it worse than our recent experience, in a way: I routinely became an unwilling witness to a place the unhappy young couple visited nightly; a very bad place. I awoke in the wee small hours of the very first night, the drink having worn off, unsure why at first; until, from the wall behind the bedhead, I realised I was hearing the rather petulant, whiney tones of Ms Miserable, next door, and the deeper, argumentative voice of Mr Miserable, evidently in the middle of a barely-controlled ding-dong. I couldn't ignore them and couldn’t get back to sleep; so I was forced to lie there, while they argued, half-a-dozen feet away.

Because they weren’t actually raising their voices, protest seemed unreasonable. I tried a pillow over my head; which meant I was unable to distinguish most of the words, but then continued hearing the two voices merely as sounds: now rising to a crescendo, now falling away to pianissimo - alternating, then overlapping - by turns freighted with feeling, or cool and conciliatory. As a matter of fact, although they were Brits, the pillow meant it was also like listening to another language, at times; perhaps an unfamiliar opera in a foreign tongue, where you guess the meaning and import of a duet from the tone and inflection of the singers. In this case, the import was pretty obvious: whatever it was Mr Miserable was saying, and however he was putting it – the same thing, over and over again, ad nauseum – the message was plain enough, even in a different room. You don't love me enough. I don't feel wanted, I felt he was saying. I don't have your respect. I don't feel attended to, I don't feel needed, I don't feel loved. And no wonder – the tiresome bugger!

Hard to know who was the most irritating of that pair. Frankly, they both got on my nerves - Mr Miserable going on and on and on, grinding away at her resistance - and Ms Miserable, with her whiney voice, holding out on him. It was a bit of a toss-up, really. And I sensed this wasn't simply a bad patch, a dry spell, or a bit of tetchiness after a difficult journey. The Miserables, you felt, just didn't have it any more - assuming they’d ever possessed whatever IT is. "Oh God, I'm just so-o tired," the woman wailed, finally. "I can't do it - I can't. I can't go on with this. I just have to go to sleep!""Amen to that," I piped up.

The next night was nearly as bad as the first. It wasn’t an argument, this time: Mr Miserable snored. Were the walls really that thin, or was his snoring really that loud? Perhaps a bit of both. Ms Miserable certainly found it loud, on her side. At first, she merely sighed restlessly. Then she called Mr Miserable’s name. She cursed. And the next step was to shake him, or prod him, I expect; because there was an interruption in the snoring sound and it resumed at a slightly different pitch. In desperation, Ms Miserable must have hit him then, or kicked him – because I could distinctly make out a nasty grunting noise. And it worked - he did actually stop, for a while…..But then I heard Ms Miserable wail: “Oh-oh Go-d!” Mr Miserable’s snores had resumed.There are times when bedtime moaning and blasphemies are a good sign in a relationship. This wasn’t one of them. This was an exclamation of irritation and disgust. I prayed I’d never feel that way about anyone – and I was certain I never, ever wanted anyone to feel that way about me – not even for one moment in the middle of the night.

After a week of this, I would have been climbing the walls – or banging on them. Mercifully, the Miserables couldn’t stand each other, any more than I could stand them - and within days they’d either gone home, or found some sort of Relate resort, where they could combine holidaying and bickering, with the added benefit of an umpire. Actually, I don’t think it’s too fanciful to suggest that these couples want a witness. When you row that loudly, that persistently, it’s no accident: you need the world to know what you put up with the other fifty weeks of the year. Like unpaid therapists, you’ve cast your hapless fellow guests in the role of adjudicator - the place where someone will take your side, where your suffering will finally be understood.

Our more recent disturbed night in the Canaries ended much more strangely. Next morning I went to Reception: not so much to complain – it was hardly their fault – but simply to find out if everyone was in one piece and make it clear that either the couple responsible were found new rooms, or we were. Yet the apartment next door appeared to be empty as I passed – the cleaners were already in – and to my astonishment, reception staff pretended they knew nothing of the nocturnal disturbance at all. This was just - and only just – conceivable, but highly unlikely. Even though they were on a different shift, they must have known about a couple who’d either been expelled or hospitalised. I found it spooky to deny their existence – and not a little insulting to my intelligence to be told I must be prone to nightmares! Why lie to me? Had the Tourist Police reassigned them to a no-star establishment, under cover of darkness? It doesn’t bear thinking about, does it; the heartbreak hotel to which deviant guests from every other establishment are incarcerated……..

*

Clearly, you get a better sort of person staffing the front desk in four and five star hotels: there may be a tendency to fawn unnecessarily; but at least they occupy more or less the same reality and don’t try to mess with your mind. I’d always assumed that the obscene amounts of dosh you part with in such places bought a ‘can-do’ attitude from the staff - and a better quality of fixtures and fittings, too, perhaps. Not so. I now realise one pays mostly to have neighbours who know how to behave.

The walls and floor coverings are thicker in the best hotels, the balconies better separated, air conditioning obviates the need for open windows and the fabrics are more luxurious; all of which may deaden sound. In my very favourite hotel, even the corridors have the stilled hush of a private chapel; which, I think, is entirely as it should be. Come to think of it, I’ve never even seen anyone else in the corridors there – and I’ve definitely not been aware of anyone in neighbouring rooms. Yet on the whole, I think one’s fellow guests in such establishments must have the decency to argue quietly. I can picture them, hissing fiercely across the acres of deep-pile carpeting at one another between clenched teeth: “Yuh-are-ur-complete-und-utter-vastard!” “Yuh-are-ur-artless-vitch!”

Alternatively – and this, I think, is far more likely – five-star folk are happier. Either people with unresolved conflicts and rocky relationships go two and three-star because they’re not willing to spend as much on a holiday with someone they secretly despise; or, better-off people are more contented with their lot. And with good reason: not only is their holiday spending power higher; but also their holiday companions seem to be less argumentative! We might even suggest that top hotels are active in conferring happiness upon their guests – and not merely in superficial ways, such as the size of the bathroom and length of the pool – but also, in the profound sense that they confirm the higher status of their visitors, relative to those staying in adjacent hostelries with less stars. I kid you not: research at Pennsylvania State University published a year ago – which had examined a representative sample of about 20,000 Americans, from 20 to 64, between 1972 and 2002 - found that happiness was relative. The wealthier people were, in relation to their peers, the happier they reported feeling. And the poorer they were, compared to neighbours and peers, the less happy they felt. (It follows that, even though they may not consciously be aware of it, the guests in cheaper hotels are providing a service while they put up with full-blown domestics in the night and stodgy dinners by day: they’re actually boosting the happiness quotient of those in better establishments nearby.)Personally, I suspect those staying in better hotels are happier simply because they’ve had an undisturbed night’s sleep.

BEYOND THE PALE

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MATING IN CAPTIVITY

You’ve got to admire the publicity machine organised by the publishers of Esther Perel’s book Mating in Captivity. Once a week, for the last couple of months, one or other of the broadsheet supplements which serve the chattering classes has featured an article, or an interview to promote the book, or both.

It’s a gift for weekend journos with space to fill: you can shout ‘sex’ in your headline; yet, taking its cue from the book, the uplifting gist of any ensuing piece will be that readers can preserve their marriages and get more and better sex – or any, in some cases – without doing the dirty on their partners. This alone doesn’t quite explain the passion with which (the invariably) female journos embrace Perel’s so-called ‘message’ (that would be ‘commonplace’ to the rest of us Europeans).

It’s hard to get at the substance of the title in question when these features tend to gush rather than analyse (though Polly Vernon’s piece in The Observer was better than most), but it appears to be pretty light fare. Perel’s point – that sex in marriage rapidly palls and declines, not only beneath the burden of the banal mutual routines of daily life, shared responsibilities and child-rearing; but also because passion is detrimentally affected by too much openness, egalitarianism and familiarity - is what her adopted countrymen would call “a no-brainer”. And her solution - to drop a bit of the pc sharing, caring, equality and candour - could only seem novel to middle-class, metropolitan Americans. (And perhaps those Brit forty-somethings in elasticated trousers, for whom the worthy tenets of second-wave feminism remain unqualified articles of faith.)

I understand Ms Perel is of Belgian origin – though presently a therapist in New York – and I’d venture to suggest that the “ground-breaking” and “explosive” conclusions of her book combine a bit of basic psychoanalytic theory of the Freudian ‘school’ with the sort of thing you’d pick up on any brief sojourn among the cosmopolitan middle classes of Brussels (or Paris, or Milan). I’m not saying the woman’s wrong. On the contrary, her unsurprising opinions are common sense. It’s just that, by contrast with the Anglo-Saxon fuss about the book, one can almost picture the Gallic shrug of any chic, well-heeled Parisienne; who takes it for granted that one tries to stay slim and glamorous, that you don’t compromise your mystery as a woman by permitting too much familiarity to a partner, that no, men and women aren’t actually the same, and that children will benefit rather than suffer from both parents having dynamic lives of their own outside the nuclear family. (Not to mention an unspoken conviction that, whether transient amusement or sustained affair, divertissements and liaisons for either partner do not necessarily mean the end of a worthwhile, sustaining and rewarding marriage.) In other words, grow up and get a life!

Interestingly, one (US) journalist seems to have been on the case; since he suggested the book is like Jacques Lacan meets French Women Don’t Get Fat. Spot on! So I’m not alone, then (though if it reads like Lacan, it isn’t going to be very popular). Let’s face it, there’s no clearer indication of the uphill struggle Ms Perel may have on her hands than the difficulty American women have shopping for clothes in France, where they don’t consistently stock above our size 12 (USA 10). It ain’t rocket science: no one’s going to feel erotic passion for someone who looks like a large marine mammal. Never mind, at $300 an hour (!!!) for her therapy and international best-sellerdom beckoning, there’s a shed-load of money to be made in the attempt!

*
What I found decidedly spooky about some of these articles, is that their gushing authors seem to be heading straight for the rocks, their eyes wide open and Perel’s book clutched eagerly in their sweaty little hands: apparently as sincere, ambitious, self-obsessed and blinkered in this enterprise, as they probably are in every other area of their lives. They refer to incompetent husbands, as dependent and domestically inept as children, unaware that they must have chosen them like that (and chosen to keep them this way). So - not much chance of relinquishing their control-freakery for the weekend and going off for a high old time with the girls, then! They talk about essaying Perel’s precepts for “a ‘hotter’ model of monogamy”: yet seem blithely unaware that in every single instance they’re trying to initiate intimacy solely on their own terms – and haven’t paused to enquire what their partners’ terms might be. In other words, sex is merely an extension of the same controlling impulse witnessed in every other sphere (domestic, social, child-rearing, etc); rather than an enjoyment of themselves as desiring and responsively desirable. What perhaps happened here – apart from those dull domestic regimes - is that these capable, clever women unconsciously chose someone who would be dependent and amenable to control; then lived to regret the lack of more wayward masculine qualities they might truly fancy.

Worse still, we find a clue to the profundity of their predicament in their inability to relinquish what one of them - Anna Johnson, in The Guardian - calls “the child-centred model of family life”. The idea of an intense Oedipal bond between the under-fives and their mother is nothing new, going back to Freud’s Little Hans (Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy, 1909). As I understand it, Perel’s populist, Stateside spin on these Freudian insights is not only that the mother is the focus of the child’s erotic interest; but also that the mother can be tempted to transfer all her sensual energies to the child; giving this new and intense relationship her playfulness and sexuality, rather than giving it to the husband. In response to this, the journalist candidly confesses that: “(b)abies create their own utterly absorbing physical rapture……a bliss beyond sex”; and admits she might be “in a selfish love-lock with (her) son”. What she fails to go on to say (so I don’t know whether Perel says it or not), is that this is something which the child always desires, but cannot continue to have. What’s more, by permitting this state of affairs, she risks damaging not only her relationship with her partner, but the child, too. It can never meet the mother’s desire and needs to be released from her oppressive desiring by the prohibition of the father. A child interprets everything in relation to itself: it is perplexed by the mother’s unsatisfied desire and assumes the shortcoming is it’s own; whereas the model of a mother’s desire being directed at, and adequately met by, the father, on the other hand, provides the map of a destiny with a happier outcome. hyperlink

*

Otherwise, most of Perel’s “concepts” and recommendations are, as far as I can tell, simply the ordinary day-to-day strategems of any affair, transferred to marriage or LTR: claiming a little time for yourself apart from children and home, looking your most seductive best as often as you can, scheduling intimacy rather than hoping it’ll crop up spontaneously, ensuring it occupies a private, adult-only space away from the domestic sphere, and basing sex on play, difference and non-pc desires, rather than cuddly domestic ‘bliss’. The only thing she seems to miss from the formula, is romance. It’s this thrill from relationships which gets you high and makes you happy. Yet there’s no way in hell you’re going to inject it into a marriage, however loving - and a couple of weekends, or weeks, per year on a spa break with hubby just won’t cut it. Is one romance per lifetime enough? Apparently not: they may only be after some rough rumpy-pumpy, of course; but more likely, it’s this which accounts for up to a quarter of married women admitting infidelity (depending on the survey).

To be fair to Perel, she does appear to suggest that not only is flirting and sexual attraction outside of the relationship a healthy thing, that an affair can be survived (?duh!) - and can even sometimes benefit a marriage – and that it isn’t helpful to designate victim and perpetrator in this situation. It’s just that these bits of the book seem so troubling to British female journalists that they skip over them, rather than doing them justice. It’s distance and separateness which Perel stresses, because this prompts, or maintains, desire. Yet paradoxically – and amusingly – what some of the women writing her up do instead, is exactly what the book recommends they avoid; that is, sharing. “Too much information!” we cry – as their partners have probably done for years – while they discuss feeling “primal forces” and getting in touch with their “erotic core”, but there’s no stopping them.

The same writer (Johnson in The Guardian) seems troubled by what she calls “the spectre of infidelity”, which she claims “haunts” most couples. Most of them? Really? I don’t think so. I don’t think it even arises as a worry for a lot of people – and judging by contact/swinging sites, it’s a turn-on for many, who actively enjoy each other’s extra-curricular activities. It definitely haunts her article, though; like the stale smell of another woman’s perfume still lingering in a room. So urgent a problem is it, that she begins by trying to exorcise it, demonising and trivialising an advocate of adultery as a cynical buffoon; while herself clearly envious of the erotic power of the role of mistress; resentful, she says, of “some strumpet” getting to “wear all the high heels”. She thus implies a traditionally male division between the virtuous married woman and her debased competitor; whereas we men have moved on. We know there’s no such division: one of the other mums from the school run is going to go to work in the morning, dutifully make cakes for the bring-and-buy in her lunch-break, and be a hot slut with us for a couple of hours in the afternoon. I suspect it’s the perceived phallic qualities of this fantasy traditional mistress which appeal (and of which those heels are an emblem). Hence her understanding of Perel, is that she needs to appropriate this role as well, and become mistress to her husband. (And thus control his desire). But isn’t this another impossible fantasy? Such a dynamic and eroticised relationship can only exist apart from the nappies and bank statements and whose turn it is to do the washing-up. The truth is, that if she wants the role of bourgeois wife, with all its advantages, then that is as much as she can be to her husband – and she can only be mistress to another man.

Curiously, she claims that the traditional “mistress system is what made middle class marriage work for centuries across different cultures. Work for men, that is.” Clunk! It’s true that both covert adultery and hidden prostitution, used by either party, implicitly supported the ideological primacy of monogamous union. And the price bourgeois men had to pay for a dalliance might be measured only in pounds; whereas the price a wife might well have to pay could be her marriage, her children, her home, and her entire social situation. This wasn’t equal or fair: yet it’s also silly to suggest all bourgeois men-folk remained married without love and kept a mistress tucked away somewhere. Middle class marriage didn’t work cynically or conspiratorially. Like nationality, faith, class, imperialism, or law, it worked because both partners believed in it, subscribed to the values it embodied, and were formed, as subjects, within an ideology which represented it as both a ‘natural’ and desirable state.

In fact, the middle class (who don’t go back centuries – one-and-a-half, perhaps - nor cross different cultures, come to that) were always opposed to the immorality of what they saw as a dissolute aristocracy. From the late C18th, the increasingly confident mercantile classes were engaged in an earnest ideological conflict between their own moral restraint and what they saw as aristocratic licence. Whole rafts of European culture forged by this struggle seem to have completely passed Ms Johnson by; from Clarissa to Le Nozze di Figaro, from Les Liaisons Dangereuses, through Jane Eyre to Rebecca. (*) Within the upper classes, women as well as men continued to have freedom for dalliances and affairs, between Laclos’s time and Du Maurier’s; in part because everything, from wet-nursing to the running of their households, was managed by others. (Facilitating amours could be part of the job for a lady’s maid.) By contrast, adultery was a middle class ‘crime’ for both men and women; putting the bourgeois order at risk. Yes, men with means have always been able to take a little extra-curricular sexual gratification for granted. However many individual men secretly used prostitutes (male, juvenile and female), had affairs, or kept a mistress, though, I’d be surprised if any of it was remotely socially acceptable, or the norm; let alone a “system”, any more than was covert homosexuality. And in bourgeois art-forms like C19th novels and operas, penned by both sexes, it’s invariably punishable by death - of the mistress, of the adulteress, of either or both lovers – with occasional maiming, or social ostracism, as an alternative fate.

(* Literary critics needn’t write in – I take Christopher Hill’s point that Richardson’s art exceeded his ideological project and that Clarissa’s death indicts Puritan values as well – just as I’m aware that these other works have many other and more complicated things to say to us.)

And wasn’t it this same sweet notion of exclusive, married, romantic love - one on which all these female journos seem so hooked – which inscribed women into an unequal (and at times oppressive) social order within bourgeois culture? Surely it was this same, constricting model of idealised, virtuous wife and unacceptably over-sexed, gold-digging femme fatale, which policed women’s desire - and against which modernists and feminists alike revolted, from the late nineteenth century onwards. Wasn’t it this gilded prison, this doll’s house, from which the feminists had to free (bourgeois) women; while the moderns gave them (back) their own, dissenting voice; whether Nora, in A Doll’s House, or Molly Bloom in Ulysses?

Call me an old-fashioned pinko, but I’d understood from feminist writers that belief in a single, life-long, romantic love was a fundamental aspect of patriarchal ideology. Romantic love resolves and masks the contradictions and unequal relations within marriage and family; both of which have traditionally functioned as the site of women’s particular oppression. Romantic love, leading to marriage, blurs the reality of thankless, unpaid labour in the home and the self-sacrificing support for a man’s career. It blurs the reality that looks are a commodity, more valuable than women’s intellect or personality (a commodity to be traded by women themselves rather than by their family nowadays, but no less negotiable for that). Nor is this old hat, by any means: inequalities are still masked, because – going back to those incompetent husbands – the modern “wage-earning wife’s double day of work uncovers the patriarchal bias of (both) liberalism and (late) capitalist society”. (**) (In a report published just this week, it transpires that women with a child under eleven are 45% less likely to be employed than a man, and at the current rate, it will apparently take until 2085 to close the pay gap between men and women.) After all that ideological, artistic and feminist struggle, I’m absolutely amazed to find modern young women, like these journalists writing up Perel, naively buying into the illusion that their wedding was the entrée to a lifetime of romantic and erotic bliss! At this late date, why on earth would these sophisticated and intelligent women fondly believe that might ever be the case?

(** Eisenstein, Z (1982), The Sexual Politics of the New Right, from Keohane, N O et al (eds), Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology )

*

“But what do you do when you’re away on your own?” one inquisitive female friend was asking me, in front of my wife. (A nice woman - and one clearly tempted by the freedoms I possessed - but her partner won’t be getting away without her, that’s for sure). “Don’t ask!” my lovely and wise wife advised, with a laugh; “even I don’t know what he gets up to.” Perhaps this contained a barely disguised plea to be reassured, or better informed; but equally, she may simply have been enjoying having a partner with a little bit more edge and masculinity and mystery than our friend’s tightly-leashed husband. It’s a two-way street: nor do I know what my wife ‘gets up to’, on her weekly trips away from home for work, or her little breaks to see relatives and friends. Why should I, and why would I ask, if she didn’t offer the information? Whatever she likes, as far as I’m concerned; as long as she doesn’t come to any harm. You’ve got to respect and trust a partner as an equal adult, not to betray the larger principles of the relationship; rather than tying them up in minor prohibitions, like your child. If she met someone and didn’t want to stay with me, I certainly wouldn’t want her staying because of habit, or obligation, or duty, or history, or fear of the unknown – and I love her enough to want her to be happy, regardless of my self-interest.

So as far as I can tell, Ms Perel doesn’t go far enough; very possibly because there’s no point biting the hand which feeds you. Sorry, but a successful marriage and a fulfilling romance or exciting sexual relationship just may not be the same thing. Is there any reason why they should be? And the trick isn’t juggling friendships, dalliances or romance with home/marriage/family – there isn’t usually any contest - home and marriage win every time, as far as I can see; unless people get confused. Now and then, the woman gets carried away and ends her marriage; or a man has a mid-life crisis and swaps his partner for a younger model. But then this must have been always on the cards, anyway, within their individual make-ups - and it definitely doesn’t guarantee they’ll be one jot happier on their own or with their new partner, after a while, than they were in their first marriage - it will just be different. No, the hard thing is remembering that just because someone’s given you the first proper seeing to you’ve had in the last few years, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in love with them, or they’re in love with you. The trick is to remember that just because you find yourself in a romantic situation and it’s wonderful and you adore this gorgeous other person having dinner with you in the moonlight, it does not mean you have to leave your partner and shack up with them. In other words, grow up!

Liberated and empowered by greater equality and earning power, by greater prosperity and mobility; by better health, by looking and feeling good for longer; by our children’s invariable departure for further education before they’re out of their teens - and yet still motivated by the baby-boomers’ mantra of self-fulfilment - we are in fact perhaps more in need of a mature, sophisticated attitude to marriage than ever before. No wonder we look to relationship ‘gurus’!
Yet why insist on any proposal for the conduct of someone else’s life? I’m not. I’m certainly not making an argument for routinely conducting a series of affairs: if I were, women might be most disadvantaged by such freedoms; given both the biological fact of child-bearing, and the cultural and economic tendencies which still invariably give them the burden of ultimate responsibility for household and child-rearing. I’m neither recommending exclusive monogamy, nor bed-hopping: only a bit of realism, flexibility, maturity and tolerance; instead of obsessive and anxious self-laceration. I’m definitely not making an argument for open marriage: there’s something a bit cloying, in my view, about knowing too much about someone else’s sexual or emotional life beyond you. I saw a lot of this when I was young and felt such couples can easily become like an incestuous brother and sister, or a gay/hetero friendship, in that situation – aiding and abetting one another’s conquests and amours - rather than having a desiring relationship between themselves. But a few boundaries, a sensible respect for the other person’s individuality and separateness; that’s another thing entirely: together with a mature acceptance that no one can ever be absolutely everything to someone else.

The solutions people find, the compromises they settle on, have got to be their own. I’m merely stating the obvious: that perhaps one person may not always be enough for an entire lifetime; for every erotic impulse, for every emotional, sexual or intellectual need and longing. And yet this surely doesn’t mean we have to inflict painful, costly and traumatic divorces and separations on our children, our partners and ourselves. I’m not suggesting divorce should never happen; but people who are on their third or fourth marriage have definitely got a problem. In a dynamic and successful marriage, surely all one needs to do, is get out of each other’s pockets and get on with your own lives: both sexes need to grant each other a bit more space and autonomy, a bit more real equality.

As for Ms Perel and her journalistic sycophants…. Well, perhaps I’m wrong – now and then, it may work, I suppose – but it’s very hard to believe that a few expensive sessions with a ‘couples’ therapist is going to fix a relationship in crisis; let alone two complex people, and the complicated relations between them, getting sorted merely by reading a self-help book! Why would it be that easy, how could it ever be so small a matter - when it will inevitably be the product of two entire biographies, with much of this experience unconscious? Yet so eager for answers were the reviewers and interviewers – (or perhaps they were just eager for a decent session in the sack!) - that they swallowed the PR wholesale; I didn’t read one single word of caution, let alone of criticism. If either or both partners really would benefit from therapeutic intervention, then I’d argue that it’s an entirely individual matter; which will probably take them years. (And it will take them years on their own – they didn’t share childhoods!) Just like any successful long-term relationship, it will require commitment and hard work. And just like the commitment and hard work you put into a relationship, there’s a reasonable chance that, in return, therapy will then deliver a degree of happiness, understanding and well-being. But get real, people! - expecting a quick-fix to put the thrill of romance or the excitement of eroticism back into a lifetime’s partnership may be asking way too much.

(written Feb 07)