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?
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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.)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
