Mating in Captivity (25 page)

These days, we are our own matchmakers. No longer obligated to marry who we must, we set out with a new ideal of what we want, and we want plenty. Our desiderata still include everything the traditional family was meant to provide—security, children, property, respectability—but now we also want our Joe to love us, to desire us, to be interested in us. We should be confidants, best friends, and
passionate lovers. Modern marriage promises us that there is one person out there with whom all this is possible if we can just find her. So tenaciously do we hold to the idea that marriage is for everything that the disenchanted opt for divorce or affairs not because they question the institution, but because they think they chose the wrong person with whom to reach this nirvana. Next time they’ll choose better. The focus is always on the object of our love, not on our capacity to love.
Hence the psychologist Erich Fromm makes the point
that we think it’s easy to love, but hard to find the right person. Once we’ve found “the one,” we will need no one else.

The exclusiveness we seek in monogamy has roots in our earliest experience of intimacy with our primary caretakers.
The feminist psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow
writes, “This primary tendency, I shall be loved always, everywhere, in every way, my whole body, my whole being—without any criticism, without the slightest effort on my part—is the final aim of all erotic striving.” In our adult love we seek to recapture the primordial oneness we felt with Mom. The baby knows no separateness. Once upon a time, there was one person whose only role was to be there for us. In the ecstatic communion between mother and child, there is no gap. To the newborn the mother is everything, all at once, inseparable, unbounded: her skin, her breast, her voice, her smile, it is all for him. As a pink-bottomed baby, we were full and fulfilled, and somewhere deep inside we’ve never forgotten that Eden. Those of us who didn’t know this idyllic state—those with mothers who were unavailable, inconsistent, absent, or selfish—are often even more determined to find the perfect partner.

The question remains: isn’t the oneness we strive to restore itself a fantasy? For the child, Mom is the be-all and end-all, but the mother has always known other people. She even has a jealous lover, the father. As it turns out, Mom was never totally faithful—not even once upon a time.

So the specter of betrayal is there from the beginning. We grow
up with it. The isolating conditions of modern life only amplify the rumbling insecurity that hides in the background of our romantic possessiveness. Fear of loss and fear of abandonment tighten our grip on fidelity. In a culture where everything is disposable and downsizing confirms just how replaceable we really are, our need to feel secure in our primary relationship is all the greater. The smaller we feel in the world, the more we need to shine in the eyes of our partner. We want to know that we matter, and that, for at least one person, we are irreplaceable. We long to feel whole, to rise above the prison of our solitude.

Perhaps this is why our insistence on sexual exclusivity is absolute. Because adult sexual love momentarily reenacts that most primitive form of early fusion—the merging of bodies, the nipple that fills our entire mouth and leaves us completely satiated—the thought of our beloved with another is cataclysmic. Sex, we feel, is the ultimate betrayal.

Monogamy, it follows, is the sacred cow of the romantic ideal, for it is the marker of our specialness: I have been chosen and others renounced. When you turn your back on other loves, you confirm my uniqueness; when your hand or mind wanders, my importance is shattered. Conversely, if I no longer feel special, my own hands and mind tingle with curiosity. The disillusioned are prone to roam. Might someone else restore my significance?

Doug met his first wife in college. They were good friends, but their sex life was never particularly interesting. Eventually it, and the marriage, fizzled out. He went on to have a few passionate relationships that left him sexually invigorated but emotionally spent. Then he met Zoë, an energetic and joyful CGI artist with what he calls a “low neurotic quotient.” He goes on, “She was one of a
kind. Down-to-earth, practical, and wild in bed. I thought I’d hit the matrimonial jackpot.”

Several years into the marriage, she has stopped responding to him so enthusiastically. She still has a lot of energy, but much of it is directed elsewhere. The kids demand her attention. Animation saps her creativity. And her size X-L family—her parents, her five sisters, and all their kids—are the hub of her social life. Doug feels unnoticed. Without sex to distinguish him among the cast of characters in his wife’s busy life, he feels increasingly irrelevant, like an extra.

In the ensuing years, Doug’s growing irritability is punctuated by brief flashes of seductive instigation. He whisks Zoë away on romantic weekends, carefully selects the weekly DVDs, buys earrings because she fancies dangling baubles. For the most part, Zoë is game. But the more Doug pursues her, the more he realizes how essential his effort is, and this depresses him. Despite all the kindling, he never manages to light the roaring blaze he needs. The more he tries to fill the gap, the emptier he feels. His eyes begin to wander, and when they finally focus, it’s not on Zoë; it’s on Naomi.

This striking redheaded retail buyer isn’t subtle about expressing her attraction to Doug. She finds excuses to go into his office, and once there, she lingers. She’s impressed by how well he handled their boss; she likes that suit; are those new glasses? A sandwich turns into a drink turns into a five-year affair. The sex is fiery, but that’s not what the affair is about. It’s about the abundance of attention, and the exhilaration of the illicit. With Naomi, who never lacks for male attention, Doug is irresistible. She misses him on the weekends; she’s jealous about his other life. And while her possessiveness drains him, and is sometimes annoying, it also confirms exactly how important he is.

When Doug comes to see me, he can barely manage the contradictions in his life. His marriage, which is supposed to be monogamous,
is not. His affair, which is de facto nonmonogamous, has just ended because he couldn’t meet Naomi’s demand for fidelity. “The whole thing is insane,” he tells me. “Naomi wanted me to stop having sex with Zoë, which I told her I couldn’t do. So she started seeing someone else, and now they’re talking about marriage. She’s refusing to have sex with me, and she’s completely secretive about her relationship with Evan. I’m so jealous I’m obsessed. The thought of her in the arms of another guy makes me nuts.”

“I hope the irony isn’t lost on you,” I tell him. “You demand fidelity in the very place that’s defined by infidelity.”

“Yeah, but that’s her infidelity, not mine,” he answers.

“Oh, yes, I forgot there’s a double standard. She and Zoë are both expected to remain faithful to you while you remain faithful to neither?”

“Something like that, yeah. Not a very fair arrangement, I know. Believe me, I’m not proud.”

“So why didn’t you leave Zoë?” I ask. “If you had all this with Naomi, why didn’t you follow the burning bush, the fire that never consumes?”

“I love Zoë,” Doug says, shocked at the implications of what I’ve just said. “I’ve never really wanted to leave my marriage. I have a good thing with Zoë, and I don’t want to live away from my kids. Anyway, Naomi and I married? That would be a disaster.”

“So this wasn’t an exit affair. Maybe more like a stabilizer, where the third person helps keep the other two in place?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. The point is that I didn’t think. I just did it. I followed my gut, and now I feel like shit.”

On some level, I think Doug would like me to confirm that indeed he has done something terribly wrong. He has betrayed his vows, a
moral offense in black and white. But wholesale condemnation too easily distracts us from the real issues behind his behavior. I prefer a morally neutral stance that leaves us free to explore the meaning of the affair rather than the ethics of it. Once Doug understands the motives that drove him into Naomi’s arms, he’ll be able to draw his own conclusions, both about what he did and about what he wants to do henceforth.

People stray for many reasons—tainted love, revenge, unfulfilled longings, plain old lust. At times an affair is a quest for intensity, or a rebellion against the confines of matrimony. Transgression is an aphrodisiac, and sometimes secrets are a source of autonomy, or a backlash against lack of privacy. What could be more titillating than a whispered phone call in the bathroom? Finally, the harried mom can feel like a woman again; her lover knows nothing about the broken Lego set or the plumber who failed to show up for the second time.

An illicit liaison can be catastrophic, but it can also be a liberation, a source of strength, a healing. Frequently it is all these things at once. When the intimacy is gone, when we no longer talk, when we haven’t been touched in years, we are more vulnerable to the kindness of strangers. When the kids are young and needy, extramarital appreciation can feel like a tonic. When they’re older and gone, empty nesters may seek replenishment elsewhere. If our health fails us, or if we’ve just been visited by death, we may experience outbursts of dissatisfaction, a cry for something better. Some affairs are acts of resistance; others happen when we offer no resistance at all. Straying can sound an alarm for the marriage, signaling an urgent need to pay attention. Or it can be the death knell that follows a relationship’s last, gasping breath.

I question the widespread view that infidelity is always a symptom of deeper problems in a relationship. Affairs are motivated by myriad forces; not all of them are directly related to flaws in the
marriage. As it happens, plenty of adulterers are reasonably content in their relationships. So was Doug. But he wanted more. He couldn’t articulate what it was exactly, only that it had something to do with more frequent sex.

Together, Doug and I explore the anatomy of his passion, and I come to understand what needs are met in his tumultuous relationship with Naomi. For him, sex is a place of emotional nourishment and a sanctuary. It is love incarnate. Through sex he reaches an egoless oblivion that makes him feel at one with the world. Passion grants Doug ultimate relief from the unbearable aloneness of being. “It’s like I’m gone; it washes everything out. That kind of absolute focus, total attention, somehow releases me from myself. I stop thinking, the sensation washes up my spine, through my brain, and out. But there’s no observing of what’s going on.” Lovemaking is all-encompassing. With Naomi, Doug is able to maintain this high-octane, transcendent sex. In part, this is because erotically they are made of the same cloth. But, more important, the very structure of their affair, and of all affairs, lends itself to passion.

Affairs are risky, dangerous, and labile, all elements that fuel excitement. In the self-contained universe of adulterous love you are secluded from the rest of the world, and your bond is strengthened by the secrecy that surrounds it. Never exposed to broad daylight, the spell of the other is preserved. There’s no need to worry that your friends won’t like him, since nobody knows about him. Affairs unfold in the margins of our lives, and are luxuriously free of the dental appointments, taxes, and bills.

Then there are barriers to overcome. To see each other, you have to make an effort, sometimes a huge one. There are hoops to jump through, schedules to juggle, locations to secure, excuses to invent. And all that unflagging zeal repeatedly affirms the lovers’ importance to each other. Seen in this light, Doug’s transgression was an attempt to recapture what he once had with his wife and
could not live without: a sense of importance, a relief from loneliness, and a feeling of robustness.

By the time the affair ends, Doug’s marriage is down to the bare bones. Doug and Zoë are cordial, respectful, even occasionally affectionate, but emotionally they have flatlined. They have grown accustomed to vagueness regarding his repeated absences. His overtures are few and far between, and he is distracted. He is afraid of unintentionally disclosing something with a slip of the tongue; his secrecy is taking up more and more acreage in their marriage, leaving him with few subjects he can freely discuss with Zoë: the kids, the president, and the weather.

As we unravel what sparked Doug’s affair with Naomi, it becomes clear to me why he chose not to fight for her but instead to stay with his wife. Zoë is terra firma. At the same time, her ability to keep things in perspective gives her a certain ease; it’s not hard for her to sleep through the night, or to get up in the morning. Zoë doesn’t seek passion. She is rarely swept away. With Naomi, Doug may have found the single missing piece, but with Zoë he has the rest of the puzzle.

Doug and I discuss how his ideal of marriage holds up to the reality of his own particular union. He wants heat and warmth in the same place. He wants the kitchen table to be an altar of carnal merging at night, and a sunny breakfast nook for pancakes with the kids the next morning. But Doug will probably never experience with Zoë the same intensity he has had with Naomi. Affairs have their own brand of passion. Secrecy, torment, guilt, transgression, danger, risk, and jealousy are highly combustible, a Molotov cocktail, an erotic explosion far too threatening in a home with children.

As Doug becomes clearer about what he can reasonably expect from his marriage, a new set of questions arises. What are his options now that he has chosen to stay? Can he recognize his desires without having to act on them? Will he continue to negotiate monogamy privately, without Zoë’s knowledge, as is typical in affairs; or might he opt for a more open discussion of the sexual boundaries around their marriage? Must he disclose the affair in order to reconnect with his wife? What can he do with his guilt?

The answers change every day. Last week, it seemed as if he would never be able to look her in the eye unless he came clean. Today, it seems that the most loving thing he can do is to keep his mess to himself. “Do I break her heart just to ease my conscience? Sometimes I think she’s known all along, and the only reason she hasn’t left me is because I’ve kept my mouth shut. At least this way she gets to hold on to her dignity.”