Authors: Lisa Grunwald,Stephen Adler
Tags: #Family & Relationships, #Marriage & Long Term Relationships, #General, #Literary Collections
The Marriage Book (34 page)
RICHARD TAYLOR
HAVING LOVE AFFAIRS
, 1982
A philosopher with an abiding interest in virtue ethics, Richard Taylor (1919–2003) taught at Brown, Columbia, and Rochester universities, gave frequent guest lectures, wrote books on ethics and beekeeping (his avocation), and, in one of his most unconventional works, not only praised the joys of adultery but set out a series of marital rules intended to make it more practical.
The joy of a love affair is that someone seems to love you who does not have to, or who, in fact, positively should not. . . .
. . . It is very doubtful whether there can be found in any human experience anything as totally fulfilling as being loved in this way—intensely, intimately, and gratuitously. No one should say that it is bad, just because it is so easily condemned and so dangerous. It is still the ultimate
joy that everyone wants more than anything else. The most vehement condemnations of it seem to come from those who have abandoned hope of experiencing it, and who therefore represent it to themselves as something base in order to assuage their own sense of deprivation. A person involved in such a love affair—overwhelming, forbidden, explosively dangerous—can think to himself, with some truth at least, that here is one person in the world who cares for him for no ulterior reason at all, who has nothing to gain by it and very much to lose, but who does nevertheless love. The feelings, together with this thought, are so totally intoxicating that those who have never experienced them, and especially those who have given up hope of them and perhaps taken complacent pride in this deprivation, should withhold their condemnation of others.
This does not mean that love affairs are better than marriage, for they seldom are. Love between married persons can, in the long run, be so vastly more fulfilling that none but the hopelessly romantic could suggest otherwise. . . .
It is nevertheless true that the joys of illicit and passionate love, which include but go far beyond the mere joys of sex, are incomparably good. And it is undeniable that those who never experience love affairs, and who perhaps even boast of their faultless monogamy year in and year out, have really missed something. Virtuous they may be—even this can be questioned—but truly blessed they are not quite. Such a person lives in a kind of lifelong total eclipse, or a house without windows. He is like someone who has never heard a nocturne of Chopin’s, tasted caviar, or beheld the Alps—except that what he has missed is something with which these tepid things do not even begin to compare.
NORA EPHRON
HEARTBURN
, 1983
Nora Ephron (1941–2012) had already made her name as a magazine columnist with several bestselling collections when she published her first and only novel, treating the grim facts of her marriage to journalist Carl Bernstein with signature bite and humor.
Heartburn
would become a movie starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson, and Ephron would go on to add producer, director, and playwright to her already brilliant career as screenwriter and essayist.
When Mark finally came home, I was completely prepared. I had rehearsed a speech about how I loved him and he loved me and we had to work at our marriage and we had a baby and we were about to have another—really the perfect speech for the situation except that I had misapprehended the situation. “I am in love with Thelma Rice,” he said when he arrived home. That
was the situation. He then told me that although he was in love with Thelma Rice, they were not having an affair. (Apparently he thought I could handle the fact that he was in love with her but not the fact that he was having sex with her.) “That is a lie,” I said to him, “but if it’s true”—you see, there was a part of me that wanted to think it was true even though I knew it wasn’t: the man is capable of having sex with a venetian blind—“if it’s true, you might as well be having an affair with her, because it’s free.” Some time later, after going on saying all these lovey-dovey things about Thelma, and after saying he wouldn’t give her up, and after saying that I was a shrew and a bitch and a nag and a kvetch and a grouse and that I hated Washington (the last charge was undeniably true), he said that he nonetheless expected me to stay with him. At that moment, it crossed my mind that he might be crazy.
DIANA, PRINCESS OF WALES
BBC INTERVIEW, 1995
Perhaps the most public marriage of the twentieth century was that of Britain’s Prince Charles (1948–) and Lady Diana Spencer (1961–1997), and one of the most public infidelities was that of Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles (1947–). In an interview with the BBC’s Martin Bashir, Diana discussed both topics. Having separated in 1992 after eleven years of marriage, Charles and Diana divorced in 1996, a year before her death in a car accident.
Charles was said (albeit in the tabloid
Daily Mail
) to have once asked his wife: “Do you seriously expect me to be the first Prince of Wales in history not to have a mistress?” He and Parker Bowles married in 2005.
BASHIR: | Around 1986, again according to the biography written by Jonathan Dimbleby about your husband, he says that your husband renewed his relationship with Mrs. Camilla Parker Bowles. Were you aware of that? |
DIANA: | Yes I was, but I wasn’t in a position to do anything about it. |
BASHIR: | What evidence did you have that their relationship was continuing even though you were married? |
DIANA: | Oh, a woman’s instinct is a very good one. |
BASHIR: | Is that all? |
DIANA: | Well, I had, obviously I had knowledge of it. |
BASHIR: | From staff? |
DIANA: | Well, from people who minded and cared about our marriage, yes. |
BASHIR: | The Prince of Wales, in the biography, is described as a great thinker, a man with a tremendous range of interests. What did he think of your interests? |
DIANA: | Well, I don’t think I was allowed to have any. I think that I’ve always been the eighteen-year-old girl he got engaged to, so I don’t think I’ve been given any credit for growth. And, my goodness, I’ve had to grow. |
BASHIR: | What effect did that have on you? |
DIANA: | Pretty devastating. Rampant bulimia, if you can have rampant bulimia, and just a feeling of being no good at anything and being useless and hopeless and failed in every direction. |
BASHIR: | And with a husband who was having a relationship with somebody else? |
DIANA: | With a husband who loved someone else, yes. |
BASHIR: | You really thought that? |
DIANA: | Uh, uh. I didn’t think that, I knew it. |
BASHIR: | How did you know it? |
DIANA: | By the change of behavioural pattern in my husband; for all sorts of reasons that a woman’s instinct produces; you just know. It was already difficult, but it became increasingly difficult. |
BASHIR: | In the practical sense, how did it become difficult? |
DIANA: | Well, people were—when I say people, I mean friends, on my husband’s side—were indicating that I was again unstable, sick, and should be put in a home of some sort in order to get better. I was almost an embarrassment. |
BASHIR: | Do you think he really thought that? |
DIANA: | Well, there’s no better way to dismantle a personality than to isolate it. |
BASHIR: | So you were isolated? |
DIANA: | Uh, uh, very much so. |
BASHIR: | Do you think Mrs. Parker Bowles was a factor in the breakdown of your marriage? |
DIANA: | Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded. |
BILL CLINTON
GRAND JURY TESTIMONY, AUGUST 17, 1998
Six years after Bill Clinton dodged assertions by Gennifer Flowers about a lengthy affair (see
Devotion
), another allegation—that he had had a sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky—was harder to refute. A 1994 investigation, originally intended to explore the Clintons’ finances, was expanded to include the Lewinsky situation. The president’s grand jury testimony was memorable for his definitional acrobatics (including the oft-quoted statement “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”) as well as his parsing of the phrase
sexual relationship
.
Clinton ultimately conceded in a televised address that he had had “a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate.” He was formally impeached by the House of Representatives on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice but was acquitted by the Senate. The questioner was prosecutor Robert Bittman. Robert Bennett was Clinton’s attorney.
BITTMAN: | And you remember that Ms. Lewinsky’s affidavit said that she had had no sexual relationship with you. Do you remember that? |
CLINTON: | I do. |
BITTMAN: | And do you remember in the deposition that Mr. Bennett asked you about that. This is at the end of the—towards the end of the deposition. And you indicated, he asked you whether the statement that Ms. Lewinsky made in her affidavit was— |
CLINTON: | Truthful. |
BITTMAN: | —true. And you indicated that it was absolutely correct. |
CLINTON: | I did. . . . I believe at the time that she filled out this affidavit, if she believed that the definition of sexual relationship was two people having intercourse, then this is accurate. And I believe that is the definition that most ordinary Americans would give it. If you said Jane and Harry have a sexual relationship, and you’re not talking about people being drawn into a lawsuit and being given definitions, and then a great effort to trick them in some way, but you are just talking about people in ordinary conversations, I’ll bet the grand jurors, if they were talking about two people they know, and said they have a sexual relationship, they meant they were sleeping together; they meant they were having intercourse together. So, I’m not at all sure that this affidavit is not true and was not true in Ms. Lewinsky’s mind at the time she swore it out. |
STEPHANY ALEXANDER
“TOP 10 WAYS ON HOW TO CATCH A CHEATING HUSBAND,” 2009
The list below appeared on the popular website “WomanSavers,” which was created by relationship guru Stephany Alexander as a “date screening service.”
1. Set a trap. Cheating husbands usually cheat when their wife is out of town. Tell your husband that you are leaving for a couple of days and then wait, listen and watch. Place a recording surveillance device in your bedroom or near the phone and then listen. Park in a friend’s car with a hat and sunglasses on and follow his car or wait for someone to come to the house. Keep a camera, binoculars and a cell phone with you. Cheating husbands usually take their affair out for dinner and a rendezvous while you are gone. Give your cheating husband lots of space to make a mistake. Your husband will leave cheating signs unknowingly. Make sure you are “busy” or out of the house a lot while you are investigating. Take a long nap under your bed at lunch or in the evening or place a long-recording digital tape recorder which is voice activated under the bed. This wouldn’t work if you have children or a dog.
2. Watch his cell phone. If he protects his cell phone with a password, unexpectedly ask to borrow his cell phone to make an important call. Then make a fake call, pressing as many buttons of his call log as possible to note any strange calls. Go to the bathroom with phone if at all possible. Watch whether his cell phone is always turned off when with you or whether he takes unusually long to phone you back. Note the times, dates and length of any suspicious calls. Press the re-dial on the phone or *69. This is an effective way to find out who they’ve been calling.
3. Place a long-recording digital tape recorder under your cheating husband’s car seat every morning and then listen to it when you are alone. Please check the laws in your city or state to make sure it is legal to record someone in your car if they are borrowing it. The same goes for a GPS tracking device which tracks everywhere your husband’s car goes. GPS tracking devices are now made the size of a pack of chewing gum so they are easy to hide.
4. Monitor your husband’s computer usage. Does he use the computer late at night or for an unusual amount of time? Cheating husbands frequently utilize free email services such as hotmail, msn, yahoo, gmail, hushmail, etc. Check his internet web browser history for warning signs. If you suspect your husband is cheating, you can install a
keystroke logger which will log every keystroke your husband types, including his passwords. There are many good ones currently for sale.
