THE MYTH OF AN OPEN MARRIAGE
...by an author who bitterly regrets hers
‘Fidelity was for the dull, and sex was for pleasure’
THE first rule was the time limit: two weeks maximum. The second was that the affair should take place far from home, preferably abroad. The third was that each of us had the power of veto: if we felt even the remotest bit uncomfortable, we could say to the other: ‘Stop!’ And kisses didn’t count. Kisses were just for fun. These were the rules of my open marriage — rules I followed during the eight years I was with my husband, the writer Adam Nicolson.
And rules that ultimately led to our very painful divorce eight years later.
Of course, anyone reading this will scoff: well, of course it led to divorce. What did she honestly expect?
But to the young 20-something bohemian me — and, it would seem, a surprising number of couples today — it wasn’t obvious at all.
How pleased we were with ourselves, Adam and I. How smug. Only we knew the truth about things: love was for life, sex was for pleasure, fidelity was for the dull. We’d chat about it, fine-tune it, laugh about it. We would say how alive it made us feel, like the whole world was ours.
I remember looking around me at a railway station, in a lift, in a library and thinking, gleefully: ‘Any one of these men could be my lover, if I wanted.’
I relished that power, that sense of limitless possibility, while feeling safe in my belief that my marriage was indestructible.
Only... it didn’t work. Open marriages very seldom do. For all our safeguarding rules and our conviction in our perfect relationship, in the end my husband fell in love with someone else and left me. And it broke my heart.
So it was with some sadness and fascination that I read of the case of Professor Neil Ferguson. Were it not for his embarrassing indiscretion, as the British health adviser who helped order England into lockdown and then broke the rules by allowing his lover to visit, we would not have known that they were keeping the concept of open marriage very much alive.
It emerged that he and Antonia Staats, a married mother of two, had an understanding with her husband, Chris. She was free to have a lover — as presumably was he. The two men even met: Chris is a Cambridge graduate and senior lecturer in Arabic Linguistics at SOAS, and Professor Ferguson an epidemiologist and professor of mathematical biology. They are said to share an interest in data science —among other things.
When the story broke, everyone seemed so outraged, not just by the flouting of the self-solating rules but also for the decadence of their lifestyle.
But how can I wag my finger censoriously at them when they are only enjoying a way of life I was once certain was the ‘right’ one?
While I’m in no position to judge, I fear it’s rather too late to warn them. If Ms Staat’s young children don’t know the true state of their parents’ relationship, they will do soon and they’ll be hurt.
The world as they know it will suddenly crumble. They won’t escape. The world of my three very young sons crumbled, too.
Yet it’s not just the children I care about. They will weather it in the end, and even learn something from it: my own sons are now in their mid-30s, all married, and most certainly monogamous.
It’s Antonia and Chris I care about most. I wonder how they’re faring really. How blithely one enters an open relationship; how bitterly one regrets it.
I met Adam at Cambridge when I was 18. He came from a long line of bohemians; his grandparents were Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, whose own open marriage was celebrated in their son Nigel’s book Portrait Of A Marriage. Nigel gave me a copy the first time I met him.
Fresh from an Anglican all girls’ boarding school, I was as innocent as can be. My own family background was conservative and conventional. Yet I wasn’t at all shocked.
I read about how his father Harold had taken male lovers, while Vita’s lovers were women. Yet his parents adored each other, and when Vita died in 1962 Harold could scarcely be bothered to go on living.
I think my mother thought this strange family was corrupting me. At one point she said: ‘They’re all homosexual in that family, Olivia! I thought you wanted children?’ But I was in love. And I also thought the Nicolsons were right.
I’d come to the conclusion — as a 16-year-old virgin — that love and sex were totally disparate entities while studying for my English Literature O-level. Our teacher must have been at least 70, blind, fearless, and — as far as we girls were concerned — right about absolutely everything.
One day we were giggling over the phrase ‘make love’ in Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice. ‘The phrase means “to court”,’ our teacher barked. ‘It may come as a surprise to you lot to know that the word “love” once pertained to the human spirit. Now it seems to be about “fancying” someone.’
Suddenly, it all made sense. At school dances I’d always been drawn to the good-looking boys, not to the ones who were clever and had something to say for themselves — boys I could grow to love. I began to think of ‘fancying’ as a hobby, making a bee-line for the sexiest boy in the room, to see if I could nab him for the slow dance at the end of the evening. Portrait Of A Marriage, therefore, just confirmed what I thought I already knew. Desire might overwhelm you, obsess you, take over your life, but ultimately it didn’t matter. What mattered was love.
Adam and I made our open contract almost as soon as we started going out together. Both of us enjoyed short-lived flirtations with other people, but nothing serious. Our contract was still firmly in place when we took our vows, at a church wedding in 1982 (the forsaking all others bit we simply parroted on autopilot).
I didn’t feel like a fraud: I loved Adam with all my heart, and thought we’d be married for life.
It was to be three years before our rules would be tested. Adam was in the US researching a book. The phone call came, the permission was sought. ‘Of course!’ I said. ‘Go ahead!’ I never met the other woman; I didn’t even know what she looked like. She was 20 years older than me and married. I didn’t care about her at all. I cared about us.
Adam came home, we congratulated each other on how brilliantly we had handled it and never spoke of her again.
The next affair was mine, four years later. By then, our lives had certainly lost their bohemian edge. I had recently given birth to our third son; our older boys were still under four. Our house smelt of nappies, with toys scattered everywhere.
Perhaps Adam thought: ‘What happened to the girl I married? What happened to that romantic life we envisioned for ourselves?’
Whatever his motives, he suddenly said: ‘You look like you could do with an affair.’
I laughed. I was lying on the sofa in my baggy maternity clothes. ‘You’ve got to be joking,’ I said. ‘Me? An affair?’
‘It would do you good,’ he insisted. ‘You look terribly mumsy, if you don’t mind me saying.’
‘And who exactly would I have an affair with?’ I asked him. ‘Look in your address book,’ he suggested. ‘There must be someone.’ So that’s