Hannah Betts
In the next decade, what will become of love and marriage?
The so-called ‘hall pass’ isn’t going to cut it in the immortal longing stakes
Igreet you in an uncharacteristic state of joy. For, from today, straight civil partnerships will officially be a thing, and I am one of the many heterosexuals who have clamoured for such a right.
Whether my beloved will be as jubilant is not yet clear. In fact, I don’t appear to have seen him for a while. One might even say he were avoiding me.
Still, I’m not after a mock marriage, you understand, merely what, for me, would mark the ultimate romantic statement: a small, private, entirely unromantic state of being that would allow legal rights without matrimony’s ideological baggage.
Relationships in the 2020s will, then, be a rich and many-splendoured thing, our means of publicly attesting to them radically expanded. However, as always where there is change, so we are also forced to confront the ways in which human pair-bonding remains fundamentally the same. Viz pop god Robbie Williams’s latest wisdom in observing that – despite having just been declared, with Elvis, the bestselling UK solo artist – his life’s greatest achievement has been “monogamy – and sobriety, I suppose”.
This may sound like the usual rock star braggadocio, but, really, isn’t this as much as any of us can say? Indeed, I’d go further and admit that, in my case, the monogamy and the sobriety very much go together.
Only a few months ago, I shocked someone when they asked: “Would you ever be unfaithful?” with the reply: “Oh, no! Not now I don’t drink.” I love my boyfriend utterly, but I also have an established record of loving flirting, irresponsibility and acting like a loon. My capacity to indulge these traits in some sort of perfect selfish storm would be massively more likely, bottle in hand.
“Perfect selfish storm” could be the subtitle of Wild Game by Adrienne Brodeur, the bestselling US memoir to be published here next month. Instead, its subheading reads: “My Mother, Her Lover and Me”, the story following through with the family romance implied. I read it not only because it is all my American friends will talk about, but because I also have mother issues, only without having packaged them for a seven-figure sum, after a 14-bidder auction, in prose, if not purple, then decidedly lilac.
At its heart, is Brodeur’s mother’s infidelity, in which her pubescent daughter was forced to be complicit; sublimating her own existence for that of her mother’s mock-epic yet tawdrily mundane affair. Malabar is a monster, drunk on love and narcissism; no less her lover, Ben.
And, yet, theirs is merely an extreme version of the erotic egotism many Gen
X-ers had inflicted upon them, dragged into parental entanglements in which they were the collateral damage. Do we judge the adultery? – not necessarily. Do we judge the way it was played out? – with every fibre of our beings.
Brodeur reveals great sympathy towards her mother; the reader harbours less on the author’s behalf. And, yet, in hyperbolised form, Malabar confirms what studies have found – ditto what I see in myself. It is narrative rather than erotic excitement that is to be found in infidelity.
“Ladies love limerence,” as a psychologist friend jokes, referring to that all-consuming state of obsession that women appear to crave – and long to provoke in others. In study after study, men have been found to be content having sex with the same person, so long as they’re having it. Women want the high of infatuation, dragging compulsion, to desire and be desired. Without this, they can feel uninclined to go through the motions. Familiarity, then, breeds a certain jaded ennui; unfamiliarity arouses.
So what’s the answer? The so-called “hall pass” isn’t going to cut it in the immortal longing stakes. Might one ever achieve an “ethical” affair? Britons don’t necessarily associate nonmonogamy with the hysteria Americans attach to it, as discussed in Pamela Druckerman’s 2007 account, Lust in Translation. However, so much of infidelity’s adrenalin hit is wrapped up in its being aberrant, illicit, contra-relationship. As one of the more admirable characters in Wild Game summarises: “It’s understandable, it’s just not acceptable.” However adult one is, however bohemian, what is left tends to be a big bloody mess.
The closest I get to a solution is to be found in psychotherapist Esther Perel’s tome Mating in Captivity, in which she makes the case that “eroticism thrives in the gap between self and other”, meaning one must focus on what is alluringly alien in one’s long-term love object, restoring their mystery, seeing them with fresh rather than too familiar eyes. You don’t actually want them to have an affair, but both parties need to look as if they still have it in them.