Chapter 10. The Shadow of the Third
A New Look at Fidelity
Question: “Is there a secret that helps to maintain relationships for a long time?”
Answer: “Infidelity. Not the act itself, but its possibility. For Proust, the sting of jealousy is the only thing that can save a relationship sinking into routine.”
Alain de Botton. How Proust Can Change Your Life
The shackles of marriage are so heavy that they can only be borne together, and sometimes even with a third party.
Alexandre Dumas
There is a story in the Talmud. Every night, Rabbi Ashi stretched out before the image of the merciful lord and prayed to be spared from devilish temptations. His wife heard this and was surprised: “He has not even touched me for so many years. Why does he say all this?” And one day, while he was working in the garden, she dressed as Haruta and went to the garden. (Haruta was the name of a Babylonian prostitute. In Hebrew, this word also means "freedom".)
— Who are you? — asked Rabbi Ashi.
— I am Haruta.
— I want you, — he said.
— Get me a pomegranate from the very top branch, — she demanded.
He brought her the pomegranate and took her.
When he returned home, his wife was lighting the hearth. He approached and tried to throw himself straight into the fire. She asked, “Why are you doing this?”
— Because that and that happened.
— But that was me, — she explained.
— But I still wanted the forbidden.
Monolithic Monogamy
When two become a couple, they begin to establish boundaries: defining what will be inside their space and what will remain outside. You articulate preferences and make choices, then surround your blessed union with a reliable fence. And questions arise. “What can I now do alone, and what will we do together? Do we need to go to bed at the same time? And will you celebrate Thanksgiving with my family?” Sometimes we manage to agree on such decisions once and for all, but more often we have to proceed by trial and error. You experiment and try to understand where the boundaries of what is permissible now lie. “And why don’t you invite me to join? I thought we were going together.”
A glance, a remark, silence — and all these signals each of us has to decode. We intuitively try to determine how often we should see each other, how much we should communicate, how openly we need to share our thoughts and events. We carefully analyze our connections with other people and try to decide which friends remain important to us. We must also think about past lovers and partners: can we even mention or talk about them, meet them? Either way, we share the zones of personal space for each of us and the areas accessible to both partners.
Mother of all boundaries, the ruling queen — fidelity, for it is she who affirms the union. Traditionally, monogamy implied the choice of one partner for life, as with swans or wolves.But now monogamous relationships mean only that at any moment in time a person has no more than one sexual partner. (As it turns out, swans and wolves are not entirely monogamous either.)
Here is a woman who gets married, divorces, then remains free for some time, then changes several lovers, gets married a second time, divorces again, marries a third time — and she can still be considered monogamous as long as she remains faithful to her partner in all relationships. But a man who lives with the same woman for fifty years, but once, on the fifteenth year of marriage, allows himself a one-night stand — immediately falls into the category of the unfaithful. Since he cheated, he cheated.
Bob Dylan sang: “The times they are a-changin’.” Over the last fifty years, we have discovered new forms of marital and family relationships. Now they include traditional, same-sex, transgender, and civil unions. We can raise children alone, adopt them, become stepmothers and stepfathers, or completely refuse to have offspring. Now, no one is surprised if a person gets married several times or raises children from different marriages in their family. We also live together without getting married. Sometimes people are married but do not live together, only occasionally meeting under one roof. Aware of the incredible fragility of matrimonial relationships, we enter into prenuptial agreements and divorce without guilt.
All of the above has changed the boundaries both within the couple and between the couple and the outside world. But however flexible our attitude towards marriage may be, we stubbornly insist on adhering to the principle of monogamy. There are, of course, exceptions: movie stars, aging hippies, swingers — but overall, the boundaries that protect the principle of exclusivity in sexual relationships accepted by humanity remain immovable.
Our flirtation with monogamy does not come free. Brazilian family psychotherapist Michel Shainkman says:
We are more likely to break relationships than to question their structure.
The belief in monogamy is so strong that most couples, especially heterosexual ones, rarely even discuss this topic. After all, there is no need to discuss something that is taken for granted. Even those who are not against trying sexuality in all its diversity are often not ready to talk about changing the boundaries of sexual exclusivity. Monogamy is an absolute. And it turns out that we cannot be predominantly monogamous, or 98% monogamous, or become monogamous from time to time. Trying to understand what fidelity is means that this topic is open for discussion, which means it is no longer an imperative. But infidelity seems to most to be such a dark area that we prefer to avoid such conversations altogether: we are afraid that if there is even the slightest breach in our armor, we will not escape Sodom and Gomorrah.
According to statistics, 50% of first marriages and 65% of second marriages in the USA end in divorce. But despite this, as well as the huge number of extramarital affairs and the obvious failure of the idea of monogamy, we continue to cling to its remnants and believe in its reliability.
In Search of the One
Historically, society has imposed monogamy as a means of controlling female reproductive function. “Which of these children is mine? Who will get my cow after I die?” Fidelity — the cornerstone of patriarchal society — was associated with questions of lineage and property rights; it had nothing to do with love. Today, fidelity is associated with love. When marriage ceases to be mainly based on contractual relationships and becomes a matter of the heart, fidelity is perceived as confirmation of love and seriousness of intentions.Once society demanded constancy only from women — today both partners must be faithful. In the past, we were governed by the fear of sin — now we have voluntary self-restriction.
Nowadays, everyone finds their partner by themselves, without popular matchmakers. No one is obliged to marry by someone else's choice, and we go in search of the ideal — and our demands are serious.
Our ideal partner must possess all the characteristics accepted in a traditional family: reliability, a desire to have children, property, respect — but now we also require that the chosen one loves us, desires us, and that we are interesting to them. We must become for each other both lovers and best friends, and trustworthy confidantes. Modern marriage presupposes that anyone can find a person with whom all of this is achievable — one just needs to seek. And we hold onto the idea that marriage will give us everything we desire so tightly that those of us who are unhappy in marriage decide to divorce or have an affair not because they question the institution of marriage itself, but because they believe they chose the wrong person, and it is with this person that nirvana cannot be attained. Next time we need to choose more carefully.
Thus, we are always concerned only with the object of love, not our own ability to love. Psychologist Erich Fromm writes that we think that loving is easy, it’s just hard to find the right person; and as soon as we find the one, the only one, we will need no one else.
The exclusivity of relationships that we strive for in monogamy is related to the impressions and experiences of relationships with our parents or those who cared for us in childhood. Psychoanalyst and feminist Nancy Chodorow writes:
Growing up, we seek in love the possibility of regaining that primal unity that we felt next to our mother. An infant does not separate himself from his mother: once we noticed only her, and she was just supposed to always be near us. In this ecstatic unity between the child and the mother there is no distance. For the child, the mother is everything and is perceived as a whole: her skin, breast, voice, smile — all these are for him. In infancy, we felt satisfied and fulfilled and still remember that paradise. Often, those who do not know such an idyllic state are the ones who seek the perfect partner more insistently, those whose mother was not around or behaved selfishly and inconsistently.
The question remains: is the unity we strive to recreate not a fantasy? For the child, the mother is everything, but the mother also interacts with other people. She even has a loving jealous partner: the father of the infant. It turns out, the mother is not wholly devoted only to her child.
So from the very beginning of a little person’s life, infidelity looms nearby. We grow, and it remains close. Modern life fosters the isolation of people, and this only intensifies the painful feeling of unreliability hidden in the background of our romantic possessiveness. The fear of loss and fear of being abandoned make us cling even more tightly to the idea of fidelity. In a culture where everything has a substitute and where all kinds of optimization showing once again that, in fact, we are not irreplaceable, our need for safety and reliability reaches maximum sizes.The smaller we feel compared to the surrounding world, the more important it is for us to be a star, at least in the eyes of our partner. We want to know that we matter and that at least for one person, we are unique. We desire to feel like one whole with our partner and break out of the prison of loneliness.
Perhaps that is why we insist so categorically on the exclusivity of sexual relationships. The sexual aspect of adult romantic relationships recalls that very first form of merging with another person: the unity of bodies, nipples in the mouth, and the resulting feeling of saturation — and against this background, the very thought of our beloved being with someone else seems catastrophic. And sex on the side is interpreted as absolute betrayal.
It turns out that monogamy is the sacred cow of the romantic ideal, for it allows each of us to feel like a special person: I was chosen, and others were rejected.
By refusing all other possibilities of romantic relationships, you affirm my uniqueness; when you get distracted or start to think, I begin to doubt my significance. The opposite is also true: if I no longer feel special, I curiously look around. A disappointed lover is drawn to adventure. Perhaps someone else will restore his sense of self-worth?
“Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence”, Esther Perel
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