Just came back from a pretty nice week in Fire Island with kids and grandchildren and extended family by marriage, but I won’t bore you with more vacation details. Yesterday when I returned I happened to read a blog post about the revelations of adultery by John Edwards, and it reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about for a while. The blogger in question had a knee-jerk reaction to the news — isn’t it terrible, he isn’t what we thought he was, we can never trust him again, and so on.
Now no one is for adultery, at least when it breaks a vow of commitment, but the moral righteousness around this issue in politics drives me crazy. To be fair, adultery (especially my own) played a crucial part in my life — I’ve been hearing plenty about “what’s wrong with these men”, understandably so after Clinton and Spitzer and Edwards, but let me tell you, folks, I know some women who have had those powerful urges too, so powerful that a lot was put at risk. It didn’t feel much like the Spitzer or Clinton situation to me (I don’t know about Edwards): there was very deep and wrenching emotion involved. Nevertheless, it tends to be thrown into the same pot — it’s all the same to the moralists.
I guess what gets my goat is that the most vocal people who condemn sexual “immorality” seem to me those who are cozy and have no idea what this sort of desire feels like, and since this is a safe bet, it’s easy to get up on your hind legs and bray. I first thought about this when I was moderating an online forum on D.H. Lawrence, who slept with (and eventually married) Frieda, a married woman when he met her. We were supposed to be discussing his fiction, but a couple of the men, as well as some women, were more interested in roundly condemning Lawrence for his immorality. The men were particularly on their high horse — they would never, ever do such a thing, and anyone who did was unforgivable. At one point I asked these two guys if they had ever had the desire to sleep with another woman, and they proudly answered no, never. Now of course I have no idea if this was the truth, but I can believe it, and rather than impressing me, their answer made me wonder how much of morality is simply judging other people by what feels good to you: in other words, if you have no desire to do it yourself, no one else should either.
In The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe says, ” You respectable ones, you stand there so calmly, without any sense of participation.” He also says, “We have the right to talk about a thing only when we can feel for it.” (By “talk about a thing” he means moral judgement).
August 25, 2008 at 5:14 pm |
Well, I tried to come up with some “cozy” married people I know, and it sure ain’t easy. I could think of only two couples that might fit that billing – an older sister and her husband, and the inlaws of one my by daughters.By the way, I’m not counting anyone married less than 20 years! Neither of those couples, who seem somehow blessed with effortlessly happy marriages, would in any way be more condemning of adultery or other shenanigans in other peoples’ marriages than any of the rest of us with more compromised marriages, including myself. Let me hasten to say that if I have any condemnation of adulterers, it extends only to politcians, and not even all of them. I’m referring here only to the big guys, “leaders of the free world”, if you will.
Yeah, sure, no one should go poking into these guys’ private business, but given that they do, and that all the crowing in the world about “no ones’ business” does no good, for now, then why the hell can’t they just keep it zipped, for the sake of the rest of us? It’s not at all unlikely that Bill/Monica gave us eight years of George Bush and all that he’s wrought.
Another thing: You seem to have arrived at a duality that doesn’t reflect reality; that is, that there are people who have never been tempted and so have no right to blame those who have, and people who have been tempted, and have participated in adultery, and are therefore less likely to blame those who’ve done likewise. What about all those grays in the middle, those who’ve been tempted (to varying degrees)and refrained(to varying degrees)? Once you’re tempted, is that all there is to it, I mean if it’s a really “powerful urge”? Or is the assumption that if you didn’t give in to the urge, well, it must not have been that strong an urge? (Story of a good friend of mine: As a young married woman with two kids, had an intensely emotional love affair that went on for about 2 years, then the guy insisted that she leave husband and live with him. She wrestled with the issue and finally decided to give up lover and stay with husband; leaving, she felt, put too much at risk, most especially children, etc etc so she broke up with lover. It wasn’t til like maybe ten years or so later that she told me this story, and I asked her, so, was it easy, once you made the decision? Oh no, it was horrible she said, I cried every night for about 2 yrs. Now I’m over it, and we ever see the guy and his new wife, and it’s amazing, he just seems like a kind of mildly interesting friend. ) End of that story; I just include it as an example of a gray area, someone who gave in to an urge and who refrained from it too, in the end. Husband never knew any of it, by the way.
I do totally agree, though, that adultery is so multi faceted as to merit a lot more than one word for it, you know, like the Eskimos have 7 words for snow.
I had something of an argument with my cozy? husband re which adultery
is more serious, or I guess “immoral” – casual sex with multiple”easy” women, just for the fun of it, or an ongoing love affair with someone one cares about, the emotional wrench you spoke of?
(Clinton and Kennedy being examples of the first, FDR and Lucy Mercer being the second. ) My husband thought FDR despicable, and the others, well, so what, he thinks, it’s just for the momentary pleasure, like a massage, or something. I have more admiration for a true love affair because sex with women that people that one doesn’t care about seems so inhuman. But you’ll not be surprised when I remind you that he was involved in the first category, and I in the second. I just can’t imagine being tempted by a one night stand, and I’m not sure he understands the power of a love affair. But neither of is is standing there so calmly or feeling so respectable just because we’ve never experienced the thrall of the “other adultery”.
The the question goes on: why are love and sex and exclusivity and anger and religion and and and and all so intertwined?
August 25, 2008 at 9:17 pm |
First, I said that the most moralistic people were the cozy ones, not that all cozily married people were moralistic!
Second, in my opinion you’re absolutely right about these guys messing up not only their own political careers but risking Democratic elections, though that isn’t a moral criticism of their adultery per se.
As for the duality of those who are and are not passionate, I did exaggerate to make a point. Of course it goes without saying that there is a vast range of desire and self-restraint in between, the gray area. In fact, I think it’s more complex than that — it isn’t just a simple continuum from lack of passion to intense passion, there’s a whole variety of feelings and experiences possible in unique combinations. For example, I can’t personally relate myself to the story of your friend who ended her affair and cried for two years, then felt dismissive of her former lover when she met him later, nor does that necessarily make me believe she was truly self-denying. There are few things I claim to know for sure, but one of them is that the strength of the passion I felt did not admit of dismissing the love affair; also, I have never once since wondered what I saw in him, and I’m willing to bet a lot I never will. I can’t prove it, but my guess is still that people who are willing to reject the objects of their desire are able to do so in proportion to how deep the desire went in the first place. I just am not convinced this has anything to do with superior morals or character, cynic that I am.
August 26, 2008 at 12:49 am |
Just a quick response to the dismissive friend – what she said surprised her was that she and her husband continue to see him as a friend and that her previous passion has settled into a reasonably mellow friendship.
I also didn’t mention that the lover never displaced her husband -
August 26, 2008 at 1:12 am |
(the above went off by mistake) She was not dismissive of her lover in the sense that she couldn’t understand what she’d ever seen in him, only that she was surprised at how she no longer longed for him romatically or sexually.
I didn’t mention by the way, that throughout the affair she had no doubt that her husband was ” a good husband” and that she continued to love him as such for the duration of the affair – maybe that has something to do with the outcome.
August 26, 2008 at 2:07 pm |
I too am irritated at the moralism surrounding Edwards’s affair, and also about the apparent fact that being opposed to the affair because of its political repercussions needed to be cloaked in the language of moralism. What seems repugnant to me is not the affair or sex outside marriage, but the blind arrogance of men who apparently never thought they’d be found out and made mincemeat by their political enemies. It’s also worth noting that Clinton, Spitzer, and Edwards were all involved in quite different affairs: Spitzer paid for possibly kinky sex; Clinton had sex apparently with whoever presented herself; and Edwards had a possibly longish affair with one woman (maybe there are others who haven’t been heard from and he’s more like Clinton — who knows?). Yet they all get lumped together by the morality police as though they’d all done the same thing.
But it seems embedded in American culture. Don’t most people getting married think they are making a lifelong commitment? (Or are there more people than we think like my husband and me who left that part of the ceremony up for grabs?) I frankly find it hard to believe those men who say they have NEVER been tempted — but maybe they just have low sex drives, so it’s easier for them to stick to the morality of exclusivity in marriage and sex. And I’m assuming here that “male-pattern affairs” are primarily for sex. I know that my affairs were primarily for sex. So by Dozie’s husband’s morality, they don’t really count. And they certainly didn”t interfere with my marriage — if anything, they made me want to have more sex, rather than less, with my husband.
August 26, 2008 at 2:34 pm |
Is “male-pattern sex” anything like male-pattern baldness?
I do know men who have love affairs, for sure, and obviously there are women who have affairs that are just for sex. No doubt men still have more affairs and have affairs more frequently than women, but I’ve always wondered how much of that is learned inhibition on women’s part.
I’m not sure if rigorously faithful men have low sex drives necessarily — of course it’s just speculation, but I would guess that there are many men. as well as women, whose psychic organization is threatened by going outside the couple formation, and/or who need the structure and reliability of secure married life more than they would derive pleasure from passion. One of my brothers is like that — I believe him when he told me that the idea of another woman would never tempt him. The other brother, by the way, is not like this. Interesting.