Table of Contents
To Meaghan, with love and admiration
I know now your eyes are wide open. Certain things you will never believe any more, certain gestures you will never repeat, certain sorrows, misgivings, you will never again experience. A kind of white, criminal fervor in your tenderness and cruelty. Neither remorse nor vengeance; neither sorrow nor guilt. A living it out, with nothing to save you from the abyss but a high hope, a faith, a joy that you tasted, that you can repeat when you will.
HENRY MILLER TO ANAS NIN, 1932
Introduction
What do we wish to know of any worthy person so much, as how he has sped in the history of [love]?
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
So far all that has given colour to existence still lacks a history: where could you find a history of love, of avarice, of envy, of conscience, of piety, of cruelty?... Has anyone done research on the different ways of dividing up the day or of the consequences of a regular schedule of work, festivals, and the rest? ... Has anyone collected peoples experiences of living together... Has anyone depicted the dialectic of marriage and friendship?
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
We are just now reaching the point where we can observe objectively and without judgment the relationship of one individual to a second one. Our attempts to live such a relationship are without a model. Yet, there already exist within our time frame some things intended to help our faint-hearted beginners steps.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
The old ideals are dead as nailsnothing there. It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a womansort of ultimate marriageand there isnt anything else.
D. H. LAWRENCE
I.
For almost two hundred years, now, it has been customary to talk about marriage as an institution in crisis. Not only has divorce become commonplace, but domestic arrangements and sexual practices that used to be scandalous no longer raise more than an eyebrow in casual conversation. In the ocean of sex-drenched advertising, entertainment, and fashion, pornography, perversion, and the most sordid aspects of love have seeped into everyday cultureso much so that parents today worry not that their childrens generation wont respect the institution of marriage, but that their childrens friends and classmates might already be so saturatedso medicated, disaffected, and overwhelmedthat they wont even feel anything when they make their early experiments in sex. The hope that marriage might still have any sanctity has been so widely abandoned that our modern decline is measured against its decay.
And yetin spite of these pervasive lamentations, hasnt something been gained in our modern freedoms? We are free now because our ancestors wanted the freedom to make their attachments where they found them, to break them when they chafed, and then to make new attachmentshavent we just fulfilled what they wanted for themselves? If we have lost some cosmic or traditional belonging, we have also gained that freedomsurely we can discern some progress, from the old traditions to this new freedom, which seems to fulfill an ancient promise.
There are benefits by which we can measure our freedom: we can express, fulfill, create ourselves in unprecedented ways. To our new modern eyes, the soul has become a work yet to be madeand as modern individuals, we extend the souls promise into our relationships. We have come to believe that each souls fulfillment will be uniqueso, too, then, should every relationship be a work of art, an original collaboration in each partners fulfillment. In this view, marriage has just been one more conventional form that has to be reinvented every generation, if modern people should ever perfect their freedom and individuality in a new or higher way. If parents and grandparents have complained about modern changes, young people have known since the beginning of the twentieth century at least that their ancestors marriages would never be sufficient to their new freedoms.
We are modern, we know too much: we know that love is a fleeting ripeness of the soulwe know that desire is a constant struggle of the self against the self, of the spirit against the body. We know that we need to see things for ourselves if were ever going to trust them: we think that if we arrive at marriages like our grandparents generation mademarriages we think of as noble lifeworks, grounded in shared faithit will only be after weve found and tried faith of our own in a variety of experiences first.
So why shouldnt a man take a wife, and also see other women on the side, as he seeks himself and his fulfillment? And why should a womans satisfactions be limited to the one man she has married, when there are sides of herself that will still always need to be expressed? Why shouldnt partners allow each other this freedom, when each of them knows that the others possibilities exceed them? These are questions we each have to answer in our own fashion, but regardless of how we each solve them, our liberty itself persists in asking them, so even if we come to one solution today, the question will only be framed anew tomorrow, every time someone resonates with the promises we believe we carry, in our hearts and in our loins, in our selves.
Most people, confronting these questions, recognize almost instinctively that erotic freedom is really an invitation to chaos and drama, fights, fits, and ultimately loneliness and misery. If they begrudge their peace and stability, they nevertheless keep to one spouse, as much as they can, and keep infidelity in reserve for desperate situations or rare opportunities. They keep to one spouse and they moralize, they relegate infidelity to the desperate people who cant get enough affection, the children who arent mature enough yet to handle the commitment. This is how traditional marriage persists: as a bias against the restless or immature people who cant settle down with one spouse.
Nevertheless, we cannot escape the suspicion that individuality might be inhibited by marriage, and we wonder whether people in open relationships might not really be braver than the restas if freedom were ultimately a matter of courage, of irreverence and honesty, of rebelliousness. Ever since The Scarlet Letter and Madame Bovary were published in the 1850sand then Anna Karenina in the 1870smodern people have been drawn to adulterers: we look for the promised freedoms in their brave stories, and we shudder to see the consequences of knowledge gained outside marriage.
So soon as the early 1900s, though, it was not enough to read novels about erotic freedom and adultery. Restrictive conventions were dissolving, and even before the convulsive world wars, there was an air of permanent revolution in European culture, so that bohemians and artists were beginning to experiment with new forms of love and relationship in addition to methods of representation. Berlin, New York, Zurich, and Montparnasse were beginning to be known as places where artists were drawing new lines for marriage. By the time Freud exploded the virtue of bourgeois restraintsby the time the Great War turned love and sex into the final refuge where people could hide from the horrors of modern industrial culture, affairs and unconventional marriage arrangements were already signs of artistic genuineness. When