Linda Wolfe - Playing Around: Women and Infidelity

Playing Around

Women and Infidelity

Linda Wolfe

To Max

Acknowledgments

Many people helped me with this book. Those whom I want to thank the most were the women I interviewed. They were unstinting with their time, their confidences, their insights, but above all with their trust in me. I hope I have warranted their generous participation in this project.

I am very grateful to the late Professor Oscar Cargill of New York University, who first prompted my attention to the treatment of extramarital sex in the fiction of women writers by suggesting I do my thesis on Kate Chopin; to the New York Public Library for permission to investigate the literature of adultery in the Frederick Lewis Allen Room; and to Joan Goulianos, who helped me to focus some of my research.

Three young women helped me extraordinarily. One was my daughter Jessica, whose high spirits always revived me when writers cramp or despair set in; another was my stepdaughter Debbie, who read and discerningly finecombed the manuscript; and the third was my stepdaughter Judith, who offered both encouragement and critiques characteristically profound beyond her years.

But there would have been no book without the constant enthusiasm and tough-minded perceptions of my husband, Max Pollack, who, above all others, has always helped me the most in whatever.

Contents

Men are like the earth and we are the moon; we turn always one side to them, and they think there is no other, because they dont see itbut there is.

O LIVE S CHREINER , The Story of an African Farm

Part I

From Adultery to Extramarital Sex

(1)

The Spirit of the Times

I knew only the fiction and very few of the realities about women who were having extramarital sexual affairs until the mid-1960s. In those days, married to my first husband, I was working part-time as a researcher and journalist, raising my baby daughter, and living in a populous section of Manhattans West Side. The neighborhood, filled with parks and expansive river views, seemed to me a conventional, orderly place, dominated by the playground on the corner. It was the year-round headquartersa steaming desert in summer where we mothers sat in milk-dripped slacks, eating popsicle leftovers and trying to keep from melting away ourselves, the Siberian steppes in winter, when we braved the ten-degree cold and howling river winds to give colicky babies their fill of air.

The street itself seemed just a corridor to the real stage of our lives, the public school down the corner. On it, before nine and after three, balletic mothers hurried to and from the school, swooping the ground after a trailing shoelace, stooping one-legged to retrieve a fallen lunchbox, waving on tiptoe to a friend down the block, moving, moving fast.

It was only after I had lived there a while that I came to see my surroundings differently, and to discover that what had seemed a world exclusively of mothers and children was actually an environment shared extensively by male lovers, some of them fantasied, others quite real. In the small apartment building in which I lived, there were eight married mothers with small children. In a few months time, four of them confided to me that they had been involved in extramarital sexual relationships. A neighbor further down the street was picked up by Cadillac by her lover every morning about half a block from her house right after she had walked her three children to school. Another met hers for breakfast at the local luncheonette three times a week, then escorted him past her doorman, each carrying a briefcase underarm, as if they were colleagues on a lengthy research project.

For those who did not have lovers, the subject of extramarital sex was nevertheless conversationally prominent. It is true it was discussed with lower voices than those used on feedings, the air, the permissiveness or lack of it at private schools, or the drunken superintendent who stole the TV in the co-op. But who was or wasnt having extramarital sex, how to, whether, and why filled up hours of park bench time.

The phrase that was most often used by my neighbors to describe sexual experience outside marriage was playing around. They used it in preference to the others in the roster of imprecise and harsh expressions available in the English language, a roster that went from the obscene, like screwing or fucking around, to the degrading, like two-timing or cheating. A few women called extramarital sexual experience having affairs, but they were sometimes challenged as to whether the expression was precise for some of the short-term sexual activity they were describing; one woman said she thought that in German there was a useful word that translated as sidestepping; another liked the connotation of dalliance. But playing around was the most frequent expression, even though when a woman used it, it was always with a touch of irony; playing around might have gains and losses, but there were no rules or umpires or clearcut goals, and those who participated were rarely playful or lighthearted.

Despite my attempts at sophistication, I found I was uneasy. I had been raised, like so many of us, on Anna Karenina face up beneath a railroad carriage, on Emma Bovary pale and vomiting arsenic, on Hester Prynne shamed in the marketplace. But these were women of fiction. I had grown up with the knowledge of the affairs of Madame de Stal and George Sand and of the trial of Queen Caroline of England for adultery. But these were rich women, women of another class. Middle-class women didnt have affairs once they married. I think I learned this at my mothers knee. So my reactions to my neighbors who were having extramarital sex were complicated, contradictory. On the one hand, I condemned them, considered them cruel; they were betraying their husbands, their children, even their sex, which from time past had been assigned the victim role when it came to adultery; husbands wandered from wives, not the other way around; and there was comfort in that role. But on the other hand, something in me admired them, admired their ability to find lovers, their know-how at secrecy and their determination not to be victims, not to let life plough them underground in Riverside Park.

I found myself wondering about their lives, listening avidly to their stories, and experiencing vicarious enjoyment as well as anxiety at each new saga they reported. I think it was then that the idea for this book first occurred to me. My own confusion of feelings was part of what interested me about the subject. I was also interested in it because, while I knew that extramarital sex had not been reported as having increased since Kinseys time (he had stated in 1953 that about one-fourth of the married women and one-half of the married men he had surveyed had had at least one extramarital affair), it did seem to me that among the women in my milieu, the rate was inordinately high. That milieu consisted of non-religious, economically secure, highly educated women; they were spirited and a little rebellious, but not particularly radical.

But I didnt turn to writing about the subject back then. My own life was undergoing considerable upheaval. My first marriage broke up. My work as a journalist became full time and more demanding. I began to concentrate on articles about marriage, divorce, and sexual behavior and therapy for various national and East Coast magazines, traveling the country to research some of them, examining my immediate environment for others. The womens movement had emerged and for a while, my consciousness raised, I lost interest in the whys and wherefores of female extramarital sex. I suppose the topic seemed retrogressive. Once I discussed it with a friend, a divorced woman and an activist in the movement, who said to me, Affairs are married womens opiate. If women are unhappy in marriage and seek their pleasure outside it, it is because marriage itself is an untenable institution. Ending it, not keeping it going with panaceas, is the only sensible solution and those who have extramarital affairs are simply slowing down the revolution.