Against Love (eBook)

Love's Labors

Will all the adulterers in the room please stand up? This means all you cheating wives, philandering husbands, and straying domestic partners, past, present, and future. Those who find themselves fantasizing a lot, please rise also. So may those who have ever played supporting roles in the adultery melodrama: 'other man,' 'other woman,' suspicious spouse or marital detective ('I called your office at three and they said you'd left!'), or least fun of all, the miserable cuckold or cuckoldess. Which, of course, you may be, without (at least, consciously) knowing that you are. Feel free to take a second to mull this over, or to make a quick call: 'Hi hon, just checking in!'

It will soon become clear to infidelity cognoscenti that we're not talking about your one-night stands here: not about those transient out-of-town encounters, those half-remembered drunken fumblings, those remaining enclaves of suburban swinging--or any of the other casual opportunities for bodies to collide in relatively impersonal ways in postmodern America. We live in sexually interesting times, meaning a culture which manages to be simultaneously hypersexualized and to retain its Puritan underpinnings, in precisely equal proportions. Estimates of the percentage of those coupled who have strayed at least once vary from 20 to 70 percent, meaning that you can basically select any statistic you like to support whatever position you prefer to take on the prevalence of such acts. Whatever the precise number--and really, must we join the social scientists and pen-protector brigades and fetishize numbers?--apparently, taking an occasional walk on the wild side while still wholeheartedly pledged to a monogamous relationship isn't an earthshaking contradiction. Many of us manage to summon merciful self-explanations as required ('Shouldn't drink on an empty stomach') or have learned over the years to deploy the strategic exception ('Out-of-town doesn't count,' 'Oral sex doesn't count') with hairsplitting acumen. Perhaps a few foresightful types have even made prior arrangements with the partner to cover such eventualities--the 'one time rule,' the 'must-confess-all rule' (though such arrangements are said to be more frequent these days among our non-heterosexual denominations). Once again, statistics on such matters are spotty.

But we're not talking about 'arrangements' with either self or spouse, or when it's 'just sex,' or no big thing. We will be talking about what feels like a big thing: the love affair. Affairs of the heart. Exchanges of intimacy, reawakened passion, confessions, idealization, and declarations--along with favorite books, childhood stories, relationship complaints, and deepest selves, often requiring agonized consultation with close friends or professional listeners at outrageous hourly rates because one or both parties are married or committed to someone else, thus all this merging and ardor takes place in nervous hard-won secrecy and is turning your world upside down. In other words, we will be talking about contradictions, large, festering contradictions at the epicenter of love in our time. Infidelity will serve as our entry point to this teeming world of ambivalence and anxiety, and as our lens on the contemporary ethos of love--as much an imaginary space as an actual event. (Commitment's dark other, after all--its dialectical pal.) Meaning whether or not you signed up for the gala cruise, we're all in this boat one way or another--if only by virtue of vowing not to be.

So just as a thought experiment--though it will never happen to you and certainly never has--please imagine finding yourself in the contradictory position of having elected to live...