A long-term relationship can all too easily enforce a sense that we are neither very admirable nor worthy. Management of family life, of cleaning rotas, of finances and of relations with friends and in-laws can contribute to an impression that one is fundamentally troublesome and undeserving of sustained notice. The mood around us is fractious and ungrateful. ‘Not you again’ may be the implicit message one receives upon entering any room.
Physically, we have strict instructions to keep ourselves to ourselves. There is one person on the planet we are meant to be naked in front of and this figure is unlikely to be particularly impressed by or even vaguely cognizant of our appearance. With everyone else, we are a cautious, swaddled being. We would not dare to come more than thirty centimetres near to most of humanity.
And then, suddenly, in the context of an affair, everything changes. We can be unlaced and carefree. Our tongue, normally carefully shielded and used to form vowel sounds and break down toast or the morning cereal, is given permission to enter another person’s mouth. We are no longer just the one who makes problems around the in-laws and doesn’t pull their weight around the house or the finances; instead we are someone whose very essence has, via the flesh, been witnessed and endorsed.
What we may be doing is slipping off another’s top or inviting them to release our trousers, but what all this means is that another human has – exceptionally – chosen to find us worthy.
For so-called cheats (who will most likely have to pay a very heavy price indeed for going to bed with another person), sex can have remarkably little to do with ‘sex’. It is an activity continuous with a range of non-physical needs for tenderness, acceptance, care and companionship. It is an attempt, negotiated through the body but focused on the satisfactions of the psyche, to make up for a long-standing painfully severed emotional connection with a primary partner.
The crucial, active element in an affair isn’t really the physical sex per se: it’s the sense of closeness, the warmth, the shared liking for which physical sex provides the occasion.
The thought opens us up to a more defined, perhaps more searing and yet usefully more accurate avenue of pain in relation to our partner. The problem is not that they have been horny, something for which we cannot really be held responsible and which we can therefore safely moralize about. It is that they have been lonely – something which it is a great deal harder to bear and think ourselves wholly innocent about.
How to Reduce the Risk of Affairs
The traditional way to try to reduce the chances of someone having an affair is to focus on controlling their actions and outward movements: not letting them go to social events without us, calling them at random times or reducing their access to social media.
But people don’t have affairs because they are able to meet attractive others, they have affairs because they feel emotionally disconnected from their partners. The best way to stop their being tempted to sleep with someone else is not, therefore, to reduce their opportunities for contact; it is to leave them free to wander the world while ensuring that they feel heard by and are reconciled with their partners. It is emotional closeness, not curfews, that guarantees the integrity of couples.
At a practical level, the route to closeness requires us to ensure that the two main sources of distance, resentment and loneliness, are correctly identified and regularly purged. The more we can tell our partners what we are annoyed and disappointed about, what we long for and are made anxious by, and the more we can feel heard for doing so, the less we will bear grudges, keep our distance and seek revenge by stripping naked with someone else. Few things are more properly romantic (in the true sense of the word, meaning conducive to love) than highly honest conversations in which we have an opportunity to lay bare the particular ways in which our partners have disappointed us. Nothing may so endear us to someone as a chance to tell them why they have let us down.
To guide us in our restorative complaints, we might consider the following range of prompts.
I sometimes feel frustrated with you when …
It sounds like a nasty theme but, when handled correctly, it is the gateway to great tenderness and closeness. It provides us with an opportunity to do something very rare: level criticism without anger. And it’s a chance to hear criticism as more than an attack, to interpret it for what it may truly be: a desire to learn how to live together with less occasion for anger.
I’d love you to realize that you hurt me when …
We’re carrying around wounds that we have found it, understandably and inevitably, hard to articulate. Perhaps the complaints sounded too petty or humiliating to mention at the time. The problem is that when they fester, the currents of affection start to get blocked and soon we may find that we flinch when our partner tries to touch us. This prompt provides a safe moment in which to reveal a set of – typically entirely unintentional – hurts. Maybe last week there was something around work, or their mother, or the way they responded to a fairly innocent enquiry in the kitchen before a run. It’s vital that our partner doesn’t step in and deny that the hurt took place. There is no such thing as a hurt that is too small to matter when emotional closeness is at stake.
One of the hardest things for you to understand about me is …
We end up lonely because there is something important about who we are that our partner appears not to grasp or, so we can conclude, does not even want to take on board. But this lack of interest is rarely malevolent; it is usually more the case that there hasn’t been a proper occasion for exploration. The feeling that one person knows another is the constant enemy of long-term couples. Our partners may understand us well, but we still need patiently and diplomatically to keep explaining things that remain unclear between us. We are changing all the time, we’re no longer who we were last month, and we can struggle to explain our own evolutions and needs even to ourselves. We must never be furious with our beloveds for not grasping facets of our identity we haven’t yet properly managed to share with them.
What I’d love you to appreciate about me is …
We don’t want untrammelled praise, merely the odd moment when we can tell our partner what we feel is worthy of appreciation, maybe a little more appreciation than we have until now spontaneously received. We might want to draw attention to our best intentions (even when they didn’t entirely work out); to the sweeter aspects of our character; or to the good things about us which have quietly removed conflicts that would otherwise have emerged in the background. We’re reminding both of us that there are reasons why we deserve love.
Where I’m unfulfilled in my life …
It need not always be the fault of a lover that we are dissatisfied and restless. The longing for an affair can arise from a sense that the world more generally has not heard us, that we have been abandoned with career anxieties or lag behind our peers in terms of achievement and assets. Day to day, we tend not to explain the origins of these distressed moods very well. Our partner is the witness to them but can’t easily recognize where the unhappiness is coming from. So they make the next most obvious move and start to assume that we are simply mean or bad-tempered. This is a chance to explain the background existential fear and professional ennui responsible for some of our most acute everyday irritations and withdrawn states; a chance to demonstrate that we are not bad, merely longing for their reassurance and support to battle our impression of insignificance and failure.
We also need, in order to be close and resist the lure of an affair, to be able to speak with unusual candour about our sexual aspirations. Nothing more quickly reduces the need to act out a fantasy than the ability to speak about it – and be heard with sympathy, tolerance and curiosity. Here are some of the prompts that might induce the right sort of conversation about sex:
Something I’m really inhibited about sexually is …
I would love it if you could understand that sometimes I want …
What I wish I could change about me and sex is …
; What I wish I could change about you and sex is …
None of these prompts can guarantee that an affair will never happen, but they could at least help to diagnose and repair the feelings of resentful distance or erotic loneliness that are the hidden drivers of the desire to wander off with someone else. We should dare to spend less time banning our partners from having lunch with strangers or travelling alone, and more time ensuring that they feel understood for their flaws and confusions – and appreciated for their virtues.
Affairs and High Horses
Whatever its benefits and pains, being involved in an affair should, if nothing else, cure us once and for all of any tendency to moralize – that is, to look harshly and with strict judgement on the misdemeanours and follies of others.
An affair should naturally induct us into the full scale of our mendacity, impatience, weakness, cowardliness, derangement and sentimentality. We should thereafter never be able to feel impervious and superior when hearing of certain insane things that others have done in the name of love or desire. We will have joined the legions of the sexually chastened, who can have no more illusions as to their own purity or steadiness of mind.
And yet we won’t be able to give up on ourselves entirely either; we’ll have to keep going with life and somehow find a way to forgive ourselves for the days and nights we lost to our madness. At best, we will learn how to laugh darkly at ourselves, to know at all times that, however grand and authoritative some parts of our lives might seem, we are only ever millimetres away from tragedy and lunacy.
Our affairs will force us to dismount from our high horses and do away forever with any sense of superiority – and from there, we will have no option but to go on to be infinitely kind and unendingly generous towards anyone who ever wants to have, or has ever been involved in, those delightful, wretched, tumultuous, destructive and compelling adventures we call affairs.
3 Dealing with Problems
ARGUMENTS
An average couple will have between thirty and fifty significant arguments a year, ‘significant’ meaning an encounter which departs sharply from civilized norms of dialogue, would be uncomfortable to film and show friends, and might involve screaming, rolled eyes, histrionic accusations, slammed doors and liberal uses of terms like ‘arsehole’ and ‘knobhead’.
Given the intensity of the distress that arguments cause us, we could expect modern societies to have learned to devote a great deal of attention and resources to understanding why they happen and how we might more effectively defuse or untangle them. We might expect there to be school and university courses on how to manage arguments successfully and official targets for reducing their incidence.
But there are some strong reasons for our collective neglect. The first is that our Romantic culture sentimentally implies that there might be a necessary connection between true passion and a fiery temper. It can seem as if fighting and hurling insults might be signs, not of immaturity and a woeful incapacity for self-control, but of an admirable intensity of desire and strength of commitment.
Romanticism also conspires to suggest that arguments might be part of the natural weather of relationships and could never therefore be fairly analysed through reason or dismantled with logic. Only a pedant would seek to think through an argument – as opposed to letting it run its sometimes troubling and rowdy but ultimately always necessary course.
At a more intimate level, it may be that we cannot quite face what arguments show us about ourselves, presenting an unbearable insult to our self-love. Once the argument is over, the viciousness, self-pity and pettiness on display are repulsive to think about and so we artfully pretend to ourselves and our partner that what happened last night must have been a peculiar aberration, best passed over in silence from the calmer perspective of dawn.
We are further stymied in our investigations because there is so little public evidence that a version of what occurs in our union might unfold in everyone else’s as well. Out of shame and a desire to seem normal, we collectively shield each other from the reality of relationships – and then imagine that our behaviour must be uniquely savage and childish and therefore incapable of redemption or analysis. We miss out on a chance to improve because we take ourselves to be the mad exceptions.
None of this needs to be the case. We argue badly and regularly principally because we lack an education in how to teach others who we are. Beneath the surface of almost every argument lies a forlorn attempt by two people to get the other to see, acknowledge and respond to their emotional reality and sense of justice. Beyond the invective is a longing that our partner should witness, understand and endorse some crucial element of our own experience.
The tragedy of every sorry argument is that it is constructed around a horrific mismatch between the message we so badly want to send (‘I need you to love me, know me, agree with me’) and the manner in which we are able to deliver it (with impatient accusations, sulks, put-downs, sarcasm, exaggerated gesticulations and forceful ‘fuck you’s).
A bad argument is a failed endeavour to communicate, which perversely renders the underlying message we seek to convey ever less visible. It is our very desperation which undermines us and ushers in the unreasonableness that prevents whatever point we lay claim to from making its way across. We argue in an ugly way because, in our times of distress, we lose access to all better methods of explaining our fears, frustrated hopes, needs, concerns, excitements and convictions. And we do this principally because we are so scared that we may have ruined our lives by being in a relationship with someone who cannot fathom the inner movements of our souls. We would do things so much better if only we cared a little less.
We don’t, therefore, end up in bitter arguments because we are fundamentally brutish or resolutely demented but because we are at once so invested and yet so incapable. It is the untutored force of our wish to communicate that impedes our steady ability to do so.
And yet, though arguments may be destructive, avoiding points of conflict isn’t straightforwardly the answer either. An argument is about something, so its content needs eventually to be faced up to if a relationship is to survive. The priority is not so much to skirt points of contention as to learn to handle them in less counterproductively vindictive and more gently strategic ways.
Some of the reason why we argue so much and so repetitively is that we aren’t guided to spot the similarities that run through our arguments; we do not have to hand an easy typology of squabbles that could be to domestic conflict what an encyclopedia of birds is to an ornithologist.
Though fights can from the outside look generic, with similar displays of agitation and aggression, we should come to recognize the very distinct kinds of rows in operation. Each type listed here foregrounds a particular way in which we typically fail to communicate a vital and intense truth to a partner.
By examining them in turn, we may gradually assemble an understanding of some of the obstacles we face, and greet moments of dissent with a little less surprise and rather more tolerance and humorous recognition. We will be reminded – once more – that love is a skill, not an emotion.
The Interminable Argument
One of the hardest to unpick, this type of argument looks, from a distance, as though it is always new and always unique. One day it is about something someone said to a friend, the next about a family reunion. Sometimes it centres around a stain that’s appeared on the sofa, sometimes around the bank’s approach to the setting of interest rates.
What is hard to imagine is that we may unwittingly – all along – be having the same argument in disguise. The flashpoints of agitation may superficially seem diverse but are in fact all reconfigurations of the same basic conflictual material.
Arguments about whether to take the train or the bus, or about putting out the bins, or about the economic potential of Africa, or about a scratch on a wooden table, or about whether it’s OK to be five minutes late for a dental appointment, or about what to give a friend as a wedding pres
ent, or about the difference between a serviette and a napkin – all of these may be emerging from the repeated frustrated attempt to transmit a single intimate truth: I feel you don’t respect my intelligence.
We keep arguing because we never manage to identify and address the key issue we’re actually cross about. Irritability is anger that lacks self-knowledge.
Why should it be so hard to trace the origins of our rage? At points because what offends us is so humiliating in structure. It can be shameful for us to realize that the person in whom we have invested so much may not actually desire us physically, or may not fundamentally be kind, or could be exploiting us financially or gravely impeding our professional aspirations. We come under immense internal pressure not to square up to truths that would require us to accept a range of practically difficult and emotionally devastating realizations. We prefer to let our anger seep out in myriad minor conflicts over seemingly not very much rather than have to argue over the direction of our lives.
We may, furthermore, not have grown up with a sense that our dissatisfactions ever deserved expression. Our parents might have been too anxious, too vulnerable or too bullying to allow much room for our early needs. We might have become masters in the art of not complaining and of accepting what we are given as the price of survival and of protection of those we loved. This doesn’t now spare us feelings of frustration. It simply makes us incapable of giving them a voice.
We are hence doomed to keep having small or diversionary squabbles so as not to have to touch the fundamental truth at the core of our complaints: You don’t show me enough physical affection. My life is harder than your life. Your family are much worse than you think they are. I’m threatened by your friends. You have the wrong approach to money.
The School of Life Page 16