B007Q6XJAO EBOK

by Prioleau, Betsy

  Scientists have discovered a tiny group of couples, like Lynn and Sam, who’ve managed to hold the glow. When psychologists viewed their brains with an fMRI scanner, they found the same payoff in the reward circuitry that new lovers experience, along with extra activity in the attachment and pair-bonding centers. But, cautions neuroscientist Stephanie Ortigue, these studies tell us only so much; the understanding of long-lived love is still “frustratingly elusive.” Scientifically speaking, we seem no more enlightened than the ancient Hindu Kāma Sūtra, which attributed enduring passion to “bewitchment techniques.”

  There is, however, a long philosophic tradition devoted to the maintenance of desire. “The art of love,” instructs Havelock Ellis, “is even more the art of retaining love than of arousing it,” and he cites dozens of works since antiquity on the subject. As he and others underscore, this is advanced seduction. It requires dedication and creativity and the entire gamut of erotic spells, from charisma and character to physical and psychological lures. Women must do their part, of course, but men bear the chief responsibility. They’re obligated, stress amorists, to take the initiative and invest more “mating effort” to keep love alive.

  Great lovers are perpetual suitors. Instead of settling back after the “catch,” they intensify courtship. As the drift to ennui impinges, they scale up praise, humor, great sex, and conversation and raise the soothe quotient with intimacy and shared interests. They keep erotic tension humming. Passionate love is a charged dynamic—nothing inert about it—that demands an experienced hand at the controls, an artist who maintains a sexy flux of calm and rapture, habit and novelty, presence and absence, pleasure and pain, intimacy and mystery, concord and discord, yes and no. Ladies’ men don’t do dull. They combine accelerated love charms with an alternating buzz of opposites and infinitely faceted personalities. They lead a dance, to that woman’s tune, as if the music never ended.

  Fun/Festivity

  How much fun are you to live with?

  —DR. PHIL

  Every morning when Gustin steps out of his “Top Transport” Town Car, the cabbies at the Darien, Connecticut, train station say, “Here comes Hollywood.” It’s easy to see why. With his close-cropped white hair, pencil mustache, starched white camp shirt, and leonine carriage, he looks like a middle-aged Creole version of Errol Flynn. “These guys,” he chuckles (some of whom work for his car service), “can’t understand how come I’m an old man and I can get women.” He understates the case; Gustin is a love rocket. Amicably separated from his wife, he has more female adulation at sixty-seven than he knows what to do with: a live-in girlfriend of three years, a devotee who calls daily from the Caribbean, and comely singles in bars and nightclubs.

  One hot June morning, he invites me into his parked Lincoln, turns on the AC, and tries to explain his “certain something” with women. “I’m from Trinidad,” he says in his silky island upspeak. “God didn’t give us money, but he gave us happiness.” That, he thinks, is the key to it all, besides “class,” “character, of course,” and “supergood sex.” “You see,” he says, “you have to get a woman to feel relaxed, and the way to do it? Laughter, laughter, laughter. If I quarrel with my lady it always ends in laughter, and we hug each other up.”

  Gustin also swears by festivity. “In Trinidad we party all year. You have a good time, the blood starts flowing, the music puts a rhythm into your body.” And the women can let go and get their wild on. He met his wife that way, seduced others, and once incensed a husband so much at Carnival that he can’t go home again. “He says he’ll kill me whenever I come back.”

  In the meantime, he’s living to the hilt. The last time he went to the dentist, he realized he’d slept with everyone in the office except the male doctor. “The women talk,” he figures, “they want to find out if it’s true—whether they’ll enjoy it too.” Rip-it-down joy: that’s his love mantra. As he drives off to pick up a passenger, he rolls down the window and throws me a thumbs-up: “Crank it!” he calls. “To life!”

  Passion is fun-dependent; without play, gaiety, and carnival license, it fades to gray. Commitment conspires against us; custom and dailiness insidiously sap desire and induce ennui. Therapists, for that reason, tell couples to work on playfulness—kid around, take date nights, and vacations to holiday resorts. Howard Markman, a psychologist who runs a breakup-prevention program at the University of Denver, found that the amount of fun in a relationship predicted its success.

  Fun, though, is easier said than done. A consumer-capitalist ethos of overwork and purchased, passive entertainment militates against celebration. There’s also an art to festivity. For fullest enjoyment, it’s episodic and alternates with everyday reality. (Imagine a year-round Mardi Gras.) And a flair for gaiety is crucial; eros is “addicted to play” and insists on unbound merriment, nonsense, song, and dance. Ladies’ men not only maintain a rhythm between carnival and the nine-to-five; they are masters of revels.

  Homo festivus has a special draw for women. The “Perfect Man,” writes Erica Jong, must have “a sense of playfulness.” This may be related to women’s tendency toward hypervigilance in desire (via the judgmental neocortex) and their current stress overload. In studies, women report significantly higher tension than men over the last five years, and cite stress as a major reason for disinterest in sex. Critic Laura Kipnis speculates that women often have affairs just to flee the sociocultural pressure and have some “fun.” Joyous revelry provides the perfect sex holiday for the mind: reward receptors light up, and opiate-like chemicals flow free.

  Men who put fiesta into the love bond may strike an adaptive chord in the female libido. Besides disinhibition, joy, and emotional discharge, festivity gives women a read on a man. Playfulness, as psychologists Geoffrey Miller and Kay Redfield Jamison observe, is an excellent fitness indicator, denoting youth, creativity, flexibility, intelligence, optimism, and nonaggression. Prehistoric men were prone to violence toward stepchildren and refractory mates, and modern hotheads still can be. Shared frolic diffuses aggression and assures women they’re in safe company. Larking together is an “affinitive display” that binds a couple and creates a secure play space to unwind, goof, and celebrate.

  Mythic archetypes may have left an imprint too. Sex gods were “liberators.” At their rites, early mankind imitated the deities and cut loose. They shed rules, rank, and prohibitions and mimed the prodigal exuberance of nature. The Sumerians threw a New Year’s free-for-all after the commemoration of the sacred marriage of fertility gods Dumuzi and Inanna; and in ancient Egypt, women waved images of genitals, talked dirty, and danced in the streets in honor of Osiris, the creative spirit. Dionysus was the “deliverer” and joy-bringer who released everything that had been penned up, and led women to wanton mountaintop revels.

  Scholars of eros recommend “some fun” to keep passion fresh. The Kāma Sūtra spends almost as much space on the arts of festivity as sexual positions, and Castiglione’s Courtier advises Renaissance lovers to supply “magnificent banquets” and gaiety for romantic success. Modern thinkers agree: Ethel Person, author of Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters, ranks playfulness and the delights of regression as a precondition for lasting desire, and British psychiatrist Adam Phillips suggests that “the cruelest thing one can do to one’s partner is to be good at fidelity but bad at celebration.”

  If Charles Bovary and other dour husbands hadn’t dispensed this form of cruelty, we’d have fewer adultery novels. It’s Dr. Bovary’s tedious gravity that drives Emma up a wall and into the arms of the roué Rodolphe. Fittingly, Rodolphe seduces Emma at an agricultural fair where the carnival atmosphere suspends social constraints. “Why cry out against the passions?” coos Rodolphe. Let’s overturn “conventions of society.” As the judge announces the prize hog, Emma enlaces her fingers with Rodolphe’s.

  Carol Edgarian’s novel Three Stages of Amazement updates the mirthless cuckold to the twenty-first century. Charlie Pepper, a driven surgeon and robotics entrepreneur, pu
rsues a bicoastal career with such frenetic resolve that he forgets festivity and leaves his wife, Lena, to a dismal grind of freelance deadlines and child care. That is, until an old beau, the sportive Alessandro, resurfaces and lures her into an AWOL escapade. When the stunned Charlie confronts her, Lena replies, “You were good, smart. Steady. Loving. Kind,” but “we want to laugh. We want to laugh.”

  Popular romances fantasize beyond flings with playmates. In these novels heroines demand committed partners who keep the party going. Colt Rafferty of Emily March’s Hummingbird Lake is more than a safety engineer with a PhD; he’s a celebrator, and just what the doctor ordered for traumatized pediatrician Sage Anderson. As they become a couple and marry, he teaches her how to play. He appears in jeans and a Santa suit, carrying a pillowcase filled with a Slinky, Silly Putty, and bottles of Napa wine, and barrels off with her at the finale on a Gold Wing motorcycle as she lets out a “joyous laugh.”

  History has short-shrifted Roman politician and general Mark Antony; he’s viewed as Cleopatra’s puppet, a bungler, and “gigantic adolescent.” Antony, however, was a formidable public figure as well as a ladies’ man who sank deep hooks into women. His looks helped; he was tall, muscled, and heartbreak handsome, with a corona of thick curls and a “tunic tucked high on his rolling hips.” He was, besides, a seductive blend of a lord of misrule and a lord of the realm.

  A born leader of men, Antony commanded brilliant campaigns and rose through the political ranks to become governor of the Eastern Roman Empire under the triumvirate after his defeat of Julius Caesar’s assassins. At the same time, he was an unapologetic party animal who traveled with a caravan of musicians, actors, and mountebanks and drank deep of hedonistic excess. He carried golden drinking cups before him in processions as though they were religious relics, and entered Ephesus as the new Dionysus, accompanied by bacchants, satyrs, and pans.

  Women flung themselves at him. Besides mistresses, Antony had five wives, none of whom wearied of him. His third wife, Fulvia (who treasured his practical jokes), made war on his behalf, and after she died in the attempt, he married his rival’s sister, Octavia. She, too, remained fond of him, interceding with her brother and sending Antony troops, despite his defection to Cleopatra.

  Antony’s encounter with Cleopatra at Tarsus in 42 BC was a meeting of two force fields. Dressed in the robes of Isis, she was his mythic counterpart, a ruler who mixed politics and festivity better than he. While they plotted the formation of a Roman-Egyptian dynasty, they founded the “Society of Inimitable Livers,” dedicated to the celebratory arts. Together they nearly achieved their dynastic ambition. But after the naval defeat at Actium in 30 BC, they went down in divine form. Before their joint suicides, Antony hosted an extravagant feast, with entertainment, music, and the best wines and cuisine. That evening, they say, inhabitants heard the “marvelous sound of music” and chants of bacchanals as the god Dionysus and his entourage left the city.

  If Antony’s carnival spirit captivated women, it worked tenfold for Romeos of the 1950s. When “ladies” were girdled and gloved and conditioned to “good girl” asexuality, men who tore off the restraints and brought on the revels held an irresistible appeal. David Niven, British film star of over a hundred movies, was one of the most appealing. A delectable meld of English gentleman and randy cutup, he endeared women in droves—many long-term. Said one of his conquests, everyone was “crazy about him.”

  As soon as he arrived in Hollywood in 1934, he began laughing women into bed, from newcomers like Marilyn Monroe to Rita Hayworth, Merle Oberon, and Grace Kelly. A carnival king, he was a ham, prankster, risqué raconteur, and fabulous party-giver. Although twice married, once to his great love, who died at twenty-eight in an accident, he was a chronic womanizer. Nevertheless, women forgave him everything when he strode in with his saucy smile. He was “total fun,” recalled lovers, with a humor “as delicious as French pastry.” Women looked at him, they said, “as if it was God turning up.” In a way, it was—the god dearest to women—the “joyful one” who bursts bonds and ushers in play and jubilation.

  Another British bon vivant, Kingsley Amis, had the same limb-loosening effect on the female fifties generation. Teacher, poet, and author of Lucky Jim and other comic novels, he was an enticing hybrid of literary lion and Liber, the Roman god of fertility and festival. With Amis, women “seemed to have no verbal or sexual inhibitions at all.” He was a lark—playful, irreverent, and fall-down funny.

  His first wife, Hilary Bardwell, remembered being disenchanted with him at first. He had “yellow and snarly” teeth, a rotten haircut, wretched clothes, and no money or distinction. But he was a freer-upper; he “made everyone laugh.” He also made free with the ladies. After his marriage to Bardwell in 1948, he philandered with a vengeance, once charming guests at a party into the garden for a quickie.

  Yet she was too smitten with him to leave. She gamely sat out his 1959 teaching stint in America, where he turned Princeton into an academic Woodstock a decade in advance—boozy picnics, hijinks, and liaisons with faculty wives. One ascribed his sex appeal to his liberating sense of the ridiculous—“the most powerful seduction of all.” For him, she elaborated, “America with her straight-laced Puritans, was one big laugh-in.”

  After fifteen years, his wife divorced Amis, and he married novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, who stood by him throughout his downward cycle into drink and dissipation. At the end, “Hilly” took him to live with her and her third husband, Lord Kilmarnock. There, she tended him lovingly until he died, knowing “his weaknesses” and “ador[ing] him anyway.”

  We now have carnival license everywhere we turn: X-rated entertainment, clothing-optional resorts, orgiastic club nights, and Las Vegas. But there’s mounting evidence of a national fun-seepage. Author Pamela Haag writes of the rise of semi-happy, “melancholy marriages,” and critic Barbara Ehrenreich thinks we’ve lost the arts of festivity and entered a “drab and joyless” era. But eros always unchains the pleasure principle, the archaic instincts, and has the last laugh. In sexual selection, it really is the survival of the fizziest. The couple that plays together stays together.

  Novelty, Curiosity

  Keep it New or it’s Through.

  —ADAGE

  Professor Jack Harris is on spring break and back for a second interview. This time he’s talking about his marriage. “There’s almost nothing a woman could do now,” he says, swinging his legs onto an ottoman, “to get me into bed.” His voice has the same Tidewater tinge, but his looks have changed subtly since his last visit. He has a designer stubble and new dress style: a lavender-striped shirt, black cords, and a bracelet. He spins it around his wrist and explains, “From Japan when I visited the in-laws. A month ago, you’d never see me wearing something like this. Unpredictability: that has to be one of the top qualities of a great lover.”

  Since his marriage eight years ago, he’s made a habit of subverting habit. “You have to be proactive,” he says. “Surprise—spontaneity—is one of the best ways to keep things alive. My wife never knows what she’ll get when she comes home. Sometimes I’ll do flowers or sashimi, change plans, or spring a new idea on her, like a sabbatical in Zaire. If you ask her, she’ll say that’s part of the allure and attraction. Still,” he goes on, “I married for the security.” Then he clasps his hands behind his head professorially: “Boredom, though—never,” he exclaims. “A ladies’ man is someone—here goes!—who continues to seduce and fall in love, and have that reciprocated over the life course.”

  Romantic love requires dependability and security, but there can be too much of a good thing. Total predictability—same old, same old—can drain desire. To keep passion juiced, experienced lovers inject the familiar with novelty, change, and mystery. The unexpected, say scientists, gooses the brain, throwing pleasure switches and unleashing dopamine and norepinephrine, neurotransmitters associated with energy and elation. Such jolts may be vital for sustained ardor. New and exciting things, claim love experts
, preserve “the climate of romance” and ward off the toxic effects of tolerance. The unforeseen can make the heart grow fonder.

  According to folk wisdom, men are the erotic novelty hounds with an innate lust for variety. That view may be changing. Psychologists Cindy Meston and David Buss found that women may be just as avid for the new and different. Darwin believed that novelty seeking, “change for the sake of change, acted like a charm on female[s]” and was a driving force in sexual selection. This prompted men, conjectures Geoffrey Miller, to devise novel and surprising courtship maneuvers. Prehistoric suitors included delightful marvels and mysteries in their amorous arsenal, Miller surmises, as a way of holding women’s attention and securing longer relationships with more offspring. Romance, perhaps inherently for women, includes mystique, novelty, and surprise.

  Secrecy and surprise are standard tools of the seducer’s trade. Johannes of Kierkegaard’s Diary of a Seducer structures his campaign for the guileless Cordelia on the startle-and-swoon principle: “If one just knows how to surprise,” he gloats, “one always wins the game.” Curiosity can be so erotic, writes Roland Barthes, that it’s almost “equivalent to love”; we’re exalted by those who puzzle and intrigue us.

  These seductions only potentiate for the long haul. Honoré de Balzac warned husbands that if they didn’t supply variety, surprise, and curiosity, someone else would. Mate poachers, he advised, come “arrayed in all the graces of novelty and all the charms of mystery.” Without some enigma and novelty in a relationship, writes psychiatrist Michael Liebowitz, a woman will likely contract “old boyfriend syndrome” and take her love down memory lane. As amorist thinkers caution, female affections can fluctuate; a man must preempt ennui with “perpetual freshness.”