I was up late last night thinking about the answer I gave Sunday to Harriet, whose husband told her he wants to sleep with other women and, that he’d like her to join in.
Because this is a blog, and not a book, or even a prepared talk, I answered her question (“Should I?” ) quickly. Not wrongly, I believe, but quickly. I did you all a disservice, though, by not taking on this hugely important question Harriet asked—and giving it the time it deserves, blog or no blog.
Extramarital sex, as a topic, is very much part of what The Goddess came down here to talk about. More marriages break up these days early—within the first ten years—than later, and infidelity is often at the heart of them. I’m not happy about the numbers.
But what kept me up is this: Harriet’s husband, for better or worse, is attempting not to go behind her back with his desires; but to include her.
Possibly he’s saying to her, “Look, we’re at a dead end; I’m feeling sexual but not with you and we’re not at our best right now and I DON’T WANT TO CHEAT…so, could we try it together? Could that save us? Can we, in other words, write our own script for our marriage—keep it alive in ways that other people haven’t been able to, because they didn’t try to break the mold together?”
You don’t want to blow off a husband like that, whether he’s wrongheaded or not. Is he just setting you up for something that’s hopeless and bound to destroy—as I believe he is, even if he doesn’t know it? Is he trying to broaden the confines of an institution whose rigid rules are old as the hills, and whose entrants are now far more sophisticated than they once were? It’s worth serious time and talk to find out what’s really going on. And what about YOUR desires–for his fidelity and your own? Where are they in this? Who’s putting pressure on whom?
As one who has studied marriage and love and sexuality for more years than I can tell you, I’m a huge advocate of stretching marriage to accommodate two very big people. Stretching it, that is, so it houses people far too experienced and sophisticated and autonomous to fit inside the kind of marriage that our grandparents had. Institutions don’t change; it is the people in it who will be the ones to stretch marriage, to make it whatever they need it to be for them—for their own unique, private selves. And the truth is, the most unconventional people are best at doing what works best for them. They often have the most successful marriages.
That said, the reason “opening” a marriage to other sexual partners is a nightmare of unexpected, explosive, primitive, infantile feelings that cannot later be “fixed”; the reason I hold fast to my initial advice, even though I technically need to know more about this couple than I was told, is because our sexuality is wild; it cannot be negotiated. You can’t say, Here, we’ll do THIS with it and give it to THOSE people, and you’ll feel THIS way about it and I’ll respond THAT way. We did that when we were single. And it didn’t even work then.
Thank you for your wonderful responses. This site is new, and my blog is new, and with your sensitive and smart comments, this will be a place to talk about this and many other explosive subjects, the ones hardest to talk about, with wisdom and emotional intelligence.
Thank you!
