Grown-up Marriage by JUDITH VIORST

Author:JUDITH VIORST
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: First Free Press
Published: 2003-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

In her impressive examination of the subject in a book entitled Adultery, sociologist Annette Lawson reports on the pleasures and the pains of adulterers.

FROM AWOMAN: “I cannot convey to you how marvelous

I felt…. I felt I had been made whole. That I had been made complete in some way.”

FROM A MAN: “I felt ten feet tall. I came out of there and knew I was alive…. I felt as if, suddenly, I was dealt a new set of cards as far as life was concerned.”

FROM A WOMAN: “I have learned to live without fierce sexual passion though I’m glad I had that brief experience to see what it was like.”

The pleasures of infidelity can include, along with fierce sexual passion, the joy of loving and being loved and needed; “novel and uncomplicated sex”; a friendship between the two lovers; the opportunity to expand the boundaries of self; “pleasure in conquest … a boost to be thought attractive”; and the excitement, the drama, the giddy fun of having a risky sexual adventure. “Marriage tames adventure to a journey involving hard work but little play, …” writes Professor Lawson, “with little opportunity for heroism or rebellion, excitement or danger. Indeed, the only heroism may be in overcoming obstacles in making the marriage work and endure.” She notes that adultery offers husbands and wives “the chance to play—the chance to escape from marriage as the emotional and everyday workplace.”

Adultery also offers pain, however, often in conjunction with the pleasure but sometimes drastically overwhelming the pleasure.

FROM A MAN: “I felt sick-—really sick. I mean I had to stop the car and get out to vomit. I felt so awful.”

FROM A WOMAN: “The whole affair made me … ill. I just couldn’t cope. All the lies and everything. Horrible.”

FROM A MAN: “By everything I’d been taught and knew, it was wrong.”

The pains of committing adultery include living a life of falsehood and deception, of alibis and excuses and sneaking around. Dubin, the unfaithful husband in Bernard Malamud’s Dubin’s Lives, “worried about the spreading dishonesty he was into. Awful, if you thought of yourself as an honest man.” And Laura, married to Fred but in love with Alec in the movie Brief Encounter, observes that “it’s awfully easy to lie when you know you are trusted implicitly—and so very degrading.” There is also the guilt of doing harm (even if it’s not known) to an innocent party, the guilt of breaking a vow, of committing a sin. And because, as one wife told me, “I’m not just a bad human being; I’m also a very bad liar,” there’s the constant anxiety about getting caught.

Some wives and husbands, of course, never get caught and never tell—on the grounds that “the truth would kill him” or “what my wife doesn’t know won’t hurt her” or “it’s over and done with so why should I make us both miserable?” They never tell because the relief that confession would offer them would be outweighed by the damage it would do.

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