|
When I began seeing my current boyfriend, he had another girlfriend, who was seeing another guy. Since the very thing that broke up my last marriage was my former husband’s infidelity, it seemed to me that I was putting myself right back into danger, and so for a long time we refrained from identifying our relationship even as a “relationship.” We were friends, then “all-inclusive friends.” A turning point came about six months in, when the other girlfriend broke up with her other boyfriend and said to Jack, “Well, I guess it’s just you and me again,” and he said to her, “Well, you, me, and Jane.” Within a few weeks, she had another boyfriend.
Sometimes we would have dinner together, all four of us, but our dinners were, to say the least, volatile. Even so, all of the relationships, mine with him, his with her, hers with the other guy, endured, and not without pain and jealousy on the part of every single one of us. But we had a principle. We were not married, and, further, we didn’t wish to take marriage as our paradigm. Couples in America begin taking marriage as their paradigm almost as soon as they begin dating: going steady, exchanging rings, or whatever. It takes real conviction and unusual stubbornness to flout the paradigm, and I, for one, needed help to do so. More than anything, I wanted another marriage to close over my head like the surface of a vast sea, preventing me from acquiring any real understanding of myself, my sexuality, and my ways of relating to men. The other girlfriend and her very central place in the life of the man I loved prevented that, and her own refusal to allow her sexual freedom to be restricted offered a model of an alternative.
Some men and women have the knack of being so delightfully present that time with them is worthwhile no matter what, whether or not any promises about exclusiveness have been made. There are people in whom freedom is the very essence of their appeal, and those who love them have to make the choice: Is the desire to possess, in and of itself, more worth pursuing than the relationship with that delightful person, and, if so, why? Or is that relationship, whatever it entails, the valuable thing?
Fidelity, more than anything else, is the signifier of marriage. To forswear fidelity is to open yourself up to other ideas, others thoughts, about what love is, what desire is, what happiness is, and what commitment is.
-- Jane Smiley, “Why Do We Marry?,” Harper’s Magazine
|
