Are you faithful, darling? By Erica Jong

Europeans mate with their hearts but marry with their heads. Americans want it all in one neat package.

"Are you faithful, darling?" The answer to this question is always yes, says my friend who lives in Paris. "But, of course," he goes on, over a scrumptious lunch of stuffed roast lamb with wild mushrooms at Maxim's, "Europeans know better than ever to ask that question. It is just assumed that monogamy is rare, if not impossible, among lively people, and the question never comes up."

Whether my friend's observation is true or not (for I have many European friends who do seem to care deeply about their mate's fidelity), it certainly does seem that Europeans see marriage differently than Americans do.

Marriage is for stability, friendship, children; love is for the adrenaline highs and lows of sexual madness, the romance of being appreciated by anew person, the joys of flirting, pursuing, and clandestine coupling.

Being thoroughly American (despite all the time I spend in Europe), my life has been a tribute to the American way of serial monogamy: passionate exclusive attachments, most of which have lasted about seven years. I am a bonder, a marrier, who marries for love against all reason and who stays as long as love lasts.

But the having and growing of children, gardens, libraries, and art collections seem to demand something more permanent than romantic love allows. And now I, too, am beginning to wonder whether the European way isn't more pragmatic, more intelligent, finally more durable. The American "system (if we may call it anything so formal as that) is the romantic's way and the European is the classicist's. The roar of outrage that greeted Shere Hite's assertion that 70 percent of American wives married more than five years are unfaithful just goes to show how against American values this notion of "open" marriage is: Americans idealistically imagine their marriages closed. If they are in fact open, we really don't want to know about it. Perhaps we are witnessing here different ideals of the relations between the sexes rather than two different systems. Americans believe in perfect, bonded romantic love that lasts; Europeans do not. Which is not to say that they do not love—only that they think marriage is too important to be based on anything as flimsy as romantic love.
Romantic love is by its nature delusional, brief, a madness; married love is pragmatic, enduring, sane. We Americans hope that one will grow into the other. Europeans know that the two are by nature polar opposites.
Romantic love thrives on differences: She speaks Japanese; he only speaks Amurrican. He is a gondolier who wants to be a famous artist; she is a famous artist who wants to be (or love) a gondolier.
Romantic love thrives on obstacles. Married love thrives on convenience. Romantic love takes two unlikely people and brings them together despite the odds; married love takes two likely people and keeps them together against the odds.
And so we come to the question with which we opened: "Are you faithful, darling?" Perhaps the answer should be "yes—I am always faithful to our marriage." Then comes the inevitable dilemma of whether one can be faithful to a marriage and bed others. I, for one, have never been able to manage this—but perhaps the inability is a character defect on my part. When I love wholly, I make a whole commitment, and when that commitment begins to break down in the sexual area, I know I am on to some deep discontent I have to not yet owned. For me, sex and love are not very easily separable. Romping recreational sex always seems like a lesser pleasure than great—if angst-filled—romantic love.
But with maturity, couldn't one find another way of loving? I can imagine two deep friends and soul mates, two travelers from a distant asteroid (of the mind) reunited on this planet, whose bond was so deep, so abiding that they dared to experience other loves and even share them with each other. I have had one such relationship in my life, for nearly two decades. It has outlasted two of my three marriages and many of my friendship. It did not begin as a sexual union but it has outdistanced my most passionate love affairs. It takes as a given that the friendship that endures between lovers is more vital than the sexual love that flares between friends. It is based on a common heritage: We both come from a distant galaxy far away and feel ourselves to be stranger on a strange planet. We both need kinship, communion, and nurturing; we both need occasionally to go mad with an earthling; we always come back to each other. What we have together cannot be threatened because it is something we have found with no one else. We have spent whole nights awake in bed with our legs and arms wrapped around each other, talking about everything in this or any other universe. We get up in the morning refreshed as if we had slept—because the sharing we have experienced has in fact been more refreshing than sleep. There is little doubt that this chemistry is impervious to the pollution of outside elements. No one can duplicate the dialogue we create when we are together. We float through the world in a bubble of laughter made up of two parts pun, one part aphorism, three parts poetry, and the rest pure beluga caviar. (We also do a lot of eating!) Who could rival this mixture? I neither know nor care whether it has a name. But I am sure that it is precious and irreplaceable.
Two people who have found such chemistry between them have little to fear from the beast of territoriality—or do they? We humans are territorial creatures, by nature jealous and threatened. Like dogs, we tend to piss on things to mark our territory. A relationship like the one I describe can only be shared by two supremely secure superspacetravelers. They must feel complete enough, fulfilled enough, separate-but-equal enough not to fear the wandering mongrel who barks in their yard. If one member of this dup succumbs to fear, the game is lost, for it is based upon freedom on both sides. The one who mistakes the wedding ring (or any symbol of commitment) for a pair of handcuffs changes the game and runs the risk of escalating it into a world war. The freedom must be freely given, given by both, and its greatest enemy is resentment. I think very few people are capable of such a union. It presupposes too many equalities: emotional equality, material equality, intellectual equality. There must also be certain unbreakable ground rules, honesty being the first.
The only relationship of this sort that has been historically documented (prior to the one I share with my special friend) is that of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.
The answer to the question "Are you faithful, darling?" was always a resounding no in their case. At first, like any woman in love, Simone de Beauvoir suffered the hell of jealousy. Hers was the courageous and pioneering position of a woman of her time and standing never marrying, yet being emotionally and intellectually committed to her special human being. His was more usual for his sex: having a harem of "contingent loves" but also one special woman to come home to in spirit (for Beauvoir and Sartre always maintained separate quarters). As the years went on, however, the union tested both parties equally. It usually came to a crisis when either Sartre or Beauvoir encountered a "contingent" lover who was not content to remain contingent. The understanding of the two principals did not always extend to others. Nelson Algren, the novelist, Beauvoir's Chicago love, could not understand why Beauvoir would not marry him when her relationship with Sartre had long since ceased being sexual. He did not understand and could not accept the primacy of the other man in her life.
And so we come to the crunch: the issue of primacy. If human beings can accept sexual infidelity from their partners, they cannot easily accept the primacy of another lover or friend. What happens in "peacetime" when several lovers can exist in relative harmony (or unknowingness) is no indication of what happens in "wartime" when one lover asserts, demands, or needs primacy over the other. When one lover is ill, in trouble, under fire, in need—what then is the understanding amongst the parties? For most of history, the double standard has prevailed: women have accepted polygamy from men, but men have been loath to accept polyandry from women. What happens in a situation of equality has rarely, if ever, been tested.
"Are you faithful, darling?" is no simple question when everyone is young and fit and solvent. Imagine how difficult it becomes when people get older, sicker, and poorer. Perhaps there should be communes for former lovers, now become good friends. There's a Utopia! I can imagine all these older lovers put out to pasture, sniping harmlessly at each other in some sunny clime—say, the south of France. Is that how I want to spend my declining years? Actually, I don't expect and declining years. (But then, who does?) I expect to go off into the sunset with one special friend and find or buy or borrow an island in the South Pacific where we can welcome all our other friends and ex-lovers. Hopefully, they will only visit for brief intervals. But if they stay (and I've had houseguests who stayed for years), then, in our communal situation, we really will have to find an answer to the question "Are you faithful, darling?" The fidelity will not have to do with sex so much as with friendship—not to mention who gets the biggest palm fronds and coconuts. By then I hope we'll all have learned how to overcome territoriality. It has no place on our island, as it has no place on my home planet. Planet Earth could learn a lot from the inhabitants of my planet. Her name is Venus.

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