108 What in any case is at least as evil as the affaire itself is a situation in which, beckoning in its aura of amoral modernity, it stands as a smart sanctuary, an escape from the pressures of society, as a recompense for having to die, as all sorts of things it partly is but should not essentially be. For in an age where such a relationship still has to be described as officially ilhcit it is obvious that however innocently it is entered and enjoyed, it will be in conflict with all those unpermissive modes of thought and conscience, the communal superego, that society has had us taught.
109 Most adolescents and pre-adults are naturally confused by two drives that mimic each other: the drive towards sexual experience (in itself part of a deeper drive towards the hazardous and adventurous) and the drive towards love as institutionalized in marriage (in itself part of the drive towards certainty and security). They find it difficult to separate the two; what starts as one can in even a few moments become the other. A desire to kiss becomes the desire to live together for a lifetime, the decision to marry becomes the abrupt yearning for another body.
110 Much more of the sexual education of adolescents should be devoted to teaching them the aetiology of love; this is just as important as the physiology of coitus.
111 There is a widespread belief that love and sex are incompatible. That if you have considerable sexual experience you cannot love (Don Juan); and that if you love (maintain a permanent relationship like marriage) you will sooner or later cease to enjoy sex. The belief is strengthened by the regarding of marriage as a mere licensing of sex instead of as an affirmation of love. If you sternly forbid the affaire to the unmarried, you must not expect them to understand marriage for what it should be: the intention to love, not the desire to enjoy coitus licitly.
112 The charm of the illicit sexual experience is sometimes almost as much that it is illicit as that it is sexual. When Meaulnes eventually refound his domaine perdu, domaine sans nom, when at last he met the mysterious Yvonne de Galais again, what did he do? He ran away after the very first night of their marriage.*
113 When the individual is being attacked on all sides by the forces of anti-individuality; by the nemo; by the sense that death is absolute, by the dehumanizing processes of both mass production and mass producing: the affaire represents not only an escape into the enchanted garden of the ego but also a quasi-heroic gesture of human defiance.
114 Just as art is being used by the individual as an outlet for the resentments caused by the inadequacies of society, so is the affaire. It is a day spent playing truant from an excruciatingly dull and wintry school. The whole of contemporary popular art is based on this notion. Listen to the lyrics of ‘pop’ music. Compare the sexuality of a figure like James Bond with that of figures like Maigret or Sherlock Holmes.
115 The same can be said for advertising. Cigarettes are not recommended for their quality as cigarettes but as the right accompaniment to the affaire; recipients, the advertisers say, can be ‘won’, ‘seduced’, ‘enchanted’ (shades of the love philtre) by all sorts of innocent objects – chocolates, pens, jewelry, packaged holidays, and the rest. Similar tendencies can be seen in much car and clothing advertising, though here the appeal is that of the aphrodisiac rather than of the love philtre. This car makes a man more virile; this dress suggests a Messalina. Even fabrics have moral associations woven into them by the publicity men. You no longer buy black leather, you buy its suggestions of sadistic perversion.
116 The extramarital affaire becomes particularly sirenlike after several years of marriage. There is among husbands a kind of
117 For the would-be adulterous husband or wife the pressures to enter into an affaire may be less, and the penalties greater, than they are for the unmarried person. The moral issue is generally much clearer; but other factors, such as the sharper sense of failure or dissatisfaction that age brings, the memory of premarital affaires (or the memory of the lack of them), the monotony of marriage and the general climate of a society intoxicated by permissivity, may make the objectively clear issue subjectively harder to see now than ever before in history.
118 Pleasure may come to seem a responsibility; while responsibility may rarely come to seem what it can be, a pleasure. How many marriages break because so many marriages break?
119 When the whole philosophy of a capitalist society can be reduced to this: You owe yourself as much as you can get, whether it be in money, in status, in possessions, in enjoyments, or in experiences. Can pleasure not become a duty?
120 The tendency of any capitalist society is to turn all experiences and relationships into objects, objects that can be assessed on the same scale of values as washing machines and central heating, that is, by the comparative cheapness of the utility and pleasurability to be derived from it. Furthermore, the tendency in an overpopulated and inflation-fearing society is to make things expendable, and therefore to make expendability a virtue and pleasure. Throw the old object away and get a new. As we are haunted by the affaire, so are we haunted by the pursuit of the new, and these ghosts are brothers.
121 Fathers and mothers no longer see their children as children; as they grow they see them increasingly as rivals in the enjoyment race. What is more, rivals who seem bound to win. However harmless it is, whenever a change of social habits brings more pleasure into the world, some older people will object, simply because they had to do without the change when they were young, and others will frantically and foolishly try to catch up. It is not just chastity, morality and marriage that are under attack, but the whole traditional concept of what we are and what we are for.
122 Some suggest that we are moving into an age when it will be considered normal that one should have sexual relationships as one wants and with whom one wants, regardless of other social ties. They say this will be possible because copulation will come to seem no more significant than dancing or conversing as one wants or with whom one wants. In such a society there would be nothing exceptionable about coitus in public; and the queues that now form to see Fonteyn and Nureyev would form to see skilled practitioners in an even older art. We should, in short, have returned to ancient pre-Christian ideas of sex as an activity that does not require any special privacy, nor evoke any special inhibitions. It is dimly possible that this depuritanization of sex will one day take place; but for as long as the present sexual conventions, licit and illicit, supply some deeper need of man in an unsatisfying society, it will not.
123 In an education in humanity the teaching on this matter must surely be based on the following considerations:
(A) One great argument for more teaching of self-analysis, and for more analysis of the self in general, is that half the pain caused by the affaire and the broken marriage, and the very causing itself, is due to the ignorance of each of both each and the other.
(B) The excessive commercialization of sex, and especially of the affaire, is not the brightest jewel in capitalism’s crown.
(C) Of all activities, sex is the least amenable to general judgements. It is always relative, always situational. It is as silly to proscribe it as to prescribe it. All that can be done is to educate about it.
(D) To teach the physiology of sex without the psychology of love is to teach all about a ship except how to steer it.
(E) Spokesmen for ‘morality’ have no right to condemn or to try to prevent any kind of sexual relationship unless they can demonstrate that it is bringing society more unhappiness than happiness. It is always easy to produce illegitimacy, divorce, and veneral disease statistics; but the statistics of sexual happiness are harder to come by.
(F) A child is a law against adultery; and though an adulterer can no longer break the law, he can still break the child. But as children grow, divorce becomes less and less a crime, since the disharmony the growing child increasingly takes note of may do as much harm as the ending of the marriage.
(G) Just as surgery can be abused, so can divorce. But that a thing can be abused is never an argument against it.
(H) The noblest relationship is marriage, that is, love. Its nobility resides in its altruism, the desire to serve another beyond all the pleasures of the relationship; and in its refusal ever to regard the other as a thing, an object, a utilizability.
(I) Sex is an exchange of pleasures, of needs; love is a giving without return.
(J) It is this giving without return, this helping without reward, this surplus of pure good, that identifies the uniqueness of man as well as the true nature of the true marriage. This is the quintessence the great alchemy of
