“Thou art sad; get thee a wife, get thee a wife!” —All’s Well That Ends Well
Let me say at the outset that I’m not sure I’m qualified to write this article, having been married four times — though my wife Janice does not seem especially troubled, especially after I explained I was merely marrying my way to her. One might even say in my defense that I’ve had lots of practice and may actually have learned a thing or two about how to manage and survive this most profound of mysteries. I was encouraged to discover that my early philosophical hero Bertrand Russell also reveled in four wives. Multiple marriages may be construed as a protracted rite of passage.
I have often pondered my marriages, their ups and downs, their joys and miseries, their loyalties and betrayals, and in three instances, their melancholy break-ups. It’s said that there are always two sides to a question, so it’s often unclear who is responsible for a failed relationship. Though in my case I generally tend to endorse Jimmy Buffett’s conclusion in “Margaritaville“: “It’s my own damn fault.” At least, I didn’t pursue the Bluebeard option.
Among relatives, friends, and acquaintances, scarcely a single union has remained intact, no doubt a feature of our morally fractured and narcissistic times, an age, we might say, of bed and circuses. Political and social frictions have also taken their toll in so vexed and querulous a culture as ours — a Republican married to a Democrat, a Trump supporter hitched to a Biden voter, a COVID-19 skeptic paired with an avid jabber. All too often, I have seen such couples disintegrate or remain unhappily together for lack of a viable alternative.
It makes sense to recognize that sexual and romantic partners have a better chance of living happily together if they share a decisive number of basic ideas, habits, expectations, and traditions, disagreeing only on minor matters or, when something more serious may arise, arriving at feasible ways of resolving disputes. In “12 Rules for Life,” Jordan Peterson explains that when he and his wife experienced a sometimes deep disagreement, “we would separate briefly, she to one room, me to another,” where they would question the motives behind their irritation and anger. If the interrogation is honest, “then you can go back to your partner and reveal why you are an idiot.”
Well, maybe. It usually takes me a day or two of simmering, a bottle of Scotch, and a terrible feeling of loneliness before I can apologize or am ready to receive an apology. Luckily, such catering to self doesn’t happen often. But it’s a more natural if more painful way of arriving at a denouement, I believe. Peterson’s is more clinical — but then, he’s a professional psychologist. The great man once told me that if a couple agree on too many things, there could be problems ahead — a dictum I find passing strange. Many people, it must be said, just bury the issue that agitates them or damages the relationship, try to forget about it, and hope it doesn’t emerge again. This is what I call a whack-a-mole marriage, and it never works.
What we call “open marriages” are generally, or should be, non-starters. They are rarely successful and, at least in my estimation and despite what the avant-garde may affirm, cannot kindle a genuine sense of intimacy and togetherness between two people. I had a friend, a well-known university professor, who arrived at such an arrangement with his wife. All went reasonably well for a time until his wife’s paramour fell in love with her and created more trouble than he was worth. Meanwhile, my friend continued to indulge in his desultory affairs. His wife then took a second lover and my friend would come home to discover all manner of sex-related paraphernalia on the night table. He began to feel an intense discomfort and jealousy that, even when he put his liaisons behind him, continued to tear the marriage apart. This is only one instructive example among several I’ve been privy to.
I also know, both from literary history and personal experience, of marriages in which the men were unfaithful and the women not, as if indicative of what may be a biological fact, males spreading their seed and females preserving the bloodline — a major motif in Shakespeare’s plays. The great poet William Butler Yeats had an affair with a young poetess, which his wife Georgie Hyde-Lees did not object to and even encouraged — the poet was elderly and needed an inspirational boost, and he was, be it said, one of the cynosures of the Western canon. He deserved a little slack, apparently. Aldous Huxley’s wife Maria procured for him, and the couple also enjoyed a long-lived threesome with Mary Hutchinson. Whether that makes the wife unfaithful is another question, since in the latter case she participates equally with her husband.
I’m not suggesting that I recommend such practices, but despite the raging polemics of contemporary feminism or the disapproval of normal women, there is, admittedly, a patriarchal element in such indulgences that no amount of criticism and virulence will totally dispel. It seems part of the biological package. At the same time, women are no more exempt from such temptations, so it seems to be part of the “human package” as well. In any event, couples have to figure out these disruptions for themselves and find a strategy for taming nature rather than offloading their problems to some presumptive expert’s guidance.
For I do not believe that marriage counseling is anything but a professional deception as if marriage were an object with moving parts and a counselor an ersatz mechanic whose expertise must inevitably lack projective inwardness and who may have an agenda of her own. (Such therapists are usually women, it seems.) A close friend of many years whose marriage was in shambles after he discovered his wife’s infidelity agreed to consult a counselor together with his partner. He noted that the specialist kept snapping pencils in two, the symbolism of which did not escape him.
He came to understand that the therapeutic impetus of modern culture was a vast and destructive illusion, eating away at personal agency and priapic self-assertion. He felt that the remedial mindset that pervades contemporary society produces the gradual erosion of personal integrity and moral accountability. Now re-married to a young and affable woman, he prefers the teaching of the Kabbalah, which proclaims that when a man and a woman unite in love and compatibility, an angel is born. This is another way of saying that one must find the right partner to keep the devil at bay.
When it comes to love and marriage, the complexity, the discrepant, and even the incoherence seem unavoidable regardless of intention and good faith. Shakespeare begins one of his most well-known sonnets with the resonant phrase “Let me not to the marriage of true minds/Admit impediments; love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds.” “True” means straight, but the poem develops the idea of “error,” literally crookedness, wandering, bending, or infidelity. Even if one will be unfaithful — “though rosy lips and cheeks/Within his bending sickle’s compass come” — the other will forgive and will not admit impediments. This is a tall order, clearly, and requires a certain heroic temperament not all of us possess.
Conservative thinker John Derbyshire addresses the same issue in his charming novel “Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream,” which reads like a narrative gloss on Sonnet 116. He walks a fine line between error and truth, showing how forgiveness can lead to understanding and reconciliation, almost as if a marriage foundering on infidelity can be mended like a sort of kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken vases with gold lacquer. But what goes for ceramics may not go for the more tortuous art of human relations.
It’s a prickly problem. What is to be done? Best, of course, to remain “true,” if only after preliminary “error.” To remain stoic if life becomes problematic. To follow the dictate of Paul in Ephesians 5: “So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies…” and the wife see that she reverence her husband. And it is important, as well, to be modest and playful and even a tad self-deprecating, as in Woody Allen’s winsome quip: “Basically my wife was immature. I’d be at home in the bath and she’d come in and sink my boats.”
For a marriage to stay afloat, husband and wife must pledge not to sink one another’s boats except in the bath.