For Fidelity

Intimacy in Relationships

Casual Sex

I argued throughout the preceding chapter, in various ways, that sexual desire is far more than a simple physiological need. Sexual desire is powerfully and intricately interwoven with the deepest levels of human identity and with the most difficult questions we have about who we are or what it means to be human. Sexual desire can be repressed, or it can be heedlessly indulged, or it can become a calculated part of a marketplace exchange. Or, I will propose in this chapter, sexual desire can be integrated into the whole of who we are. The question, of course, is how. How or where does sexual desire "belong" in the whole that we are?

The answer demands a return to my initial observation about sexual desire: It cannot be genuinely satisfied on the cheap or by the solitary individual. At its most potent, most vital, most delightful levels, sexual desire must be reciprocated to be sated. That's why we cannot "locate" an appropriate sexuality without considering the human relationship in which it is realized or enacted. We need to know the basis of the interaction in which sexual intercourse participates. Is it really mutual, for instance? Are both partners offering and seeking the same things? Consider rape, or prostitution, or the sexual abuse of a child. Consider how sexual access has been demanded as a condition of employment, promotion, business contracts, or social acceptance. The disparities are self-evident. It's easy to see what's wrong, which is a first step toward articulating an appropriate sexual relationship.

It may not be as easy to see what is wrong with what I have called "marketplace" sexual ethics. Consider this scenario, for instance: Two adults meet at one of those exhausting and tedious professional meetings held in banal hotels near the airports of cold, bleak cities. After three days of grueling seminars predicting the imminent collapse of the industry that employs them, they decide to join a few friends in skipping the Annual Self-Congratulatory Dinner. They pile themselves into a couple of cabs and head off for real food somewhere remote from the peculiar antiseptic smell of big hotels. They share a meal and a few drinks, grousing and joking and telling stories in the usual friendly way of bored and lonely strangers at meetings. En route back to the hotel, the two people we are watching find themselves distinctly enjoying the physical attraction that has buzzed about the edges of their interactions over the last few hours and days. They linger in the lobby as the group disperses, quite aware that they
are very attracted to each other.

There is the possibility here of a free, independent sexual exchange between mature adults who are equal to each other in age, status, and so forth: just tonight, no strings, no phone calls later, no promises, and no regrets. Good contraception, let us suppose. Safe sex. Privacy assured. Suppose both are single and neither is willing to consider a permanent relationship. Or suppose they are, both of them, actively looking for life partners; or suppose one is. Or suppose one or both are married. Under any of these circumstances, is a casual sexual encounter OK?

My short answer in any of these situations is no, and my long answer is the burden of this chapter. Casual sexual encounters are morally wrong because the exchange is partial even when it is entirely equal or open or honest. Sex in these situations is not genuinely reciprocal but rather mutually exploitative and, ultimately, mutually self-denigrating. In such an exchange, each regards his or her own sexual desire as a primarily physiological need essentially separable from the deeper psychological and emotional union that is physically enacted in sexual intercourse. I contend that we cannot split ourselves into parts like that.

Body and heart or soul are one. Any attempt to dissociate them is both doomed and dangerous, and that is how casual sex injures even free and willing participants. It severs vital connections within the self, thereby silencing or at least muting one of the most powerful and literally vital foundations of our richest and most creative relationships with other people. Casual sex easily devastates the capacity for serious sex.

This risk remains inescapable even if the sex is much less casual than this imaginary encounter between people who have known each other only briefly. I contend that we are not wise to regard sexual intercourse as an essentially ordinary and acceptable expression of affection between men and women who have made no permanent commitment to each other. Of course, many people will disagree with me, in effect arguing that sexual desire can be merely an appetite or a friendly gesture in some relationships and yet still retain its role as the symbolic embodiment of commitment when they are ready to make that sort of commitment. The disagreement has less to do with sex, I believe, than with the philosophy of symbol and the psychology of symbolic expression and perception--which leads quickly into complex theories of imagination and creativity.

Those woods are lovely, dark and deep; let me but steal a twig and then keep going. I said at the beginning that sexual fidelity is an art, and like all arts it is dependent upon disciplines and practices learned and sustained over time and within communities. Let me take that idea one step further. These disciplines and practices--and especially the most embodied or material and "technical" of them--provide the crucial foundation for symbolic perception and expression. The glorious coherence and lucidity and passion of a fine musical performance are not possible except through years of excruciating discipline, both in the exact actions of fingers or other parts of the body and in the detailed material and technical aspects of music and musical composition. Literature too involves an array of word choices and technical strategies that critics spend lifetimes trying to understand and to appreciate. The art that is sexual fidelity also depends upon a deeply complex, not fully conscious array of spiritual and m
aterial aesthetic practices and disciplines. Casual sex, even between good friends, threatens to inhibit or unduly complicate the practice of faithful sex just as, in any artistic practice, it is difficult to overcome "careless" techniques learned early in one's career.

One does not need to be an artist or art critic to know how this reality works. Mistype a word once, and of course you are apt to keep mistyping it that way for the rest of the day. In the era before spell-checkers, I copied the list of words I persistently misspelled onto the inside cover of the dictionary I still keep next to my keyboard: I gave up hope of getting them straight in my mind. It's and its; to, too, two; that and which: Get them confused for too long early in life, and you will be doomed to keeping them taped to your monitor for the rest of your days. That's not a matter of intelligence. It's the power of embodiment, eyes and fingers together establishing neuron pathways.

As recent reports about the brain document, we are all the creatures of past experience, the more powerfully so in the less conscious and more highly embodied aspects of our lives. Erotic responsiveness is extraordinarily complex and subtle, so we are wise indeed to approach its depths with great care for what we understand to be its ultimate significance in our lives. To the extent that sexual fidelity is understood to be a central virtue, casual sex of any kind is, at the very least, an unwise risk. Plenty of folks come through apparently unscathed, I realize. But I still think it is a significant risk, particularly for people who might be sexually active for ten or fifteen years prior to marriage. For a vocalist or a violinist, that much "bad practice" would be devastating.

We teach our kids to be honest in all things, even in small things, because life's most important moments of costly integrity depend upon exactly the same consistent spiritual discipline and practice across time. We correct their lapses not in high moral outrage but with the quiet persistence of piano teachers reproving a stiff flat finger or baseball coaches correcting batting stance: "Not like that, like this." "Here's how," taught with care and learned with care, involves the transmission of many "habits" whose meaning and value become clear only after a long time. People achieve full or mature integrity only by internalizing it so that they know for themselves and in themselves exactly what is at stake in any particular situation they face as adults. The same is true of sexual fidelity: It can't be reduced to a simple list of "do" and "don't" that will obviate the need to develop mature judgment and self-knowledge. The best guide to sexual fidelity is a life of fidelity--to self and to other--in all of our social encounters.

Defining Marriage

I have said that serious sex is among the most vital foundations of our capacity for rich and creative relationships with other people. Let's go back to that idea. What is so vital here? Sexual intercourse, I am claiming, ought to be the exclusive and embodied language of commitment between two people. Traditionally, that sort of commitment is called "matrimony." Individual relationships of this kind are called "marriages" for heterosexuals and "domestic partnerships" for homosexuals, although that usage seems to be changing. Over the past thirty years, increasing numbers of straight couples--especially among retired folks and young professionals--have lived together in seriously committed relationships but wanted to avoid the massive legal and financial implications of contractual marriage. Some gay couples, meanwhile, have sought the protections and the provisions that the legal contract offers. I need to set aside the contractual issues; I don't know enough about the legal and financial implications to ha
ve a credible opinion.

Furthermore, my interest is not in the law but in the human relationship of serious, committed sexual fidelity, a relationship that I mostly refer to as "marriage." Marriage, I propose, is an alliance for its own sake and not for some good or goal or project extrinsic to the relationship itself. It is not matrimony if someone marries in order to have children, in order to enjoy greater economic security or benefits, in order to earn society's approval, in order to have a noninfectious or socially sanctioned outlet for sexual desire. In matrimony, two lives are lived together for the sake of being lived together; two lives are shared for the sake of the sharing.

All sorts of other goods may follow of their own accord. They probably will, in fact. But all sorts of increased sufferings will also follow of their own accord. As Sir Francis Bacon wryly observed, he who marries yields hostages to fortune. Lives that are shared are lives at risk both for each other's joy and for each other's pain. We marry "for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health" and not as a prudent investment. In this time of AIDS, gay couples have heroically demonstrated what matrimonial fidelity can entail. Whether or not you have watched a couple struggle to the end with AIDS, surely everyone has at one time or another seen a married couple steadfastly endure through the catastrophic illness of one partner. Such duress makes public and easily visible the lineaments of fidelity that are so seldom otherwise evident.

Most teenagers do not realize just how hard life really is for most people most of the time, an innocent but implacable oblivion around which we have to navigate in talking to them about matrimony and sexual ethics. It doesn't help, in this difficult process, that most of us are also disinclined to think seriously about the suffering around us all the time. We just cope as best we can: "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." But for a moment here we need to consider the sad fact that life is reliably difficult for every one of us. That difficulty makes marriage an imprudent undertaking, at least if you are calculating a cost-benefit bottom line for yourself. Maybe that's why most of us marry young, while we are still unconsciously certain of our own omnipotence and invulnerability. But if matrimony is not merely a cost-benefit gamble, then what is it? It took me a very long time to realize that I did not know, or at least to realize how imprudent matrimony is and how amazingly complicated as well.

When I married Warren, a year after we graduated from the university we had both attended, getting married seemed quite conventional. A white dress, a church, an obsequious caterer--all of that. Bastille Day 1973 was the hottest, muggiest day Chicago knows how to provide. My hair curled so intensely it almost worked free of my head altogether; the veil perched atop this unruly mop like something borrowed from Charlie Chaplin. I had bought my dress in February, when the temperature was well below zero and I was recovering from the flu: It had a high neck and long sleeves. It was a beautiful dress--for February. In mid-July I clutched the prie-dieu in a stifling church and repeated after myself, "Thou shalt not faint; thou shalt not faint." I didn't faint, but I did hear the mutterings of some still, small voice arguing that here was proof positive that I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't want to listen. I pitched the veil into the back seat of my father's Ford, and we took damp but grateful refuge in the
air-conditioned restaurant where luncheon was served.

Six years later, also in July, our friend Helen came for a weekend visit; by the time she left, that little voice was sounding a lot more clearly in my ears. Helen is tall but delicate, with long, graceful hands and pale blue eyes. On yet another stifling Saturday afternoon, Helen and I strolled for a couple of miles along the Lake Michigan shoreline parks in Evanston. She was thinking about marrying the fellow she had been dating, and she had come for the weekend to ask the kinds of questions old friends can ask each other. How had I come to the decision to marry Warren?

Helen had a list of questions, in fact, and as we walked along, the conversation began to feel a lot like oral comprehensive exams. Had I considered his attitude toward money? Toward children? Toward his career? Toward mine? Toward my family? Had I considered his family? Their demands on him? Their expectations of me? What about his parents' marriage? Were there dysfunctional households anywhere in his family? Inheritable diseases? Did I consider the fact that we both have asthma? Myopia? Did I consider whether we like the same weather, the same geography, the same kinds of vacations? Did I consider his taste in music? In clothes? In cooking? What about ethnic restaurants? Did my family meet his family prior to the engagement, and if so, had I taken into consideration the success of that event? Did his mother expect me to learn her Polish cooking? Did my crazy Irish clan know what to make of Warren's quiet, reserved demeanor?

They seemed like such reasonable questions, such prudent questions. I felt like an idiot. As we sat together on a park bench, Helen rolled her eyes to the sky and gestured upward in frustrated orison to whatever benevolent angel supervises ditsy women like me. Then she folded her arms and stared at me, every inch the young Harvard professor. I gulped and tried again. I had various observations on these topics, I proposed. I had some great stories. Would stories do?

No. Helen wanted to know whether and how I had done something like premarital calculations on an imaginary psychosocial spreadsheet. She was trying to construct something like a Consumer's Guide to Husbands for herself. "Does Laundry: +2 (much better than average); Snores During Ragweed Season: -1 (somewhat worse than average)." By the time we got home again, back to our apartment high in an old brownstone, we had fallen silent. Helen kept glancing down at me with a distinctly worried look.

When Warren and I went to bed that night, I told him about the conversation that afternoon. He didn't have answers either.

"Did either of us think about what we were doing?" I asked. "Why did we do this?" We mulled it over for a while there in the dark, watching the curtains flap limply in the summer breeze.

"It wasn't a decision," Warren proposed at last. "Not a decision but a choice, a gut-level thing. It's not a conclusion; she's thinking too much. It's just something you do, something a lot bigger than thinking." I tried that out on Helen the next morning, but she was clearly skeptical.

"Did you think about whether he was thinking about it carefully enough?" she wanted to know. "Did you think he knew what he was getting into?"

Of course he didn't. And neither did I. No one can, no matter how detailed the premarital analysis: Marriage is always a leap of faith. It is far more than a merely intelligent decision: It is a voyage outward upon the deepest mysteries and paradoxes of the human condition.

Individualism and the Need for Fidelity

To an individualist like Helen, marriage is part of the larger project of self-affirmation: In matrimony, two individuals pursue their individual goals in some weakly defined federation of sovereign entities, a federation held together essentially by the goods each can supply the other, such as social propriety, sexual access, companionship, and so forth. We are in fact islands, individualism claims, but we can build bridges and maybe even breakwaters to protect both of us from the battering of a highly competitive society. "Courtship," from this perspective, becomes the consumerist scrutiny that Helen was hoping we could help her conduct thoroughly. If you are an individualist as smart, as careful, and as analytically trained as Helen, marriage looks like a speculative gamble. The young bed and wed blithely, but by age thirty or so marriage begins to look like cowboy-style venture capitalism using one's own deepest emotional reserves--and in an unregulated market besides, where everyone is looking out only for himself. "All's fair in love and war," we say. And some marriages end in the emotional equivalent of nuclear holocaust.

But I am convinced that there is something historically naive and psychologically simpleminded about the notion that a good life is one in which the individual achieves the fullest possible measure of self-esteem or self-investment in whatever values and ideas he or she has selected. I think it is shallow to suppose that the end or purpose of life is the highest possible degree of self-affirmation and self-realization. Ancient wisdom from all over the planet argues that self-absorption is a trap and not a liberation. There is something like a global moral consensus that there is more to life than me, myself, and I; there is more to you than what you can do for me. Learning how to live wisely, these spiritual disciplines insist, is something like a craft in which we spend most of our lives as apprentices "studying" with the "wise ones" of our own particular heritage and community.

Real intimacy, as I am defining it, confronts and discredits the radical individualism of our times by demonstrating the profound importance of human relationships. Just as new life depends upon and arises from sexual union, so the new growth that marks a living personality depends upon discoveries that can only happen within some level of intimate relationship, whether between matrimonial partners or between those dearest of friends who so nearly approximate mates. Without the clean and honest mirrors of intimate friendships, we are lost in that faceless crowd of faces made to meet the faces that they meet, faces designed to remain safely, anonymously conventional. Matrimony is thus the building block of all human community because it is the paradigm of friendship in general--differing in degree but not in kind. Real matrimony, as I am defining it, confronts and refutes the commonplace individualism of our times because it models a human relationship that is not centered upon the emotional equivalent of cos
t-benefit investment calculations.

Although matrimonial intimacy is the paradigm of the intimacy that underlies all real community, the fact remains that marriages are different in degree from friendships. I have argued that the full measure of human intimacy is necessarily sexual because our bodies are ourselves. We must undress, both emotionally and physically, in order to satisfy our deepest needs for fullest intimacy. But that undressing entails an equally full measure of vulnerability. Thus, complete intimacy cannot develop except within the security or the confidence of a serious and permanent commitment to the relationship. That's the difference in degree between good friends and marriage partners.

In the absence of full confidence in the reliability and seriousness of the commitment between partners, both common sense and psychic self-preservation will demand a guardedness, a holding back, a tentativeness that impedes the development of full intimacy. Or so I claim. And it is a claim, a premise, upon which much of my argument depends. Furthermore, it explains a key difficulty in talking to our kids about sex: The young are, on the whole, blissfully but unconsciously certain of their own invulnerability. They do not realize--as we do--how profoundly they can be hurt by a casual sexual affair or the sexual infidelity of a spouse.

Vulnerability and Compassion

I have argued at length that the fullest or richest realization of our sexuality takes place within committed relationships. We need that security not only for our own safety but also in order for our vulnerability to become fully conscious. Only as vulnerability becomes more conscious can it develop as it ought to develop. In the secure environment offered by a mature and committed relationship, vulnerability can be transformed from a lack or a deficiency into the gift of compassion, which is to say into the strength or the wisdom to understand that our suffering need never destroy us. Were we invulnerable, we would be heartless. Were we invulnerable, we would be incapable of relationships and incapable of creativity. Only as vulnerability evolves into compassion can we face life's pain with the serenity or equanimity that is the fruit of maturity.

There are many paths to that enlightenment; marriage is only one of many. In fact, I suspect that marriage is the least recognized of these paths. As I complained before, most accounts of the spiritual journey presume that the seeker is sexually ascetic if not entirely solitary. I understand that: Although in a quiet week I can spend eight or ten hours writing, I am primarily a homemaker presiding over a houseful of cereal bowls and soccer balls, physics books and fencing gear, art projects and biology projects and the unsewn pieces of quilts. Troops of teenagers thunder in and out, all of them hungry. It's distracting all right. And there are not as many quiet weeks as I might wish for. What little solitude I can find for prayer or for writing is precious indeed. Amid this commonplace reality, amid this suburban, middle-class, Midwest existence, I have slowly realized that spiritual discipline is required for anyone to sustain the intimacy that marriage is and requires. Jon Kabat-Zinn at one point describes his own babies as little Zen masters, parachuted into his life to demonstrate to him all over again how attached he can be to his own egotistic gratification. I laughed until I choked. But his wisdom has proved very helpful indeed.

Living with somebody, day in and day out, year after year after year, and especially with the added stress of childrearing, produces an incredible vulnerability between partners. That's why so many marriages fail. In a marriage, sexual union enacts and expresses that vulnerability and resolves it into some of the most powerful pleasure that life can offer anyone. Marital sex is thus a wellspring from which the roots of compassion are watered. It nourishes the creative, compassionate generativity that childrearing demands and that can be expressed in so many other ways as well. The power of sex both celebrates and strengthens the intimacy that full sexual development requires. If the spiritual journey is to be sexually realized rather than sexually ascetic, fidelity is crucial.

Acknowledging Each Other's Needs

I want to look more specifically at the vulnerabilities that couples experience within committed relationships, so as to delineate more clearly the role that fidelity plays in creating and sustaining intimacy. Fidelity is not a contract clause governing the organs of reproduction. Fidelity is not simply an agreement about sexual exclusivity. As I said in Chapter One, fidelity is intrinsic to the happiness and the life of a happy marriage. It's time to look closely at how that happens.

First of all, intimacy demands the acknowledgment of each other's needs at face value, without question. Your needs are no longer merely yours but as nearly my own as possible. If you say you need something, I need for you to have it--without second-guessing, without cautious, evaluative skepticism. That means that each must be responsible for evaluating the appropriateness of his or her own claims. A marriage is not a miniature free market in which every contender makes the largest demands that the system will tolerate. Marriage is an ethical commitment that resides within a network of ideas about right and wrong behavior.

Ethical demands--unlike wage or price demands--have internal boundaries or limits. We must be honest and mature in expressing our needs, so as to avoid both self-indulgence and injury to our spouses. And we must recognize that even legitimate needs cannot always be satisfied. Life is hard. But that is certainly not the fault of our spouses. It is not their responsibility to meet our needs but rather to live alongside us, with whatever unmet or unmeetable needs we may have. Recognizing how vulnerable each spouse is to the other, we must be cautious and mature in our demands even upon each other's empathy.

Nonetheless, there are myriad ways in which spouses can meet each other's needs, myriad generosities small and large wherein we can discover that it is in giving that we receive. For instance, I know a marriage in which she is deathly afraid of heights, probably a true acrophobic. His idea of the perfect vacation is climbing up a sheer rock face; since adolescence, he has spent a couple of weeks every summer climbing with a fellow who has been that sort of friend for decades. They literally put their lives in each other's hands. She doesn't go along to watch because she could not endure to. Home alone in Evanston, she worries. She calls me, and we go out for lemon bars and coffee.

Even in the intimacy of our old and dear friendship, she does not begrudge him the time, the expense, or the danger. He needs his rock climbing. She cannot fathom why, but she accepts that he does and makes no complaint. Thereby, as it turns out, she shares in the spiritual and emotional renewal he achieves. She shares the high, if not the heights. It is a vivid example of a reality that finds a thousand petty echoes in almost every marriage, even in something so simple as watching football on TV or belonging to a book group that reads fluffy novels.

But that kind of relaxation and renewal is just the beginning. I have another friend who has a fabulous perennial garden, including an artificial pond with water lilies. She and her husband replaced the driveway some years ago with an exotic metal gridwork through which grass can grow so that the swath of concrete would not disrupt the harmony of her yard. The only problem is that she has a bad back. When there is heavy work to be done--laying that grid, digging that pond--he does it for her under her painstaking supervision. But it's not that he too is a gardener. He is, she realizes, quite without opinions of any sort.

What he notices and cares about is her need to create beauty and to live surrounded by beauty. We sat on her porch one afternoon drinking iced tea, and I dared to ask whether she resented his oblivion to it all. She didn't. And as we talked, I realized how profoundly blessed she felt by his perception not of the landscape but of her own deeply rooted aesthetic sense. He sees and nurtures that beauty in her. His indifference to her delphiniums measures his recognition of truths about her that she needs acknowledged far more than she needs praise for her garden. The whole neighborhood is agog about that garden, after all. Its spiritual origins in a very quiet and private woman are hidden from almost everyone--but not from him. She is probably the most beautiful woman I know, but she has trouble recognizing or acknowledging her own good looks. But I see them acknowledged, plain as day, in her husband's demeanor around her. He holds a mirror up for her, a mirror that begins in his large, almost hazel brown eyes.

Truly to acknowledge the other's needs at face value, despite fear of heights or indifference to delphiniums, is to trust each other's absolute honesty and mature self-knowledge in claiming, "I need this." The potential for abuse is simply astounding, and surely many marriages come to grief upon these rocks. But that sad fact does not impinge upon the importance of what's going on when the claim is honestly made and honestly heard.

To acknowledge needs at face value can be to solace pain that lies far beyond the ordinary boundary of what can be articulated or directly revealed. Such acknowledgment nurtures those depths that remain secluded in the mystery at the heart of each of us: Visible or declared needs can be emblems or emanations of needs that are perforce invisible. Such compassion is costly stuff. It can be very painful indeed to suffer the slings and arrows of each other's outrageous fortunes, especially when as a practical matter there is nothing to do or no way to help. But for the relationship itself, it does not make a lot of difference whether or not we have the resources to solve each other's problems or to meet each other's needs. What matters is how this quality of nonjudgmental compassion helps to sustain the perception of each other as separate, distinct, ultimately unknowable others. Both partners are drawn outside of themselves as centers of cost-benefit calculation because they must learn to care for and to care a
bout someone outside their control. A permanent, embedded, embodied responsibility for someone else can be a transforming experience. It is not to be undertaken lightly because it can be as spectacularly damaging as it can be spectacularly vital or graceful.

Trusting Each Other's Integrity

Intimacy also demands full and absolute trust in the beloved's integrity. For instance, one of my best friends is married to an engineer--an exceedingly witty and handsome fellow, in fact--whose company sometimes does highly classified consulting work on government contracts. When he travels--handcuffed to his briefcase--he cannot tell her where he is going or for how long. He cannot call her once he is there, and he cannot return from a trip early just because, for instance, a child has broken a leg or she has gone into labor to give birth.

She worries at times about coping alone, but that's about all. Trusting him is never a question. She is bothered far more, in fact, by the fact that they cannot mix socially with foreign nationals. She is not even supposed to tell such people why she is declining their invitations or failing to extend one. We live in a community of immigrants: The school district reports eighty-seven different languages as the primary speech of families. When soccer games get close, the cheering and advice erupt into a cacophony of tongues. There is something crazy-making, in her mind, about this demand that she avoid so many of the other soccer moms. She shrugs and copes as wisely as she can: His work requires this from her, and that's enough. She figures that if he can put up with her family, she can put up with his security clearance. Life just makes these demands, she says. I suspect the two of them are saints, but it is evident that their marriage is deeply contented.

Again, this is an extreme instance of a commonplace reality. Lots of folks sometimes have to work late or on weekends in ways that disrupt the routines or the expectations of their spouses. Many of us work with people whom we find sexually attractive. If nothing else, all of us are always spending shared resources on items of purely individual use or value. And all of us are always deciding whether to do chores or whether to do something we enjoy or whether we need above all to collapse in a comfortable heap and do nothing in particular. In marriage, it is vital to trust the other's integrity in making these accounts or in making these decisions because there are myriad ways in which people can exploit each other. In the early romance of a relationship it may seem not to matter who does the dishes or the laundry, who pays the bills or shops for groceries or keeps the coffee table cleared. But in time, it does matter.

Reciprocity Rather Than "Equality"

And so the third key aspect of vulnerability within intimacy is how deeply intimacy depends not upon equality but upon reciprocity. Equality can be counted out; reciprocity cannot. Equality is measurable; fidelity gives without measure. In the very early years of our marriage, friends of ours kept a checklist in the kitchen, held to the fridge by a magnet. A column on the far left listed various household chores; each was assigned points according to the time and effort involved. A row across the top listed days of the week. Each time a chore was completed, the husband or the wife would scribble an initial at the intersection of day and chore. Subtotals were calculated both weekly and monthly, and their goal was to achieve essentially identical totals at least monthly, if not weekly. The objective rationality of the scheme had some modest appeal, I admit, as we wrangled back and forth with our own version of the Housework Wars.

But since then I've realized that life does not yield itself to objective and rational schemes. Life is just too complex. Totting up points on a grid cannot tell the truth that must be known or guard the values that must be preserved. "For better for worse" ebbs and flows far more often and far less predictably than charts allow; nor are there points that tell the value of Warren's bringing me coffee in the morning or my turning on his side of the electric blanket to warm the bed when he is working late at his desk.

If you are adding up points, such small acts appear to cancel each other out. If you are building an intimate relationship, such small acts of kindness are valuable beyond measure. If you are adding up points, you have an eye on the running total. If you are building an intimate relationship, you have an eye on the person you love and the whole life that you share. I have come to think of this deeper reality as "the one-life clause." It's a domestic version of "From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs." Needs and abilities fluctuate with time and circumstance, but if there is one life, then there is one bottom line rather than competing totals.

It remains crucial to recognize how easily and how profoundly we fall into exploiting each other. Money, housework, emotional support, child care, in-laws, career demands: Such issues are part and parcel of sexual ethics because these are among the ordinary sources of vulnerability to each other's greed, laziness, ambition, egotism, and so forth. Trusting each other's integrity demonstrates that marriage is not a mechanical or arithmetical quid-pro-quo arrangement but rather the gutsiest, most nitty-gritty test of what it means to have faith in another person. If my accountability is to the chart on the fridge and not to you, then I can do what totals to "my half" and then go read a novel--no matter what your needs may be. Or if I'm locked in battle with a stubborn, inarticulate manuscript and my score starts to fall, then I'm "one down" in my relationship with you. Anger, guilt, and frustration start to feed each other. But in a genuinely intimate relationship, my accountability is to myself and to you and
not to some ratings chart. Life's external demands do not get any easier, but at least the marriage doesn't serve to amplify the problems.

In marriage, each partner faces the challenge of knowing the self and knowing the spouse, knowing the self's needs and limitations and knowing those of the spouse. Each is challenged to grow up. Partners must renounce both pseudosaintly claims to martyrdom and pseudoheroic claims to invulnerable strength. The manipulative powers of dominance and guilt must be set aside and kept aside.

When both partners are fully and honestly attentive both to self and to other in this way, then the potential for exploitation falls dramatically because the efforts of each person are not only mutually perceived but mutually experienced. Compassion grows into the space created by the thousand small habits and routine practices that over time build up the reality of faithfulness. The self-abandonment or openness or vulnerability of the sexual act either enacts the fundamental quest for fully reciprocal fidelity in the relationship or enacts an exchange that is governed like an investment and is inherently exploitative in its primary focus on the self as a center of cost-benefit calculation. The structural or inherent reciprocity of erotic desire sacramentally and physically enacts the material reciprocity of two lives lived and shared as one life. One's arousal is part of the other's arousal just as one's "terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad week" is part of the other's week.

In short, there's nothing wrong with lists of things to do on the fridge. Every household needs them. But a scorecard is not OK. The several marriages I knew that used scorecards did not last very long, and I've come to recognize the scorecard mentality as a sign that a relationship is deteriorating. Successful marriages, on the other hand, seem often to involve the risky generosity that gives without counting cost or calculating merit. The commitment of full sexual fidelity creates a secure inner landscape in which to live out that adventure in all its improbable risk. That's why sexual fidelity is the material or bodily enactment of a commitment that is of the whole person--not merely something cerebral or merely a contract delineating exclusive rights to the organs of reproduction.

Mutual Care

Intimacy creates, depends upon, and ultimately transforms vulnerability because marriage demands a full mutuality of attention and energy, each for the other. Marriage is not simply an idea, nor is it merely a set of feelings. It is more than an ability to communicate, just as it must be more than a house kept in common or children jointly nurtured. As life lived in common, as lives shared for the sake of the sharing, marriage depends upon material or literal participation in the realities of each other's lives. And so fidelity is neither a contract nor an attitude but a set of practices or habits--disciplines, in the old sense--whereby two lives are lived in gracious accord with each other. This notion is an elusive reality that Warren and I have lived our way into gradually, not quite knowing what we were about or why. We did it because we were told to.

About six or seven weeks after our first child was born, late in my maternity leave, I went up to the library one afternoon to attend a guest lecture on illustrations of Goethe's Faust. It was a gorgeous day in early March: cold, clear, sunny, with almost a hint of a promise of warmth in the sun. The walk up to campus felt wonderful, even though the sidewalks were lumpy with old snow. It was probably the first real exercise I had had in months, and I was feeling vibrantly, incredibly, gloriously alive. The lecture was interesting and well attended, and--best of all--for a solid hour I could sit quietly without liability to the unpredictable demands of a newborn. I enjoyed myself thoroughly.

Afterward I left the small lecture hall with a fellow from the school of music, speaking softly and walking quietly through the towering ranges of books in the library. He congratulated me on my new baby and asked the usual new-baby questions. Suddenly he stopped walking, so I stopped too. In just a couple of steps, he backed me more or less out of sight into the empty space between a structural pillar and the end of a range. He put down his briefcase so he could gesture with both hands, as if he were conducting an invisible orchestra.

"Look," he said, his German accent thickening abruptly. "You don't know what you are doing, you two. You think you know, but you don't. You want babies, and you want this too?" He gestured down the long rows of library books. I could almost hear a crescendo of my own professional ambitions.

And he went on to tell me that all his friends were getting divorced--the agonized sundering of lives that had been shared for decades. At some point, he promised, our new baby and any others we had would all be grown. Or if not grown, at least gone. Summer camp. College. Then, for the first time in maybe twenty years, the parents are alone. The parents for the first time in so many years have a chance to talk without interruption. And then what? Then there is nothing to say. After so long a silence, after so many years of attention only to work and to household and to children, there is nothing left between them to say. They are strangers. Strangers!

I looked up at him, bewildered. He was a stranger too. I hardly knew him. He was very handsome, with chiseled features and a powerfully aristocratic manner made all the more elegant by how dramatically his hair was streaked with gray at the temples. But he was decades older than I was. I had only spoken to him a couple of times before. One of his freshmen had enrolled in a writing course I was teaching, and he had kept a close and fatherly eye on the boy's progress. But we had never spoken again--at the time, I did not even know what department he was in. What was going on?

Then he told me about how he and his wife had fled Nazi Germany in the late '30s, about how both of them had lost to the death camps all the family they left behind, about how they had felt besieged and isolated by both anti-Semitism and anti-German sentiment in America in the '40s. All this added up to feeling desperate to sustain their own marriage so as to sustain and eventually re-create the familial heritage destroyed but for them. They were such a tiny remnant of so many dead.

As I listened, I was at first startled to see that their commitment to each other was for him transparently synonymous with their commitment to their children. All those relationships had seemed threatened by the world around them in the 1940s and '50s. In a world that cannot be trusted, in a world of such bad faith, he felt that his marriage offered to his children the crucial example of what real fidelity means and how real fidelity both exists and can be trusted. And now, in the 1970s, he felt that fragile heritage of fidelity threatened again by the rising tide of midlife divorce.

"Do this," he said to me suddenly, taking a deep breath and pulling himself up in full professorial decorum. "Do this: Every week, every week no matter what, go out one evening together. Dinner. We, we never become strangers. Once a week, always. Do this. Both of you scholars, and babies too? Make time before it is too late, before there is no time left." His voice wavered slightly; he fell silent and looked away. We stood a while in the privacy of two long rows of books. Then I bowed and thanked him, and we walked in silence the rest of the way out of the library.

We do it. We do it, and we remember him, although I never had a chance to tell him that we had taken his advice to heart. And besides, "advice" seems too tame a word for that conversation. But it is a story I have told over and over through the years, always to someone astounded and indeed envious that Warren and I have always made this kind of time for each other. It is clearly not a common habit: Especially once there are children, spouses seem all too seldom to make time to do things alone together--except, I suppose, making love. But that should not be the only time the couple is alone, awake, and exclusively attentive to each other.

There is nothing magic about going out to dinner, of course. Nor have we always done it that way. When we have not had enough money to eat out, we have gone for long drives or walks. Nor are these evenings primarily a chance for conversation. Often we are too tired for much talk; often we have eaten or walked mostly in companionable silence, in comfortable solace from the verbal performances of the day. Even when it happens, the talk mostly resembles the desultory chat of old friends catching up with each other.

Our time together is valuable not as a forum for something else but as an invaluable respite from all of life's implacable demands. It is an enduring testimony that each matters to the other enough to set aside regular time from life's responsibilities simply to be together without any agenda at all. In marriage as in any other relationship, the deepest sorts of conversation happen when and as they will and not, therefore, in any predictable way on our Wednesday nights out. Wednesday nights are merely the common foundation upon which we assemble the week's collage of issues and ideas and decisions--all the small bits of conversation that happen en route to the train or while doing dishes. Furthermore, the habit insists to the children that the core of this family is the marriage of the parents and not the children themselves--and certainly not that list of things to do held to the fridge by a magnet. A couple of times we let the habit lapse, and we found that our life together grew progressively, inexplicabl
y more difficult.

My best explanation for our Wednesdays, even after so many years, is a metaphor. Certain kinds of trees will be shaped in their growth by the impinging presence of other plants. Out my study window I can see a mature honey locust with a curve in the north side of its crown where a Chinese elm used to fit. The elm had sprouted too close to the foundation of the garage, and when we first bought this house we chopped it down. That was almost ten years ago, but the locust has not grown into that empty curve. Time together without an agenda or desultory, aimless, attentive conversation in which anything might surface, places exactly that sort of pressure upon the growth of the individual spouses.

Wednesday nights are not a chance to say, "You forgot to enter a check in the register," or "I'll be in Cleveland the weekend of the seventeenth," or "I think there's trouble with the transmission in the washing machine." Wednesday nights are not an exercise in five-minute management. They are just a chance to lean on each other, in many senses of that word. We cast shadows and twine roots and provide some measure of shelter from the wind. Our time alone together is as vital as our individual time entirely alone. Psychologists of course attribute considerable power and importance to what surfaces in such "agendaless" time, but whether or not psychodynamics explains all of it, such times do render us permanently vulnerable to each other in the shape and direction of our individual growth, just as the tree outside my study demonstrates. As the years tick past, that vulnerability has become stunningly evident to me.

As my music school colleague claimed, this time together is crucial. But that very centrality makes it dangerous as well, and the danger demonstrates the need for integrity and commitment to the relationship. Sexual fidelity is the physical enactment of the encompassing fidelity that reaches deep into the depths of all that we are. Remember Faust: We trade our souls or we take our chances. There's really no alternative. A sexual relationship in which bets are hedged may not dissolve into angry divorce, but neither will it achieve real matrimony.

Excerpted from For Fidelity by Catherine M. Wallace
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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