Olivia Fane and her first husband had an arrangement that allowed them both to stray, but within limits. It worked for years – but then he wanted to change the rules ...
When I was a girl of 13, my mother said, "Darling, I want to give you some sound advice. You must be a virgin on your wedding night. No man likes soiled goods. But after you've had your children and providing you are totally discreet, you may take lovers."
Doubtless her own mother had said the same to her; and I only learned recently that at the end of the war my grandfather had stayed on in Durban three months longer than was strictly necessary. Everyone knew that the reason was "a woman". No one raged, no one even mentioned it. When he came home, my grandparents continued to have many happy years together, as though there had barely been an interruption.
When I was a teenager, this division of love from sex made perfect sense. For me, sex was fundamentally shallow. It was about lust, greed, the desire for possession. It was about appearances. It was about bottoms and hair and legs. It was about a Mick Jagger mouth. It was about wanting to be touched down there by someone who was really, really good looking. In fact, I was always faintly contemptuous of sex.
Love, meanwhile, was everything to me. If sex was about taking, love was about giving. While sex was possessive and turned a person into an object-body, love was generous. Love was about saying, "I trust you, and I give my very soul to you. I want you to know me, every part of me, and I want to know you, every part of you."
Of course, I had never read Freud. I had no knowledge of the primacy of the genital relationship and how, if you get that right, everything else follows. Nor did I know anything about the modern orthodoxy that sex has to be sewn into the relationship right from the beginning for it to be a successful one. Instead, being a classicist, my influences were Plato and Aristotle, both of whom, I was delighted to read, had as low an opinion of sex as myself. For Plato, sex sat on the lowest rung of the ladder, while truth sat on the highest.
Aristotle was even more dismissive. Human beings shared a sex drive with animals. Sex was about biology, reproduction, and equivalent to a desire for food. Far more interesting, according to Aristotle, was the fact that human beings were intelligent and creative.
So when I met my first boyfriend, who became my first husband, I was delighted to discover that his family history in some strange way mirrored my own. At school I had found nobody to agree with me at all. When I had argued that the phrase "making love" in its modern sense was a lie – in that it was impossible to experience love and desire simultaneously – everyone looked at me pityingly. What a relief it was, therefore, to marry into a family who seemed to have lived out my entire philosophy of love and sex for generations.
One of the reasons people object to infidelity so much is that they see it as a betrayal of trust. But trust is not an absolute. There is a context to it. My wedding vow might have been: "I trust you to love me, confide in me, have no secrets from me, and I shall have none from you."
We wrote ourselves a marriage contract. Our marriage would always come first, would always win. My husband was a travel writer and away for months at a time. I had been brought up to believe that most red-blooded husbands were unfaithful to their wives anyway, particularly during conferences abroad, so wasn't it both wise and reasonable to allow him one affair a year, provided his lover didn't live in England, that it didn't last more than a fortnight and he sought my permission first?
And as I didn't travel, wasn't it reasonable that I should be allowed 10 snogs a year and one full-blooded affair, lasting no longer than a fortnight and taking place within the London borough of Stoke Newington?
I loved my marriage. I adored my husband. He was the cleverest, wittiest man I had ever met. When he wasn't abroad, he worked at home. I looked forward to every meal I had with him, every conversation. A poet friend of ours used to say about our marriage that it had "grammar", whatever that meant. He said it in a serious, impressed sort of way. I enjoyed the fact that my marriage had grammar. My husband was my life.
I have in my attic a little red suitcase containing the 150 love letters he wrote to me over the course of our marriage. The last one in particular was poignant, written in Romania after the fall of Ceaucescu and communism. By then we had three small sons. The letter was a long one. He loved us all so much, he was missing us so much, he had seen such terrible things, that sort of thing.
But what are words? I've instinctively distrusted writers ever since, they and their pretty words. A month later he was in love with someone else.
He rang me from a skiing holiday, full of astonishment and praise. We talked a little. I was so happy. Then he said, "By the way, do you mind if I sleep with X? The trouble is, she lives in London."
"Just once, just once," I enthused, generously.
I'm afraid there remains a part of me as contemptuous of this "falling in love" business as I had been about sex as a teenager. What is falling in love all about? Even when he told me about it, well, we'd been there before. Falling in love = fancying someone rotten and wanting to sleep with them. By then – eight years into our marriage – I knew how history gives a relationship ballast. How can mere fantasy even rival intimacy? Yet fantasy is obsessive. It involves thinking about someone day and night. And that, I knew, was what he was doing. For the first time in our marriage, I understood I was losing him. Even when he looked at me, he was no longer there.
Our last weekend together was a travesty. We were on holiday in the Italian Alps, purportedly to mend our marriage. On the first night as we lay there in our bed trying to snuggle up together, water began to fall on us from the ceiling. The bathroom above us had flooded. The hotel was full, and the only place they could find a space for a bed was in a corner of the dining-room. The next morning we sat up to watch the breakfasters. It was the sort of surreal situation we'd have so enjoyed at any other time. But we could barely react, and lay there glum.
Eventually, we managed to set out for our walk. We were wearing ordinary walking boots and anoraks, but it was colder than we'd been expecting. Higher and higher we went, leaving the trees behind us, clambering up ice and rocks, trudging through snow. We barely exchanged a word. It was growing dark and on we climbed. At last we found a refuge, but we couldn't reach it because the rocks surrounding it had become too icy and we couldn't get a grip. I was so cold and tired and miserable that my only wish was to curl up in a ball to die. When my husband saw what was happening to me he suddenly took charge. He took my hand and said, "Come with me." By now it was pitch black. I just let him guide me. An hour and a half later, we reached another refuge and here I am to tell the tale. He saved my life on the same day as he left me.
To be so close to a person for 12 years and then to lose him has been, without doubt, the most painful experience of my life. The trouble is that when you give your very soul to someone it takes a long time to retrieve it. I found myself phoning my oldest school friends, who'd known me long before I married. I wanted to say, remind me who I am, take me back to my old unwounded self. But everything seemed so empty, so devoid of meaning. Divorce is worse, I think, than bereavement. If he had died, I would have a memory and honour it. But he was only dead to me: he was absolutely alive to someone else.
The trouble with love is that though it's the riskiest thing you can do, though it brings in its wake the greatest pain imaginable, it's also the richest. Three years later, I married again, and we're about to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary. If anything, I value being close to someone even more second time round. It's only when you lose it that you understand how precious the much-maligned nuclear family is. To have a second chance at playing those old-fashioned roles (we have two sons of our own), to play my female part in the most traditional of marriages, has been the luckiest thing that has ever happened to me.
Nowadays, I don't even get to have a single snog a year with someone else, which seemed quite hard when he first told me he wouldn't tolerate it. Yet though we're faithful to each other, I'm pleased that, like me, he rates souls above bodies and shuns the modern orthodoxy of sex being deep and meaningful. We are merely lusty, and when we're old and give up sex, a big so what. We have just as much fun reading plays together, and who knows, I might even start singing when he plays his violin.
"With this body I thee worship", is what we say if we marry in church. We also become "one flesh". As I get older, these words resonate more and more. My husband's body is mine, my body is his. Somehow, I like that.
• The Conversations: 66 Reasons to Start Talking by Olivia Fane is published by Square Peg, £15.99. To order a copy for £12.79, with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846 Reported by guardian.co.uk 6 hours ago.
When I was a girl of 13, my mother said, "Darling, I want to give you some sound advice. You must be a virgin on your wedding night. No man likes soiled goods. But after you've had your children and providing you are totally discreet, you may take lovers."
Doubtless her own mother had said the same to her; and I only learned recently that at the end of the war my grandfather had stayed on in Durban three months longer than was strictly necessary. Everyone knew that the reason was "a woman". No one raged, no one even mentioned it. When he came home, my grandparents continued to have many happy years together, as though there had barely been an interruption.
When I was a teenager, this division of love from sex made perfect sense. For me, sex was fundamentally shallow. It was about lust, greed, the desire for possession. It was about appearances. It was about bottoms and hair and legs. It was about a Mick Jagger mouth. It was about wanting to be touched down there by someone who was really, really good looking. In fact, I was always faintly contemptuous of sex.
Love, meanwhile, was everything to me. If sex was about taking, love was about giving. While sex was possessive and turned a person into an object-body, love was generous. Love was about saying, "I trust you, and I give my very soul to you. I want you to know me, every part of me, and I want to know you, every part of you."
Of course, I had never read Freud. I had no knowledge of the primacy of the genital relationship and how, if you get that right, everything else follows. Nor did I know anything about the modern orthodoxy that sex has to be sewn into the relationship right from the beginning for it to be a successful one. Instead, being a classicist, my influences were Plato and Aristotle, both of whom, I was delighted to read, had as low an opinion of sex as myself. For Plato, sex sat on the lowest rung of the ladder, while truth sat on the highest.
Aristotle was even more dismissive. Human beings shared a sex drive with animals. Sex was about biology, reproduction, and equivalent to a desire for food. Far more interesting, according to Aristotle, was the fact that human beings were intelligent and creative.
So when I met my first boyfriend, who became my first husband, I was delighted to discover that his family history in some strange way mirrored my own. At school I had found nobody to agree with me at all. When I had argued that the phrase "making love" in its modern sense was a lie – in that it was impossible to experience love and desire simultaneously – everyone looked at me pityingly. What a relief it was, therefore, to marry into a family who seemed to have lived out my entire philosophy of love and sex for generations.
One of the reasons people object to infidelity so much is that they see it as a betrayal of trust. But trust is not an absolute. There is a context to it. My wedding vow might have been: "I trust you to love me, confide in me, have no secrets from me, and I shall have none from you."
We wrote ourselves a marriage contract. Our marriage would always come first, would always win. My husband was a travel writer and away for months at a time. I had been brought up to believe that most red-blooded husbands were unfaithful to their wives anyway, particularly during conferences abroad, so wasn't it both wise and reasonable to allow him one affair a year, provided his lover didn't live in England, that it didn't last more than a fortnight and he sought my permission first?
And as I didn't travel, wasn't it reasonable that I should be allowed 10 snogs a year and one full-blooded affair, lasting no longer than a fortnight and taking place within the London borough of Stoke Newington?
I loved my marriage. I adored my husband. He was the cleverest, wittiest man I had ever met. When he wasn't abroad, he worked at home. I looked forward to every meal I had with him, every conversation. A poet friend of ours used to say about our marriage that it had "grammar", whatever that meant. He said it in a serious, impressed sort of way. I enjoyed the fact that my marriage had grammar. My husband was my life.
I have in my attic a little red suitcase containing the 150 love letters he wrote to me over the course of our marriage. The last one in particular was poignant, written in Romania after the fall of Ceaucescu and communism. By then we had three small sons. The letter was a long one. He loved us all so much, he was missing us so much, he had seen such terrible things, that sort of thing.
But what are words? I've instinctively distrusted writers ever since, they and their pretty words. A month later he was in love with someone else.
He rang me from a skiing holiday, full of astonishment and praise. We talked a little. I was so happy. Then he said, "By the way, do you mind if I sleep with X? The trouble is, she lives in London."
"Just once, just once," I enthused, generously.
I'm afraid there remains a part of me as contemptuous of this "falling in love" business as I had been about sex as a teenager. What is falling in love all about? Even when he told me about it, well, we'd been there before. Falling in love = fancying someone rotten and wanting to sleep with them. By then – eight years into our marriage – I knew how history gives a relationship ballast. How can mere fantasy even rival intimacy? Yet fantasy is obsessive. It involves thinking about someone day and night. And that, I knew, was what he was doing. For the first time in our marriage, I understood I was losing him. Even when he looked at me, he was no longer there.
Our last weekend together was a travesty. We were on holiday in the Italian Alps, purportedly to mend our marriage. On the first night as we lay there in our bed trying to snuggle up together, water began to fall on us from the ceiling. The bathroom above us had flooded. The hotel was full, and the only place they could find a space for a bed was in a corner of the dining-room. The next morning we sat up to watch the breakfasters. It was the sort of surreal situation we'd have so enjoyed at any other time. But we could barely react, and lay there glum.
Eventually, we managed to set out for our walk. We were wearing ordinary walking boots and anoraks, but it was colder than we'd been expecting. Higher and higher we went, leaving the trees behind us, clambering up ice and rocks, trudging through snow. We barely exchanged a word. It was growing dark and on we climbed. At last we found a refuge, but we couldn't reach it because the rocks surrounding it had become too icy and we couldn't get a grip. I was so cold and tired and miserable that my only wish was to curl up in a ball to die. When my husband saw what was happening to me he suddenly took charge. He took my hand and said, "Come with me." By now it was pitch black. I just let him guide me. An hour and a half later, we reached another refuge and here I am to tell the tale. He saved my life on the same day as he left me.
To be so close to a person for 12 years and then to lose him has been, without doubt, the most painful experience of my life. The trouble is that when you give your very soul to someone it takes a long time to retrieve it. I found myself phoning my oldest school friends, who'd known me long before I married. I wanted to say, remind me who I am, take me back to my old unwounded self. But everything seemed so empty, so devoid of meaning. Divorce is worse, I think, than bereavement. If he had died, I would have a memory and honour it. But he was only dead to me: he was absolutely alive to someone else.
The trouble with love is that though it's the riskiest thing you can do, though it brings in its wake the greatest pain imaginable, it's also the richest. Three years later, I married again, and we're about to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary. If anything, I value being close to someone even more second time round. It's only when you lose it that you understand how precious the much-maligned nuclear family is. To have a second chance at playing those old-fashioned roles (we have two sons of our own), to play my female part in the most traditional of marriages, has been the luckiest thing that has ever happened to me.
Nowadays, I don't even get to have a single snog a year with someone else, which seemed quite hard when he first told me he wouldn't tolerate it. Yet though we're faithful to each other, I'm pleased that, like me, he rates souls above bodies and shuns the modern orthodoxy of sex being deep and meaningful. We are merely lusty, and when we're old and give up sex, a big so what. We have just as much fun reading plays together, and who knows, I might even start singing when he plays his violin.
"With this body I thee worship", is what we say if we marry in church. We also become "one flesh". As I get older, these words resonate more and more. My husband's body is mine, my body is his. Somehow, I like that.
• The Conversations: 66 Reasons to Start Talking by Olivia Fane is published by Square Peg, £15.99. To order a copy for £12.79, with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846 Reported by guardian.co.uk 6 hours ago.