THEY DIDN'T LOOK AFTER THEIR NICE THINGS

When my lover and I talk about our spouses and how they lost us to this passion we now share, she’ll sometimes say to me,
"Well, what did they expect - they didn’t look after their nice things, did they…..?"


No, they didn’t; but some would find this a childishly trite and cynical dismissal of two marriages, of two decent partners’ reasonable expectations of loyalty and fidelity. And yet, trite as it may seem, it hides a world of pain. There’s all the desperate longing of the ugly duckling - the gauche teenager, the girl from a big, impoverished family - who didn’t have any of the advantages the pretty, popular, middle-class girls took for granted - and who’s finally the swan she dreampt of becoming, with the life and the love she deserves within her grasp. And however flippant it seems, it also reflects the years of confusion and distress she experienced in her marriage, after the birth of her children; as her husband denied her the affection, attention, passion and affirmation she so desperately craved. In a constant, undermining war of attrition conducted through sniping, derogatory asides, sulks, arguments, bad moods and public put-downs, he made it clear that she was just too much: too committed to work (but also too committed to their home and to housework), too loud, too demanding, too sexual, too sociable, too much of a gadabout, too superficial, too profligate, too demonstrative, too excitable – and, amazingly, too affectionate.


This appears perverse. She does ask for this attention and affection and affirmation – and she does need a lot - but I find she demands it very charmingly indeed. And she returns so much love, so much joie de vivre and so much attentiveness in exchange; it’s like having a light shining on you. In retrospect, we both agree that my love rival would have been so much happier had he got himself hitched to one of those bossy, ungirly, undemonstrative women. You know, the ones who wear frumpy clothes and elasticated trousers; who exhibit an almost evangelical fervour about making their children and family life the very centre of their world; who aren’t big on glamour or grooming, who actually like going camping or visiting relatives when they go away, instead of staying in a decent hotel; and who either have a matey, mucking-in-together relationship with their partners, or organise, bully and manage them as an additional, and particularly wayward, child.


Instead, he found someone considerably fluffier than his requirements - someone who was going to want him to be a man to her woman - and someone who was gong to be confused and disappointed when he wouldn’t step up. I can see how he went wrong. On paper, there was a good fit. My lover, B, values family and home, as he does. They share a multitude of similar values on everything from politics to child-rearing to managing money. Having escaped parochial backgrounds for a more cosmopolitan world, they seemed to take an equal gregarious pleasure in a shared bohemian cultural milieu - at least until the arrival of children revealed that he’d really rather stay in, while she still craved the sophisticated adult company in which she sparkles and shines. And though she didn’t consciously realise it, I’m sure that from her point of view, his grudging approval and affection; so often withheld, so difficult to win, answered her deep, abiding, overwhelming need; not only to please others, but to earn that approval the hard way. (The merest glance at her emails to me, so often requesting that I make uncompromising sexual demands in a firm and unfriendly way – and then respond to their performance with rewards or punishments – shows how central this predisposition is to her well-being and pleasure).


Sadly, like so many relationships, the more profound ‘fit’ between them is probably based on a banal delusion. If I wanted to get Lacanian about it, I’d say that his choice of partner fulfilled his mother’s deep-seated fantasy of men’s imperfection. Although B describes her father-in-law as “a sweet and lovely man”, she’s also reported the way her mother-in-law has always treated her husband as an inadequate irritant. The failure to give love or respect would not have been lost on their son, scrutinising them constantly for signs and information to assist his survival, anxious to make sense of the relationship between the adults central to his existence, keen to please the carers on whom he completely relied, and wanting to become for her whatever his unformed mind interpreted as his mother’s desire. Pure speculation, of course; but unless I miss my guess, I’ll bet his lack of confidence originates in a mother who always withheld her complete approval; who left him needing more from her, always; and thus unable to simply act confidently under his own steam. Whatever love she felt, how could she offer her unqualified approval to a child who would become another man? – and who would thus challenge the fantasy that she had no desire; she could be complete, in herself, without the male. (And he would fulfil her fantasy, because he would be unable to manage on his own, fully, always waiting for her approval). Growing up, D would not want to become the despised object of a woman’s distain, like his dad; and yet, when he met a woman who would be, in every way, ‘too much’ for him – and thus might well become disdainful of him - he couldn’t help himself and refused to see the writing on the wall. A woman who could not be satisfied by him, who was in due course absolutely bound to find him frustrating and inadequate, must surely have been uncomfortable for him – and yet, paradoxically, must have felt just like ‘home’.


I know it all seems a bit like Ibsen – but that whiskery old Norwegian miseryguts had a point. In Lacan’s work I see the most convincing explanation I’ve ever come across, of how the poison is passed down through the generations – through the child’s inevitable striving to interpret the mother’s fantasy and fulfil it by trying to become the object of her supposed desire. And the pursuit of this same objective through a replacement love object in maturity may so easily mean that the male child and his new partner become locked into another version of this same fantasy, this same impairment of the relationship between them. And, in due course, bring up children who will duly note this problem at the heart of the central relationship in their lives, making sense of it as best they can; and duly interpret their mother’s fantasy in their own way, too; to their life-long detriment…….


All might have been well if B’s desire was simply to be unsatisfied – as it almost was - but that is not quite the nature of her wish. She wants approval tantalisingly withheld – just as she loves sexual pleasure masterfully and playfully suspended – and she wants to then earn it, win it and work hard for it, before approval and affirmation are finally, mercifully, granted. To B, her future partner must have seemed just the ticket – hadn’t he been schooled in withholding approval by his mother, who’d done it to him throughout his childhood? Unfortunately, B only wants it temporarily withheld - she does not want it spitefully withdrawn for good in a petty, vindictive way and thus never available to her. So, not only was she frustrated, but the longed-for prize – even the prize of being made to wait - seemed cruelly denied, so very close to being granted. What could so easily have been the pleasurable torment she desired, instead became painful torture.


What B will say now, is that her husband was ‘nasty’ to her. Curiously, it was not the put-downs and bad moods and lack of affection which seem to be resented most; what she complains of in retrospect was that he “wouldn’t give her sex when (she) wanted it”. This is her most damning evidence of his cruelty; paradoxical when so many females complain of too much attention from their partners. She still believes this must have been “deliberate”, or conscious; which seems odd, at first, to an outsider. But perhaps it isn’t so very far from the truth. In finding her demands “too much” – as he was bound to do, since he’d selected her in order to fall short of them - and in rejecting or frustrating them as a consequence, her husband, D, also fulfilled his own deepest needs; that is, to be an inadequate object of desire to the woman.


One can only suppose that at her most desperate, B reached some sort of ‘tipping point’, when her impatience with what must have seemed like needless and undeserved cruelty reached a critical mass. How desperately she must have longed for someone to take charge of her overwhelming desire and restrain it for her – a very different thing to rejecting it, so that she resentfully had to curb it herself. And it must have been at this moment that I appeared on the scene. Conveniently, I was moving in the opposite direction, as it were: when I was younger, I, too, had been unable to tolerate all the demands of B’s kind of femininity, for reasons of my own; though this is exactly what I had always wanted. Now I could handle it, I’d become desperate for the affection, attention, frivolity, girlishness, sensuality, sluttiness and sheer gorgeousness that went with it: my desire was for precisely her kind of woman. And while I’d lobbied and pleaded, seduced and cajoled – in vain – to reach my partner’s desires; here was a woman who was all desire, all wanting; who desperately needed a man's uncompromising demand for performance and looking and submissiveness and pleasing, in order to fulfil herself.



And yet……….and yet this is an unfolding story. I was ready for her – just – and she was ready for me (almost). But the reasons why she was with the wrong man and I was with the wrong woman hadn’t been entirely misguided at the time and hadn’t entirely evaporated. Perhaps they didn’t look after their nice things; but we weren’t ready to replace them. I wasn’t willing to commit completely to the challenge of someone so exhaustively and exhaustingly demanding. And while the licence of an affair gave B the opportunity to indulge her sexuality to the hilt, her marriage gave her every reason to limit it for the sake of her established life:
I can't help it. I love it. But I 'm trying to keep it all under control...


It must have seemed as if she couldn't help herself:
The truth is I don't even let ideas about being with you into my mind. It's too scary. You have to remember, I don't actually want this, it's only my strong feelings for you that allow it to happen and that's why I fight with myself at times. I don't want it, I don't have time for it but I can't help myself. Inconvenient as it may be, I love you.
And she may have told herself that this is the power of love, too great to be denied by convention. I suspect it is something more profound and powerful: she discovered she could have her desire. No wonder she's always felt she cou;dn't help herself. But far from being inconvenient, it’s my experience that I’ve been fitted rather neatly, by a well-organised and resourceful woman, into the fabric of her life, without jeopardising its other priorities and demands at all.


And interestingly, B is now puzzled – and often disconcerted – to find that her partner D, suddenly shows more interest in her than before; partly sexual, yes; but mostly just taking up her time with what she calls “old people’s” chat...
I hope you are being spared a reprise of any sex shennanigans. I thankfully am, as I'm currently keeping him so busy that he's happy but too tired at bedtime for exessive bothering (other than the chatty, old people's stuff).
Again, perhaps it is not so surprising. For one thing, she no longer needs or wants him. She has been steadily becoming someone else’s partner and he has happily given her up. He may not consciously recognise this, of course – I get the impression he’d be most upset if he did. But he cannot help but unconsciously respond to her heightened chic, her better moods, the gloss and glow and confidence which comes from love and attention, from feeling yourself valued and adored. And his nasty moods have gone: here we have him companiable, tired but happy. He can enjoy her without the paralysing responsibility or pressure of even trying to meet her not inconsiderable desires; which has always led to disappointment on her side and inadequacy on his. He may not know it, but he has handed her over, as Rene gives O to Sir Stephen; and he probably feels only pleasure and relief. If you doubt my surmise, what about this little gem: her recent birthday card from her children bore not only their names, but his birthday greeting, too - signed 'Dad'. Now, he is the dad of the other signatories - but not of the recipient - why wasn't his Christian name there instead; or another card also given, bearing more romantic wishes? In a sense, by finding a lover and making him her man, she's finally freed her partner from the banal expectations of his mother’s destructive fantasy. She is doubtless much easier to live with: she is no longer angry and frustrated with him for denying her what she wants.