Oscar Wilde said that one of the charms of marriage was that it made a life of deception essential for both parties. I agree; the opportunity to commit adultery is surely one of the few advantages of wedlock.
Yet so zealously monogamous has our culture become that infidelity is agreed upon as the last taboo. It is the one crime that, all nice people concur, is Absolutely Unforgiveable. Amidst all the prurient judgments cast on poor Gordon Ramsay and his alleged mistress Sarah Symonds, the consensus is that he has committed a dreadful evil and that The Woman Pays. Sure you can accuse Ramsay of hypocrisy, if you think that his private life is our business. But it is the second judgment which I find so insidiously depressing. The Woman Pays, it goes, because all we really want is a man to love us and give us babies. In her guidebook for mistresses, Sarah Symonds offers the defense that she “really tried to meet and date eligible men”. Having failed at that, there’s nothing for a mistress to do but sob into her Chardonnay and slur imprecations on her lover at her cat.
Are we really so unsophisticated? Is it beyond us to imagine that there might be many women who are perfectly content with a timeshare in a property they might not be interested in buying? Who prefer travelling, reading, socializing, living, to picking up someone’s dirty pants and making conversation with his mother? Who think that cohabitation is not such a stylish pursuit? Who don’t – oh blasphemy! – actually want children? Or worse still, might there not be wives who happily co-operate, and participate, in such an arrangement?
Sexual transgression in a woman is just about acceptable if she is apologetic about it, agreeing meekly that she was settling for the low-rent version of what good girls dream of. But a woman who cheerfully confesses to not wanting or needing commitment is assumed to be in need of therapy. Fetishising fidelity infantilises women. Perhaps we should accept that ‘til death do us part is a bloody long time, and learn to go about our sins with a little more good manner and kindness.
Comments