Why, Question Mark?
What did you hope to get out of love? Can you remember back that far?
Having been the eldest child of a marriage always threatened with ups and with downs and which, in the last seven years of my mother’s life, rivalled Strindbergian awful-ness - yet to see my father, at my mother’s funeral, pin a card to his flowery memorial on which he’d written ‘To fifty-two years of happy marriage’… I wondered how this kind of self-deception and public pretence arises.
I first began to wonder in the fifties, when divorce was still difficult and carried a huge social stigma, yet a time when ordinary people (not just Bloomsbury arties and war-time flingers) were starting to insist that rolling around with another person of some opposite sex was a huge pleasure in its own right and not just a trick for cooking up the next generation or a reward for setting up house.
People who’d had the bad luck to tie each other up legally with quite the wrong person had to go through the degrading farce of hiring a couple of bedrooms in Brighton (almost always it was the teeth-gritting husband) spend the night there with a paid stooge (often a policewoman), sign in at the register as Mr. and Mrs. Smith and be carefully watched having dinner together, and then drifting off upstairs, by a detective (another hireling - outrageously expensive, the whole circus) where they went to their separate rooms. After which a magistrate, with bare-faced hypocrisy, sat through the divorce proceedings on the grounds of the husband’s observed adultery… Sticking up two fingers at the law, the public, truth and a long-suffering society still juddering to the beat of a tortuous public morality clung to by a then still ascendant upper middle class, stoutly backed by a lying clergy.
Sin and sex were still pretty well synonymous, then... Whereas swindling your customers, drinking yourself stupid, murdering progressive foreign leaders you disagreed with, holding down small nations longing for a bit of self-determination was all pretty right-on and patriotic and what decent folk supported.
And then, as the absurd rules supposedly derived from the New Testament lost clout, sex was analysed… Freud and Havelock-Ellis and their derivatives were run to for help. How was it that Mr. Right so often missed Miss Right and the faltering couple ended up at Relate or in Counselling or Therapy?
Were you supposed to believe that as soon as the pleasant curves and flashing lashes of some person across the school dinner table began to stir up a storm in your blood, your guts and your breathing you had to tie a knot in everything and wait and wait till Mr. / Ms Perfect made themselves unfailingly known to you at some party, seminar or holiday at which you immediately got holy spliced, and could succumb, after years of held-in horrid turmoil, down onto the sanctified matrimonial bed - knowing absolutely nothing about what went in where in what manner or order or gently or roughly.
Why was this a desirable social goal in my society, I wondered? It had a name...this aspiration - monogamy.
I’ve always been interested in other animals and I noticed, after years of reading, that almost no other creature gets anywhere near aiming at this one-to-one for-the-whole-of-life commitment. Was it ignorance of the New Testament that coarsened their social interactions? Then I remarked that this aspiration was limited almost entirely to Western Europe and its clones in the Americas; that it seemed to have no biological foundation at all and to some extent served a purpose in keeping family fortunes more or less intact and to contain messy distractions for a civilisation wholely devoted to making money - but which, in consequence, paid the penalty of large amounts of private misery.
I thought I’d write about it. Supposing we were to ditch this dream, this phantasy of monogamy and admit what sort of creature we really are - and then tried to get on together in and out of bed.