Tag: cheating

Posted on

Should a Cheater Confess?

/home/wpcom/public_html/wp-content/blogs.dir/e19/64332962/files/2014/12/img_0289.jpg

Cheating: a lot of people do it, but hardly anyone talks about it.

Now, thanks to Whisper — a free online app where people anonymously share secrets — we have a little more insight into an otherwise private situation.

That is what I read in The Huffington Post the other morning while poking around the Internet. Apparently this anonymous confessing site is not the only one either. This idea has been around for a while on postsecret.com, which asks its participants to send in postcards with secrets–so I learned from my girlfriend.

Now what could be the benefit of an anonymous confessional app or space? I know the power of confession is great, a purging, and the anonymity allows for the confession, but how does that change anything for the confessor, the voyeurs looking on, or the couple? I can understand the voyeur part, as misery loves company is not a cliche for nothing, and perhaps the redeeming factor for such a site is for those who peer into others’ lives not just for vicarious thrills but to shore themselves up to do something about their own cheating or their significant others’ like confront or confess to the real live partner.

But as for the cheater confessing, what does that do other than provide a momentary relief of built up pressure that comes with holding in a really big secret. Does it alleviate the guilt associated with the act by justifying that others have done so too? Does it allow someone to reduce the self-hatred that comes with the act by seeing that he/she is not alone or the only person who has ever cheated? I can see how some would benefit from such a site. But for the serial cheaters and sociopaths, this site may actually be a narcissist’s delight; look at my exploits.

I believe the real need for confession comes in not merely commiseration but in communication and validation. If one carries a dark shameful secret, it works the mind of the carrier into shame and guilt, distorted thoughts of proportions from “I’m a bad person “to “no one has been as evil as I am.” If someone on either end of the scale confesses the secret and the hearer does not run away or burn up in the hearing, or the confessor does not explode, then the test of validation has occurred. He or she thinks in relief, “I said this terrible admission but the other is still looking at me as if I were a human being. Or, maybe, even sympathy or empathy.”

Human beings need continual confirmation that they/we are all together in being human. It’s lonely living in your own skin. There is no perspective, no context sometimes. The human egocentric being will distort the degree of horribleness of his crime or sin commensurate to how he feels about what he risks losing in having done that shameful deed: dignity, moral standing, trust, stature, jobs, friends, lovers, spouse and/or kids. For marital strayers, the need for confession depends upon that experience of projected loss and degree of guilt, whether religiously or secularly framed.

Confession as therapy has a long history from Freud’s “talking cure” and later Jung’s stages of wellness. Jung believed confession was integral to therapy and was one of the specific steps to recovering wellbeing. Others, philosophers like Michel Foucault, saw the confession as an institutionalized demand by society’s officials, the confession recipients. Whether criminal, medical, psychological or religious, confession is an extraction of personal details for the purposes befitting the one with greater power, the confessor’s hearer, i.e., police, doctors, and priests, according to Foucault. By the act of confession, one person is dependent upon the other for the hearing, the pardon, the judgment or non-judgment as the case may be, the punishment. One of the two-party configuration is in a position of power and the other is spotlighted in the gaze of the other, awaiting her fate.

When it comes to ‘straying’ spouses, should the offender confess to his or her partner? The answer to that question will vary according to the agenda or, not so cynically, the orientation of the advisor. Religious advisors may consider the moral character and state of the soul of the offender as paramount, whereas a psychologist may consider the long and short term damage to either or both spouses and the marriage itself.

In the small sampling of articles I perused on the subject from marriagehelper.com, psychologytoday.com, time.com and spiritualityhealth.com, the answer seems to be: it depends. Only one of the aforementioned seems intransigently prescriptive: in other words, here is what you have to do to make this work, regardless of the circumstances. The other articles weighed the grave injury to the non-offending spouse against the need for honesty and seeking for forgiveness of the offending spouse.

Some argued that it may be best not to tell for the irrevocable injury it would cause to the innocent spouse (I use these terms bluntly and descriptively only) not only in context of the marriage, which may well break up, but future going for the next relationship he or she enters, trusting issues, for example. Others advocate risking the injury and the probable breakup for the power and virtue in honesty and the contrition with which the honesty is given. Most agree that each case is different, which makes sense since each couple is comprised of specific individuals, not a common class of people.

Confession in itself is a rich source of contemplation, its ubiquity (Isn’t all social media confession?), its therapeutical properties and ritualistic sedimentation in cultures throughout the world, as well as its artistic value. One of my favorite poets, Sylvia Plath, harkens from what has been termed the Confessional Poets of the 50s and 60s, along with Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, characterized by very personal subject matter such as domesticity, relationships and sexuality: novel for its time but pretty old hat now. Who doesn’t write the personal?

To delve in more deeply and expansively, I consulted the Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion and found an interesting morsel in an abstract of an article by Morgan Stebbins titled “Confession”:

The act of confession either begins a process of reparation or affirms the subject’s relationship with the transpersonal. That is, one can confess wrongdoing or confess one’s faith. In most religious traditions, the former is accomplished through ritualized admission, absolution, and repair, while psychologically it begins the formation of therapeutic trust and unburdens the subject of poisonous secrets….The word confess is made up of the Latin com (together) and fateri (to acknowledge), indicating that a process of change begins both with another person and by admitting that which is in error.

Getting back to C.G. Jung, in The Journal of Religion and Health, Elizabeth Todd in “The Value of Confession and Forgiveness According to Jung” describes confession according to Freud’s successor, as one of need by virtue of being human:

Man, a naturally religious being, has a need to confess his wrong and to gain forgiveness of one sanctioned to absolve. The curative effect of confession has been known for centuries. Without confession, man remains in moral isolation. Priests, ministers, and rabbis, as well as psychotherapists, attest to the universality of this human phenomenon. Confession is located in that place where psychology and religion meet-guilt. Jung’s views on confession bridge the chasm between psychology and religion.

Confession is relationship by its very nature. One confesses to an other, human or deity/spirit. Implicit in someone unburdening a wrong committed against the hearer is the hearer’s consequent carrying that burden; confession is a complex configuration of moral, ethical, and personal obligations and considerations of fairness, rights and compassion.

Does one who cheats have the right to feel better by unloading the gnawing secret on the one on whom he cheated or is he nobler to suffer quietly the burden of that dark knowledge and guilt so as to keep the other unharmed? If morality and personal integrity is the sole consideration, then isn’t the secret holder/strayer obligated to be honest regardless of the consequences for the ultimately highest purpose of integrity and rebuilding trust, i.e., if I confess the impossibly difficult, I show you I am capable of being honest going forward? What role does the other play as mere listener, forgiver and rebuker? Is honesty always the best policy? Your thoughts?

Posted on

Holiday Mistress Blues: Revising Snow White

credit: deviantart.com
credit: deviantart.com

Gina Barreca, PhD, has a clear agenda writing about the mistress during the holidays in a 2010 Psychology Today article entitled The Mistress at Christmas. It is under the site section “Show White Doesn’t Live Here Any More”. She paints the profile of a mistress (the proffered everyday mistress), who is single and involved with a married man, and relies on stereotypical mistress-life facts to tell the story of a coming to conscience during the holidays.

Barreca tells the story of the circumspect mistress in whom conscience and self esteem triumph over delusional love, repressed empathy for her lover’s wife, and low self-esteem. She portrays the mistress who realizes that the game is not worth the candle–she has sold herself short. Though this holiday epiphany belongs to a recognizable type of mistress, the one of an over 35 year old who is not married herself but wishes to be, it is not a one size fits all moral realignment applicable to all mistresses.

The persona in the article is the conscience of the mistress, but the psychologist behind the persona is a critic making a case for the misguided one’s recovery. Story crafting is a great way to hammer some message home subtly and clandestinely. The reader gets a story–and who doesn’t love a story?–without suffering the heavy handed pedantic writer’s moral. And there is a clear moral to this story.

The author unravels the details of the mistress’s situation slowly; she is not unlike many other “typical” mistresses who are pining away for their men, lonely and disillusioned or hopeful about marrying her lover–eventually. They are also self-deluded in thinking that they have “the best of him” and of all worlds.

If she’s over 35, she probably suspects she isn’t getting that ring.

Maybe she tells herself she doesn’t want it: After all, she already has a full life and why clutter it up with a full-time relationship? Where would she find the time, the energy, the metaphoric and literal space? She gets the best of him and his wife gets the rest.

But this reflection, the reader soon discovers is a trap. The writer will steer the reader down the path of silently nodding in agreement or grimacing in revulsion with this assessment–best of both worlds–before she undercuts the mistress’s mere self-justification, as it turns out.

But holidays make it harder to find a safe place in her head. It’s as if the world conspires against her from Thanksgiving through New Year’s Day.

Innocent enough observation by the mistress, but Barreca’s project is to advocate for the mistress’s rehabilitation, not support her cheating ways. “It’s as if the world conspires against her,” sounds like someone very egocentric and unrealistic. Yes, it is metaphoric and not meant to show the mistress as a paranoid delusional, but it certainly suggests self-absorption, even if as just a passing thought. She feels the outside, uncontrollable forces are responsible for her predicament, her loneliness.

Halloween is her holiday, with masks and disguises, with catsuits and pirate outfits. She’s a shape-shifter, a plunderer, a thief, and she knows it.

Call her all the names you want, and you’ll discover that she’s called herself worse. It’s not like you’re telling her something she doesn’t know. She’s the backstreet girl, the booty call in perpetuum.

She’s Jezebel. She’s Little Suzy Homewrecker.

And there it is: the out-with-it shame and judgment of the mistress by her own internalizing of society’s mores. Yet, while the good doctor is working her reader’s sympathy (not empathy) in reminding the reader that yes, this mistress has a conscience and suffers from it, she is also reinforcing societal notions that the mistress, any mistress, is all of those: shapeshifter, plunderer, thief, booty call, Jezebel and home wrecker. All of those names encompass the socially accepted and reinforced moral dimension of a three-person relationship: deceit, plunder and self-debasement. She cheats the wife of time and money, steals it as her relationship is not legitimated morally or perhaps even legally in the court of public opinion and religious indoctrination, even as she cheats herself of pride, self-respect and open, “valid” public love.

So she makes the round of holiday parties, makes cookies and makes pies, makes jokes and makes new friends. She makes nice. She is nice. It’s not bad, but there’s a blanked-out figure where the man she loves should be.

Why does he need to be there? Is it her need or one she believes she needs because there is a constant bombardment of messages that remind and convince her that the holidays is a time for family and loved ones, and you can not be complete unless you have an other that is acceptably, normatively yours to exhibit. How can you be validated and happy and fulfilled, unless you can show up to holiday parties with a man? Where is the cheer in that holiday cheer?

Now, I am not implying that the mistress is wrong in feeling lonely and lost without a mate she can show up to parties with or that Barreca is profiling a mistress with aberrant ideas and feelings. What I question is how the mistress even knows how much is her belief and picture of herself and how much is her societally derived perception of herself in her unconscious or conscious absorption of the judged self.

Regardless of the speculated cause of her self-vilifying, there is no doubt that the mistress is an outsider and her relationship is inconvenient, frustrating and lonely–in fact.

She can’t call him; too risky. She can’t email him; anything in writing is out. She’s tempted, at her worst moments, to drive by his house in order to catch a glimpse of him through the window when his home is brightly lit after dark. Is his car there? Is she there? The wife?

She is an onlooker from the outside and wishes to be inside. Or does she? What is the measure of the frequency of her wanting to stay on the outside and enjoy the best of him against the frequency of her wanting to give it up for something full time and exclusive? The holidays are a mere smattering of days compared to the rest of the year.

Finally, Barreca shows the weighing mistress mind examining the endearing traits of her lover, what has drawn her to him and had her risk so much to be with him, against the sacrifice on her part to enjoy those alluring qualities.

In the past, she’s always found that little-kid-with-a-secret-look endearing. But today she’s less impressed. Maybe she looks at the wife, a woman more like herself than she’d care to admit. Usually she thinks of her as the woman who has everything and doesn’t appreciate it, but today his wife looks restless, tired, overworked, needy, a little frantic around the eyes. She looks older, but then who doesn’t?

Can this really be her rival? Is this the enemy she cries herself to sleep over on those nights when she can’t convince herself that she has the best part of the deal?

Well, it seems the scales are so obviously tilted that this mistress must be an idiot: “that little-kid-with-a-secret-look” versus crying herself to sleep at night “on those nights when she can’t convince herself” of her good fortune. Her attraction to his cute ways is juxtaposed to her painful self-delusion.

The picture might look different, however, if she quantified how often she lost sleep, one night a year or every night? It would also be another article entirely if the qualities the mistress gloms onto in her crisis of conscience are his traits that complement and fulfill her, like his ability to love her like no other can because of their compatibility in every way except for his being married and not to her. Perhaps she has never met a man who could kiss her in the exact way she could not even have dreamed of before because she didn’t know it existed until he named it with his kiss. Or maybe they love the same movies and find humor in exactly the same situations, let alone that they share the same world vision, values and goals. She may have not met anyone else like him before for the way he makes her feel so deeply loved. Oh, and he has that cute little boy look too.

But this is the doctor’s fiction, her probably anecdotally-derived composite of a certain mistress.. She wants to focus on that mistress who makes poor choices and, in doing the cost-benefit analysis, concludes that the costs to others’ lives and hers are not offset by the benefits because there is no prize–him/marriage–at the end.

She thinks about how the only thing to do when you want to stop going in circles is to stop.

And upon this rational thought, she, like the skaters on the ice before her lonely view on her lonely holiday walk, can joyfully whisk away her troubles and cares to a new life of legitimate love. Which is true, right? She can do better–maybe. But if she wants to have the kids and family like “the wife” has, with all of the drudgery of frictional living as well as the shared painful losses and ecstatic gains that come with coupledom, she needs to move on.

This is a story of a species of mistress, not a specific mistress. It is tailored to fit the message sculpted from the given details, and is merely a thin slice of the mistress pie. What if both were mistresses/misters? Does the distribution of power or deprivation change the equation? The question is not geared to elicit the cliche’d response that two wrongs do not make a right.

If a reader comes to the mistress story, any mistress general or specific, with pre-set notions of absolutes on the question of religiously-induced, societally induced, individually-realized and/or family-enforced rules, the accepted right and wrong of it without further indulgence in details, then those readers are resolved to condemn each mistress without exception. If, however, a mind can meet the material of each case as an unbiased observer of cultural, philosophical, psychological, social, scientific and spiritual facts, she might find that discrete individuals enter into discreet relationships, not types, and that all relationships, legitimate or otherwise, are a cost-benefit analysis.

I want to tell a mistress tale about a woman who is petite and strong with red hair or brown hair and adores both her lover and her freedom, whether she is over 35 and single or 55 and likewise married with children. She understands that the relationship comes with grief, conscience clutches and inconvenience, but she feels the situation is right for her at this time as it adds to her life goals more than it detracts from them. Perhaps she is in a sex-less marriage and her husband secretly or openly wants her to stay with him but satisfy her needs elsewhere because he can no longer do so. Perhaps they have great communication and connection but have outgrown each other as lovers even as they have deepened their well-seasoned friendship.

In this story, the wife of her lover is secretly or unconsciously grateful her husband gets his tiresome sexual needs satisfied elsewhere while she gets the benefit of his name, economic security, friendship and fathering of her children; she closes her eyes to her husband’s dalliances on the side because it takes no noticeable time away from her and the kids. Yes, he is more distant emotionally, but she still gets the day to day rote gestures of affection of the peck on the cheek and pinch of the ass. And from time to time, they do have intensely intimate moments that only marrieds can have by virtue of suffering failures and successes together and raising their kids. She may feel lonely at times, the loneliness that comes with not having all of someone in all ways, but she is not alone.

And he gets the same from his wife and mistress as they get from him. All around, the parties are satisfied for the time being if not for the long run, but none can tell the future, and the kids get to grow up with their parents in truce, or peaceful co-existence if not in marital bliss. The only glaringly volatile risk to everyone involved is the arrangement’s public disclosure with resulting judgement that causes the participants to act according to what is expected of them. Then everyone is screwed.

This is one fictional story of another account that is neither aberrant nor atypical in the human domain of mistress-dom and monogamy. I merely present a competing version to consider. And before I get accused of mere advocacy of a moral relativism, I remind my readers that my campaign, if I can be ascribed one, is for consideration of the specific over the general, the study over the selective moral quipping, and indulgent compassion over unmindful condemnation.

Some people are what they are accused of: a wicked poisonous-apple-toting witch of a stepmother. Some are not, not entirely or not at all. Was Snow White innocent or stupid to trust a stranger? Does she get a free of judgment pass for naiveté, for representing an ideal of innocence pure and sweet? After all, she did steal into the bed of a stranger in an empty house. What was she thinking?

The magic mirror shows you the truth you want to know. The more fruitful option is to question, to work at ‘seeing’ by paying attention to the details as well as the big picture. To withhold judgement until all pertinent facts are present takes strength, a healthy skepticism. The Snow White of my idyllic tale is not the innocent goddess of ignorance but the mistress of doubt, compassion and curiosity.

Those scenarios, hypothetical musings in a magazine or real experiences of the newsworthy, that cause knee-jerk powerful reactions in us are the ones that afford opportunities to test our beliefs and flex our mental, moral and empathic muscles. These muscles need a daily workout to keep them strong and healthy. Stories are the workout gyms in which to sweat it out.

Posted on

Branden and Rand Together Again?

 

credit: graphics8.nytimes.com

Apparently I missed the news that Ayn Rand’s former lover and protege, disciple or sycophant, depending upon your tolerance for Ayn Rand, Twentieth Century philosophy and/or cults, died. Luckily, I have friends looking out for me, so I was tipped off to the story, which I found, among other papers’ accounts, the L.A. Times article summary of the life, death and love affairs of Nathaniel Branden (formerly Blumenthal).

Of course, the article focuses on the most famous and all encompassing love of his life, Ayn Rand, best known as author and purveyor of her own brand of philosophy, Objectivism, and someone long embraced and cited by Conservative Republicans, most notably in recent history by Paul Ryan in the last presidential race. In fact, she is one of the “staples of the modern Conservative canon,” according to Beverly Gage of Slate.com in her intriguing August, 2012 article entitled, “Why is There No Liberal Ayn Rand?”

Fortunately and unfortunately for Nathaniel Branden (he changed his name to include “rand” in it), his life’s sum and legacy is dependent upon Rand. His story is only interesting by virtue of his involvement with her as first fan, then disciple, then lover, and finally nemesis. According to the Times, when Branden and Rand found themselves in love, the ever rational Rand insisted that their spouses be sat down and informed:

In 1954, Branden and Rand, who was 25 years his senior, started their affair after summoning their astonished spouses to a meeting.

“We’re not Platonists,” Rand reminded them, in Branden’s account. “We don’t hold our values in some other realm, unrelated to the realm in which we live our lives. If Nathan and I are who we are, if we see what we see in each other, if we mean the values we profess — how can we not be in love?”

How Rand. Reading the above passage in the Times article, I was caught once again in Rand’s net: that simple, affirmative, rational and adult-like composure to fiercely defend natural human want, desires of the flesh and the heart–by the head. I was very drawn to her ideas, her promoting the will of the intelligent, rational being as prevailing above all, when I read the Fountainhead at age 14. I was not aware then of her philosophical agenda.

For Rand and Objectivism, the here and now (the real world, the one that can be perceived with the senses) is all there is and the ultimate moral objective for humankind is each individual’s rational pursuit of his or her own happiness:

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute (Atlas Shrugged)

She spoke out against anything remotely ‘socialist’, which is what she considered the payment of taxes (one of the three pillars past of Republican principles: taxes, defense, and anti-Communism); she was for anything diametrically opposed to the communism of her descendants’ Cold War Russia. Thus, the Republican lure.

Politics aside, of course it makes sense that two people would fall in love if they are passionate to the point of obsession about a cause, an idea. And isn’t Rand to be applauded for her forthrightness and honesty to tell the spouses, hers and Branden’s, about their intention to engage in a love affair and the reasons? How mature and insightful about the human condition. After all, people get married at specific times in their lives to others who fit their needs. But needs change. Partners do not always change together, keep their goals the same. Those facts should be clear and common sensical. So why not acknowledge that as just another fact of the human condition? Why not acknowledge the unreality of monogamy as a viable institution, right? If folks were just practical…

The couple announced they wanted to be alone in Rand’s New York apartment for one afternoon and one evening each week. Over the next few years, Rand’s husband, Frank O’Connor, started drinking heavily and Branden’s wife, Barbara, began having panic attacks.

Ultimately, both couples divorced; Branden and Rand went through their final, searing rupture after he revealed his intense, secret relationship with Patrecia Scott, a young model and aspiring actress he later married. She acted under the name Patrecia Wynand, a surname drawn from “The Fountainhead”.

Well, there are good ideas, and then there are behavioral realities. How does a philosophy work that is based only on what the rational self can produce? Whose rationality? Rand would dismiss the idea that there is more than one rationality, that there is no such world produced by individual minds, only the one physical world. But that does not jive with lived experience. If you asked my brother and me the story of our childhood, he (2 years my junior, same parents and home) would bemoan the poverty and deprivation, missed birthday presents, whereas I would express gratitude for a carefree, want-for-nothing childhood. Whose reality is the real one?

My egocentric young teenager self was attracted to Rand’s thinking, deliciously indulging my belief ultimately in my own intelligence, strength and determination as the tools for my future success (Tomorrow, Pinky…the world!). But there was an unease, a coldness about that rational world that even I could not fully subscribe to or believe. In fact, Objectivism, it occurred to me later in adulthood, was only appealing to me as an idealistic, selfish adolescent inexperienced in life’s ass kickings delivered by human beings with diverse interpretations or completely devoid of rationality, reason and/or logic.

Even Branden, a psychology student and PhD, finally figured it out: that the world would be great if we could all just sit down like rational adults and reason this affair thing out–but that’s just not the way it works–especially if some other hottie comes along to derail your principles and your rational lover and guru turns irrational (but logically so) in a rage of vindictive jealousy as a result thereof.

I guess that’s why in the articles I read, Branden’s successive work, after Rand, published books on self esteem, gets footnoted almost, with a hint of an ironic wink, a chuckle and a nod.

And I suppose that’s the fate of the mistress, sometimes, when he/she is caught or even up front about the ‘other.’ People may get hurt in the schism between reason and emotion. Certainly society’s eye will sneer and smirk at his/her downfall.

Posted on

So What if a Couple Agrees to Have a Little on the Side? Chris Ryan on Marriage

IMG_0282.JPG

The loosing of restrictions outside of marriage might help the institution as a whole, argues Christopher Ryan in his Big Think interview. When our culture responds negatively to natural urges, like seeking sexual satisfaction outside marriage, the results can do more harm to marriages than good:

And one more for the revisionist thinking about the marriage institution in this Big Think interview entitled “Income Inequality Helping to Build ‘Generation Single” with Chris Ryan, author of Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What it Means for Modern Relationships. His words are excerpted above, but the three minute response in the video portion is worth a listen as he radically asks, “Whose business is it if a couple decides they’re going to allow a little casual sexual behavior on the side…it lets the pressure off.” He maintains that marriage has loftier aims and satisfies larger needs like child rearing, sharing a life and getting old with someone. The reality of who we are biologically–titillated erotically–and the expectations of lifelong fidelity, he says, are at odds and marriage expectations need to be changed to reflect the reality rather than “shoehorn” lives into the mold of a marriage concept.

He does not intimate that marriage is doomed. In fact, he specifies cogent reasons for marriage, which are the long-standing reasons anyone gets married: to share a life together. I know I will be reading his book to find out more.

Posted on

Cicisbeo’s Courtly Cell

credit: cinebazar.it

You live in a whisper, cicisbeo.
Your love is near and dearly so
but you are her shadow partner
a puppet and a beloved though
you will inherit nothing but her
gratitude and safely warm hello.

She more needs and adores you
than anyone else in her retinue
and so keeps you soft and close
inside cued cries and shrieks too
and you obey as you she chose
to wear on her arm like her jewel.

You have her secrets and her lies
told in an ear’s warm breath flies
from lips of painted hues so red
the color of her heart’s true sighs
that never you share in her bed
for she wears comfort at her side.

Are you her friend and lover too?
A scepter in her hand to rule you
are you satisfied with ether love?
Gather your pride in vain pursuit
and wear her need like the glove
of your cold killer hands so cruel.

She is dead to you now in mind
she, being blind to your design
Using another’s need as a pet
is the willful way of all her kind
and opposition none she’s met
with the force of a love sublime.

My mistress has met her a match
in circles of a scheme unhatched
come back to bite a cold remorse
in blue eyes of the candle’s catch
sweet and sorrowful loves endorse
the knife in you, the itch scratched.

Posted on

Lord Nelson and His Mistress – the 18th Century Mistress Career

image

Perusing the Internet the other day, I came across the Daily Mail Online article entitled “Letter from Lord Nelson to his mistress Emma Hamilton written days after the birth of their secret love child expressing fears their relationship could be discovered goes on sale for £15,000,” which drew me in with curiosity about yet another clandestine long term love affair with the added delight of the phrase “secret love child.” However, like the promise of so many of these articles with impressive titles, I was not so much intrigued by Lord Nelson’s affair nor their “love child” of whom I learned nothing, but moreso the afterthought write up on the life of Ms. Emma Hamilton.
Ms. Hamilton (yes, the title is anachronistic) apparently fell into a career climb solely due to her sex–gender and activity. Her tale is reported as one of woman as object–body and womb. By virtue of her sex, she rises from poor beginnings, daughter of a blacksmith, to fodder for a “sexologist” (read: procurer of a bordello) to someone’s sole sex object to wife to mistress to abject poverty and death. The 18th Century afforded fewer other career options for a woman on the rise but sex and marriage. Her story seems to be the embodiment (pun intended) of all options exercised, what little agency I imagine she had to exercise. Of course, there is much untold in this skeletal “portrait of a mistress.”
Another noteworthy item is the scant mention of Lord Nelson’s wife, whom he appeared to love very much but was irresistibly drawn to Emma Hamilton upon meeting his future mistress. One can only surmise that the vast complexities of the motivation and underside of the players in this triangle are buried and returned to the soil from which they arose-only the letters remain from which to read between the lines.

Posted on

Shadow Dancing with the Mistress Masochist

credit; http://www.zavesmith.com

I cannot face the blank page. I close my eyes, fingers frozen above the keyboard in readiness to strike the letters that form the words that fall into sentences, sentences to paragraphs, filling the blank with black. Writer’s block again. A surprise text from my beloved interrupts my agony as does the barging into my room from a disgruntled teenager who loudly complains she waited hours to no avail only to be denied the very coveted object of her desire, a new phone.

The phone rings and the voice to my ear asks me if I’m working. No, how can I? I ask where s/he is, s/he who must sneak love in a shoebox and an envelope of emailed bathroom love notes so the wife and children will not know. I love my love in so many ways: the sharp wit, keen pragmatic wisdom and common sense beyond most and all the while sentimentally apt to fall for a romantic tune and a sway dance, singing and sighing, even as s/he urges to bite and confine me with the unparalleled force of painful passion, the one s/he loves, destroy and own me. S/he is almost home, so s/he whispers a quick “I love you” and s/he is gone. The silent space fills the room. The laughter in the next room disrupts the delightful pain of longing. My life as me is a rocket ride of amazing torment and painful contentment.

The life of a mistress is one of denial, of empty space to be filled with fantasy of future memory. Her profile reveals a deep desire for punishment and deferred pleasure. She is judged and typecast as the scorpion fly, the Lilith of Eve’s prize, ever in human consciousness, but in reality, she is as fluid as the stories she floats in and out of, the ever flux of human flesh yearning for more in the quest for meaning. She provides links, fills hollow caves with patches of light, just enough to see the illusion of shadows. To judge is to play the fool.

Joyce Carol Oates in her essay, “They All Just Went Away” ponders the tendency of women to hurt themselves, to give up their space in deference to others. Each time I read this essay in preparation for class, I sink into her words.

Above all, the real is arbitrary. For to be a realist (in art or in life) is to acknowledge that all things might be other than they are. That there is no design, no intention, no aesthetic or moral or teleological imprimatur but, rather, the equivalent of Darwin’s great vision of a blind, purposeless, ceaseless evolutionary process that yields no ‘products’–only temporary strategies against extinction.

I think of humans coupling for love, marriage and children as survivalist needs for safety, security and self-perpetuation. Passion, however, is relegated to the realm of possibility and unpredictability. Sacrificing security is painful but paramount for passion, sometimes a worthwhile tradeoff. The mistress seeks and provides pleasure where safety breeds contemptuous boredom and the cancerous kill of the fire of desire, but there is a cost.

As a woman and as a writer, I have long wondered at the well-springs of female masochism. Or what, in despair of a more subtle, less reductive phrase we can call the congeries of predilections toward self-hurt, self-erasure, self-repudiation in women.

While the empowered mistress writes her role as protagonist and antagonist, hero and villain, and sadist and masochist as she loves with abandon and shadows love, aches in abandon, the nature of the mistress is often one of self abnegation and longing desire; threadbare hope and the coat of imagery warm the space, but the intangible is the self-inflicted torture, passion without presence, longing. She waits alone. This masochism is also the source of creativity of the writer. She, an other in self abnegating aloneness, borrows mystical moments of self-evisceration–the awe and radiance of others’ pain and joy–to disappear in their destruction and reappear in their resurrection Phoenix-like from the fire since passion burns born in torment. She is both agency and objectification, the meta-narrative of reading the reader reading the writer.

The writer is a mistress, with her drive toward self-punishment, in writing absolution and taking on the sins of others; she creates in hardship and pain, in triumph and longing desire, her shadowy figures tasked with completing the possibilities of the what if and should not. She is judged and critiqued. Her life drawings show us who we are. Sometimes she shows us what we don’t care to see or even dream. S/he tails the taboo.

Yet what could possibly be the evolutionary advantage of self-hurt in the female? Abnegation in the face of another’s cruelty? Acquiescence to another’s will? This loathsome secret that women do not care to speak of, or even acknowledge.

I don’t know. I won’t be judged. The mistress and the writer are independent and free to choose their stories, write them with the beginning unknown, the ending imagined and the middle lived suspended in the shadow of the snip of the scissors’ ever-so-slowly closing blades.

Shadow Dancing

Your silhouette twirls me in a pony skirt umbrella.
I falter and still to take my bow to your dark smile.
My fingers fondle high cheek bones of ionic spin.
They poke through to the wall behind you in jest.
I stroke you yet thumbing the thin strands of hair.
You hover in my chest and feet dancing me witty.
Though silence spaces the crackled sonic voice.
It fills dark deep dread of distant lost connection.
So electrifyingly fill my ear in warm static breath.
Sigh trigger heat-pour down from my neck to toe.
Body-sense wisps of thin caress a sweet timbre.
A hand in tones transmitted in aural wood chime.
Shade palms settle upon the dip of my shoulders.
They soft sweep across the bones tracing burden.
Feather touched windless air drifts across my face.
I fall back into the deep curtsy of a shadow dance.
The song circulates my bloodless fill of time spent.
Memory kissed moth flutters of your lullaby sweet.
Twenty moons shine liquid ether ossify you to me.

Posted on

“Why I Date Married Men”

image

Heather L. Hughes, a freelance writer, contributes to Salon.com “Why I Date Married Men” and lends light insight into her choice of dating partners, a kind of liberation for a sexual late bloomer (a virgin until 29), when she concludes:

Affairs with married men offer controlled companionship — there’s warmth and there’s space, there’s intimacy and there’s distance. I can’t control growing older. But as the other woman, I’ll always have an element of mystery, an invitation to a different narrative, like that lit-up window in the darkness.

The “lit-up window in the darkness” refers to her ignorance of and outsider status to the married man’s family life, his other life, about which she admits to being curious and even fantasizes.
The “controlled companionship” concept certainly appeals to the more introverted of us. Hughes doesn’t say so, but adding up the facts of her nerdy entertainment choices, her lack of sex and her lauding “controlled companionship” aka I love you now get out and give me my space, she is probably an introvert. Introverts need battery-recharging alone time, something marriage doesn’t always afford.

The best and worst part of any long-term relationship is the daily living together, the friction and resentment that builds up by the large and small stuff, disliking a mother in law or snoring. Space, one’s own space, could help relieve some of that tension. When my husband and I were separated, it was the first time I had ever had my own room. I was delighted, covetous of that space to call my own, clean as I wished, decorated as I wished. That ownership of space alone improved my disposition. That separateness also allowed me to see my then estranged husband when I wanted to and not when I had to, which improved our relationship. In sum, controlled companionship is not only convenient but a high recommendation to the relationship that allows for that. Of course, married couples can and do afford each other space, but unless one of the couple travels a lot, there is not that completely divided space that one owns and occupies like a room of one’s own.

I suppose the element of mystery in being the other woman that Hughes refers to is also tied into that controlled and convenient aspect of the dating a married man relationship–parts of the other are left private and unknown. A couple does not kill the mystery and one another with familiarity. How often have I heard, “I know you only too well”? That is not only a mood killer, an instant irritation, but is an accusation that the accused is a pattern predictable and boring, and can be no other way. Ironically, the accuser both desires and despises that kind of predictability that produces comfort and boredom too.

The most interesting part of Hughes statement, however, is that the other woman is “an invitation to a different narrative.” The assumption is the different refers to different from the man’s wife and family, the life he has set up in the daily display of the house he lives in, perhaps, the wife, kids and job he has, community he is part of and the like. His story. Perhaps it is the story of the suburban upper middle class man with money to buy nice cars, house and toys for himself and his family–the lucky guy who has everything story on the outside from society’s point of view, the very same one who keeps another woman on the side, immoral from society’s point of view. Perhaps that is the draw: look like a good boy while being a bad boy.

However, I take issue slightly with Hughes “invitation.” The assumption, though imperceptible, is that one narrative is more legitimate than the other, i.e., the married narrative is the acceptable one and the one with the other woman is “different”, weakly argued as mysterious to make the invitation more inviting. However, invitation could be bridging the territory of its silent rhymed reminder of temptation, which, of course, suggests the illicit nature of the “affair.” Hughes takes the cautious self-repudiating approach even as she defends–lightly–her choice of lifestyle. It’s weak.

Her mention of narratives reminds me of something unacknowledged. I am reminded of an old studied philosopher from school years back, one who baffled me more than enlightened except in intermittent glimmers. But now as I am older and wider read, I realize he is a writer who has covertly influenced my way of thinking and viewing the world more than any other philosopher or writer. Jean Francois Lyotard, the French philosopher who describes the postmodern condition (post WWII) as one without universals or generalities that work any longer, lured me in with his anti-establishment thought. He exposes the overarching theories and philosophies (meta narratives) that historically govern thought and behavior since the Enlightenment, for example the notion of absolute freedom or justice, as no longer tenable to order an ethical, legal, philosophical or moral structure of societies made of individuals with such an acknowledged immeasurable degree of variety.

Lyotard argues that reality is created by and social structure consists of micro narratives that we all speak and act on, engage in on the local level in discrete situations of daily life, which show how different and diverse we all are in our beliefs, desires, and actions. So even though we may say we subscribe to the belief that all humans are born free and freedom is the ultimate right and happiness, the way we live daily from situation to situation negates that actuality. Each day I work, drive kids around, eat, sleep and speak at the dictates of others. Freedom is negotiated within the pockets of time and allowance of others, not some overarching principle that governs thought and behavior.

Extrapolating from Lyotard, the way we think and act should not be proscribed, encouraged or naturalized by broad moral banners that wave the monogamy narrative or the marriage narrative as THE narrative. It is painfully obvious that we actually operate within the language and rules of private, small group situations, and specifically with respect to Hughes’ dating: man, woman, children, other woman. What is justified behavior is applicable to and determined by each individual, i.e., this man needs newness to keep him alive and happy, while this woman needs the security of a marriage to keep her free to do what she needs to do, etc, in conjunction with another or others. The agreements and socio-ethical rules are local to the participants. And they are agreements. It’s only when we start believing the grand narratives of right or wrong for everyone is where we fall into fantasy land, wanting to believe there is one right for everyone.

Some may say this is merely relativism, which may be regarded as chaotic, unstructured and anarchy (I can hear a friend say, “If you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything”). I don’t believe that is true. It is simply an acknowledgment that people actually operate on the level of their one on one or small group interactions relative to their lives, and their behavioral ethics are determined within that local climate.

So, Hughes, relax. This works for you. You’re different from others. Celebrate difference. It’s what we all are anyhow.

Blog at WordPress.com.