Fair Game
GOODMAN, WALTER
Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Extramarital Affairs The big hit of the Broadway season, Same Time Next Year, has to do with a woman and a man, each married to another, who meet dedicatedly once a...
...A hero and heroine who met, coupled and then bade each other an amiable farewell until the next time would not do very much to forward the plot...
...Sin for them does not lead to hell but to inner distress, a kind of indigestion...
...No wonder, given the audience for such messages, that at a certain point in otherwise quite promising adulteries, one of the partners concludes he or she isn't partaking of the Real Thing and there, after noisy, weepy scenes, goes the affair...
...Where nature enters, exploitation tags along...
...The reason that more such hookups aren't being made, aside from a simple lack of energy, is without doubt miseducation from a number of sources...
...Once the rules of a game have been breached by desires which the game cannot satisfy, all bets are off...
...Suppose, in the middle of a basketball game, one of the players were suddenly to feel such an affection for the ball that he went dribbling off into the street with it...
...The rules are set early and must be adhered to if the game is to remain a game...
...Lies breed lies...
...The dangerous affairs are the unregulated, unpredictable ones, where people insist on meeting in out-of-the-way places at every spare moment...
...That just wouldn't do...
...is all plus, no minus...
...Candor The only count on which objections to a relationship of this type hold up turns out to be a moral count...
...In the pages of The New Leader candor is excellent...
...The principle advanced here is that friendship between a woman and a man is likely to be undermined by sex...
...Friendship Liberation: From quite a different direction, the lately liberated woman, comes a different sort of criticism of an orderly sexual regimen outside of marriage...
...A true relationship of equality between man and woman, it is said, should be modeled on the relationship between man and man-buddies, colleagues, drinking companions...
...The Marriage Manual: This form of literature or journalism is in fact the illegitimate child of the romantic novel...
...We may leave to the sex researchers the question of how many millions have enjoyed and are enjoying such regular, agreeable, uncomplicated interludes...
...Instead of lumping all adulteries together as a spiritual disease, therefore, the moral sexologists really ought to make distinctions and campaign for extramarital adventures that are not overly adventurous...
...It awakens new expressions of tenderness...
...Guilt Moral Science: Although the manual makers and marriage counselors, a growth industry, strenuously try to divorce their trades from those of the preacher, there is nonetheless a powerful moral component in their teachings, as there is in those of the romantic novelists...
...The romantic novel and its many offshoots in movies, on television, and in endless confessional works teach us simply that people who have too pleasant a time in the early pages or frames or minutes of a work are bound to have plenty of trouble later...
...It is possible to have much the same on-the-job relationship between the sexes as within them, for men and women to develop very amicable feelings, and no sex included...
...If impulses of this sort persist, read a romantic novel or visit a marriage counselor...
...Besides being the sign of an already shaky marriage, the moral philosophers of sex tell us, adultery is bound to make matters worse, to have invidious effects upon the sanctioned relationship...
...In the account books of extramarital affairs, this sort of periodic meeting-"Hello there, again...
...Regularity lends a calming perspective to all things, particularly those of the body...
...Discourses in bed are not sexy, and they are not friendly either...
...The manual writers, unwilling to admit their true parentage, make a show of shunning the byways of romance for the thru-way of science...
...Which brings us back to the once-a-year or once-a-month or once-a-fortnight extramarital relationship...
...Let's get into something more comfortable...
...Sex without eternal love, though sometimes frightfully desirable, must be cheap and dangerous-a form of treachery to oneself as well as to one's beloved, even if the latter has not yet come into the picture...
...Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Extramarital Affairs The big hit of the Broadway season, Same Time Next Year, has to do with a woman and a man, each married to another, who meet dedicatedly once a year for sex, conversation and other refreshments...
...Opportunities for meeting would, in the nature of things, be limited-and that is to the good: Infrequency adds to anticipation, which improves the quality of the encounter...
...It means receiving from her a summary of last night's sensitivity-raising symposium or the backwash from Ms...
...Magazine...
...These can get awkward...
...I am not suggesting friendship between a woman and a man is impossible without sex...
...Let us consider some of them: The Romantic Novel: This art form teaches, in brief, that sex cannot be separated from love, and that neither can be separated from heartbreak or at least a bad case of jitters...
...Have a drink...
...Would you like to know what real female-male friendship means to a certain kind of liberated woman in these times...
...It offers a lift out of the humdrum...
...Indeed, such an arrangement is so beneficial from every point of view that a caution is required: Do not, on the reasoning that your spouse and your lover would like one another, bring the latter home to meet the former...
...In the most ferocious cases, it means angry lectures on the inequities womankind has suffered since Eve...
...So long for now, friend...
...Extramarital interludes do require a certain dissimulation or evasion or even outright lying at home-and that kind of behavior can be debilitating to the spirit...
...Extramarital sex, kept under control, can be a support for a happy marriage...
...Everyone is in favor of Authenticity, though no one can quite define it...
...The regularity with which they come together and the length of time they keep doing so may seem the stuff of artifice...
...Have not the psychologists taught us that in these matters a person gets approximately what he or she is asking for...
...It is instructive, teaching little things that can be transferred to the marriage bed for the pleasure of both parties...
...Sexual relationships can be unpredictable, and if one finds oneself being carried away by the extramarital affair, the marital affair will suffer for it...
...That kind of robust palship is completely finished once sex slips in...
...But the careful reader has no difficulty in spotting their real natures beneath the jargon of their craft...
...The reader has to recognize that nothing good can come of it...
...The marriage counselor, whose education comes from the marriage manuals, will decide either that the marriage can be saved or that it does not deserve to be saved and should be passed on to a divorce counselor, sometimes called a lawyer...
...Today, the Real Thing is called Authenticity...
...Certainly, this warning contains an element of common sense...
...Bed without boredom...
...For the romantic novel to succeed, at least one of the principals, usually the heroine, has to be deeply neurotic...
...Yet a great virtue of the kind of encounter celebrated in Same Time Next Year is precisely that it keeps relationships within compartments...
...The rules should be basic: Both parties would have to be firmly married, not casting about for a permanent exchange or alteration of life style...
...On the other hand, candor is an overprized virtue...
...It makes one pleased with oneself and more pleasant to have around the house...
...an undue amount of it at the wrong times in the wrong places can do enormous damage...
...but as for the species of arrangement, I have no doubt many in the audiences experience a pleasing sense of recognition, a flood of warm memories, a nice tingling of conspiracy...
...It means, for the man, listening to the woman talk about her career prospects, and giving her a bit of help where possible...
...So if you are having or would like to have a sensible affair, stay away from marriage counselors...
...Some advanced counselors may advise a short fling at adultery, in the hope that it will shake things up and get the legally connected partners together again, but this is an artificial business, about as much fun as aspirin...
...Not love-just good cool friendly sex...
...And if their untroubled relationship was adulterous to boot, the world of the romantic novelist would fall to pieces...
...Please don't misunderstand...
...The wonder is that everyone doesn't...
...They are enlightened parents instructing their children not that God will punish them if they raid the cookie jar but that their stomachs will...
...What is much more difficult and perhaps not possible is for a man and a woman to reach the kind of intimacy that two men or two women may achieve, without sex becoming part of it...
...Not at all...
...To them, adultery is a symptom...
...The proper course, then, should one find oneself straying, is to sit down conscientiously with a marriage counselor for the going fee and get straightened out...
...In such cases, men are definitely advised to control their sexual inclinations, insofar as these have not already been shriveled by all that talk...
...Something is lacking in the marriage when one or another partner seeks or finds sex elsewhere, or even has it thrust upon him or her...
...It is first-rate recreation, and does wonders for body and spirit...
...at home one wants handholding and back-scratching...
Vol. 58 • May 1975 • No. 10
