(5) Reader advisory

"Be advised: polemics aren’t measured; they don’t tell “both sides of the story.” They overstate the case. They toss out provocations and occasionally mockery, usually because they’re arguing against something so unquestionable and deeply entrenched it’s the only way to make even a dent in the usual story. Modern love may be a company town—it may even come with company housing (also known as “domesticity”)—but are we such social marionettes that we automatically buy all usual stories, no questions asked?"(8)

(8) Prologue - (or, “Something Just Happened to Me.”)

"“Would you like to dance?” You’ve mustered all the studied casualness you can, momentarily convincing yourself (self-deception is not entirely unknown in moments such as these) that your motives are as pure as the gold of your wedding band, your virtue as eternal as your mortgage payment schedule. This small act of daring accomplished, your body now pressed nervously against this person who’s been casting winsome glances in your direction all night, you slowly become aware of a muffled but not completely unfamiliar feeling stirring deep within, a distant rumbling getting louder and louder, like a herd of elephants massing on the bushveld … oh God, it’s your libido, once a well-known freedom fighter, now a sorry, shriveled thing, from swaggering outlaw to model citizen, Janis Joplin to Barry Manilow in just a few short decades. All rampant primal urges having long been successfully sublimated into job and family life, all applicable organs pledged to the couple as community property (and now very occasionally summoned to perform those increasingly predictable conjugal interchanges, but with—let’s face it—somewhat flagging ardor, a gradually drooping interest), you suddenly recall with a thud just what you’ve been missing. When did sex get to be so boring?" [mijn nadruk] (8)

"So here you are, bopping to the beat (you hope), awash in an exotic sensation. Is it … pleasure? A long time since someone looked at you with that kind of interest, isn’t it? Various bodily and mental parts are stirred to attention by this close encounter with an anatomy not your mate’s—who was dissuaded from coming, or wasn’t interested in the first place, and …" [mijn nadruk] (10)

"You felt transformed: suddenly so charming, so attractive, awakened from emotional deadness, and dumbstruck with all the stabbing desire you thought you’d long outgrown. Then there was that first nervous phone call, coffee, or a drink, or—circumstances permitting—an incredible all-night marathon conversation. It’s been so long since someone really listened to you like that."(10)

"Somehow things quickly get a little more serious than you’d anticipated, which you secretly (all right, desperately) wanted, and now emotions are involved, vulnerabilities are involved—emotions you didn’t intend to have, vulnerability that thrills you to the core, and you shouldn’t be feeling any of this, but also you’re strangely … is it elated?
Hard on the heels of that elation is a combustible fusion of numbing anxiety and gnawing guilt."(11)

"Whatever the specifics, here you are, poised on the threshold of a major commandment infraction, about to be inducted (or perhaps reinstated, you devil) into the secret underground guild of conjugal saboteurs, all recklessly clogging up the social machinery with their errant desires. You have no clue what you’re doing, or what’s going to come of it (situational amnesia about the last time may be required), but you’d do anything to keep on feeling so … alive."(15)

[Geweldige start van het boek. Over de vervlakking in een exclusieve relatie en het spannende gevoel wanneer je iemand anders tegenkomt die je weer echt ziet. Ontzettend goed geschreven.]

(15) Chapter One - Love’s labors

Hoe vaak komt 'ontrouw' voor?

"We live in sexually interesting times, meaning a culture which manages to be simultaneously hypersexualized and to retain its Puritan underpinnings, in precisely equal proportions.(...) apparently, taking an occasional walk on the wild side while still wholeheartedly pledged to a monogamous relationship isn’t an earthshaking contradiction. Many of us manage to summon merciful self-explanations as required ..."(16).

Noot 1

"Sexual self-reporting is notoriously unreliable. (...) Leaving aside the question of whether men over-report more than women under-report sexual activity, or whether accumulating more than twenty partners in a lifetime defies probability, we might ask, does tweaking the data on the basis of such assumptions make statistics any more reliable than guesses? As it happens, the Chicago survey reported quite low adultery rates (men 21 percent, women 11 percent), figures which are still widely quoted in current news stories on adultery. By comparison, the Kinsey reports pegged male adultery at 50 percent (in 1948) and female adultery (in 1953) at 26 percent." [mijn nadruk] (72)

Maar het gaat in dit boek niet eens om de kleine transgressies. Er volgt wat aandacht voor terminologische kwesties.

"But we’re not talking about “arrangements” with either self or spouse, or when it’s “just sex,” or no big thing. We will be talking about what feels like a big thing: the love affair. Affairs of the heart. Exchanges of intimacy, reawakened passion, confessions, idealization, and declarations—along with favorite books, childhood stories, relationship complaints, and deepest selves, often requiring agonized consultation with close friends or professional listeners at outrageous hourly rates because one or both parties are married or committed to someone else, thus all this merging and ardor takes place in nervous hard-won secrecy and is turning your world upside down. In other words, we will be talking about contradictions, large, festering contradictions at the epicenter of love in our time. Infidelity will serve as our entry point to this teeming world of ambivalence and anxiety, and as our lens on the contemporary ethos of love—as much an imaginary space as an actual event." [mijn nadruk] (17)

"But gay or straight, licensed or not, anywhere the commitment to monogamy reigns, adultery provides its structural transgression—sexual exclusivity being the cornerstone of modern coupledom, or such is the premise—and for the record, you can also commit it with any sex or gender your psyche can manage to organize its desires around; this may not always be the same one that shapes your public commitments." [mijn nadruk] (19)

"While feminism typically gets the credit (or blame) for propelling women out of the domicile and into the job market, let’s give credit where credit is due: thanks must go too to economic downturns and stagnating real wages—although if it now takes two incomes to support a household, maybe this was not exactly what the term “women’s liberation” was designed to mean."(22)

"Adulterers: you may now be seated. Will all those in Good Relationships please stand? Thank you, feel free to leave if this is not your story—you for whom long-term coupledom is a source of optimism and renewal, not emotional anesthesia. Though before anyone rushes for the exits, a point of clarification: a “good relationship” would probably include having—and wanting to have—sex with your spouse or spouse-equivalent on something more than a quarterly basis. (Maybe with some variation in choreography?) It would mean inhabiting an emotional realm in which monogamy isn’t giving something up (your “freedom,” in the vernacular) because such cost-benefit calculations just don’t compute. It would mean a domestic sphere in which faithfulness wasn’t preemptively secured through routine interrogations (“Who was that on the phone, dear?”), surveillance (“Do you think I didn’t notice how much time you spent talking to X at the reception?”), or impromptu search and seizure. A “happy” state of monogamy would be defined as a state you don’t have to work at maintaining." [mijn nadruk] (23)

"When monogamy becomes labor, when desire is organized contractually, with accounts kept and fidelity extracted like labor from employees, with marriage a domestic factory policed by means of rigid shop-floor discipline designed to keep the wives and husbands and domestic partners of the world choke-chained to the status quo machinery—is this really what we mean by a “good relationship”?"(25)

"Funny, the metaphors of the homefront seem to have acquired a rather funereal ring these days too: dead marriages, mechanical sex, cold husbands, and frigid wives, all going through the motions and keeping up appearances."(29)

"Why work so hard? Because there’s no other choice? But maybe there is. After all, technological progress could reduce necessary labor to a minimum had this ever been made a social goal—if the goal of progress were freeing us from necessity instead of making a select few marvelously rich while the luckless rest toil away."(29)

"Obviously, couple economies too are governed—like our economic system itself—by scarcity, threat, and internalized prohibitions, held in place by those incessant assurances that there are “no viable alternatives.” (What an effective way of preventing anyone from thinking one up.)"(31)

"Harkening back to some remote evolutionary past for social explanations does seem to be a smoke screen for other agendas, usually to tout the “naturalness” of capitalist greed or the “naturalness” of traditional gender roles. Man as killer ape; woman as nurturing turtledove, or name your own bestial ancestor as circumstance requires.(...) No, we’re social creatures to a fault, and apparently such malleable ones that our very desires manage to keep lockstep with whatever particular social expectations of love prevail at the moment.(...) Note that the rebellion of desire against social constrictions was once a favorite cultural theme, pulsing through so many of our literary classics—consider Romeo and Juliet or Anna Karenina. Now apparently we’ve got that small problem solved and can all love the way that’s best for society: busy worker bees and docile nesters all." [mijn nadruk] (32)

"What a startling degree of conformity is so meekly accepted—and so desired!—by a species, homo Americanus, for whom other threats to individuality do so often become fighting matters, a people whose jokes (and humor is nothing if not an act of cultural self-definition) so frequently mock others for their behavioral uniformity—communism for its apparatchiks, lemmings for their skills as brainless followers—yet somehow fails to notice its own regimentation in matters at least as defining as toeing a party line, and frequently no more mindful than diving off high cliffs en masse."(36)

"Yes, adulterers: playing around, breaking vows, causing havoc. Or … maybe not just playing around? After all, if adultery is a de facto referendum on the sustainability of monogamy—and it would be difficult to argue that it’s not—this also makes it the nearest thing to a popular uprising against the regimes of contemporary coupledom. But let’s consider this from a wider angle than the personal dimension alone." [mijn nadruk] (37)

"Clearly there’s pervasive dissatisfaction with the state of marriage: the implosion rate is high and climbing.(...) Given the declining success story of long-term marriages, as reported in the latest census, we’re faced with a social institution in transition, and no one knows where it’s going to land. The reasonable response would be to factor these transitions into relevant policy and social welfare decisions; this is apparently impossible."(39)

"Adultery is not, of course, minus its own contradictions. Foremost among them: What are these domestic refuseniks and matrimonial escape artists escaping to, with such determination and cunning? Well, it appears that they’re escaping to … love."(42)

"If adultery is the sit-down strike of the love-takes-work ethic, regard the assortment of company goons standing by to crush any dissent before it even happens."(42)

Therapie is de grote oplossing voor al die onvrede, zegt Kipnis cynisch. En anders stuurt de cultuur ons wel in de goede richting.

"But don’t resist! The more you resist the longer it takes, and the more you’ll pay—in forty-five-minute increments, and at fees far exceeding the median daily wage. But happily, you will soon be feeling far better about yourself, and at peace with your desires and conflicts; if not, the same results can be attained in easy-to-swallow capsule form. With an estimated thirty million Americans—or around 10 percent of the adult population—having ingested antidepressants to date (GPs apparently hand them out like lollipops), better living through chemistry is now the favored social solution. Just say goodbye to your sex life." [mijn nadruk] (45)

"Another of the company goons: Culture. Consider the blaringly omnipresent propaganda beaming into our psyches on an hourly basis: the millions of images of lovestruck couples looming over us from movie screens, televisions, billboards, magazines, incessantly strong-arming us onboard the love train."(46)

"In fact, according to renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, a Frankfurt School fellow traveler, the only social purpose of compulsory marriage for life is to produce the submissive personality types that mass society requires. He also took the view—along with Freud—that suppressing sexual curiosity leads to general intellectual atrophy, including the loss of any power to rebel."(51)

"How virtuous it feels, trading play for industry, freedom for authority, and any lingering errant desires for “mature” realizations like Good Relationships Take Work."(53)

"Clearly love is subject to just as much regulation as any powerful pleasure-inducing substance. Whether or not we fancy that we love as we please, free as the birds and butterflies, an endless quantity of social instruction exists to tell us what it is, and what to do with it, and how, and when. And tell us, and tell us: the quantity of advice on the subject of how to love properly is almost as infinite as the sanctioned forms it takes are limited. Love’s proper denouement, matrimony, is also, of course, the social form regulated by the state,"(56)

"Of course, no one is physically held down and forced to swallow vows, and not all those who love acquire the proper licenses to do so, but what a remarkable compliance rate is nevertheless achieved. Why bother to make marriage compulsory when informal compulsions work so well that even gays—once such paragons of unregulated sexuality, once so contemptuous of whitebread hetero lifestyles—are now demanding state regulation too? What about re-envisioning the form; rethinking the premises? What about just insisting that social resources and privileges not be allocated on the basis of marital status? No, let’s demand regulation!" [mijn nadruk] (56)

"Here we come to the weak link in the security-state model of long-term coupledom: desire. It’s ineradicable. It’s roving and inchoate, we’re inherently desiring creatures, and sometimes desire just won’t take no for an answer, particularly when some beguiling and potentially available love-object hoves into your sight lines, making you feel what you’d forgotten how to feel, which is alive, even though you’re supposed to be channeling all such affective capacities into the “appropriate” venues, and everything (Social Stability! The National Fabric! Being a Good Person!) hinges on making sure that you do." [mijn nadruk] (60)

"“Wanting more” is a step on the way to a political idea, or so say political theorists, and ideas can have a way of turning themselves into demands. In fact, “wanting more” is the simple basis of all utopian thinking, according to philosopher Ernst Bloch. “Philosophies of utopia begin at home,” Bloch liked to say—found in the smallest sensations of pleasure and fun, or even in daydreams, exactly because they reject inhibitions and daily drudgery. Utopianism always manages to find an outlet too, operating in disguise when necessary, turning up in all sorts of far-flung places. Or right under our noses, because utopianism is an aspect of anything that opens up the possibilities for different ways of thinking about the world. For madcap utopian Bloch, the most tragic form of loss wasn’t the loss of security, it was the loss of the capacity to imagine that things could be different." [mijn nadruk] (62)

[Prachtig inzicht. Daarom moet je altijd utopisch blijven denken en voelen en handelen.]

"But note the charges typically leveled against the adulterer: “immaturity” (failure to demonstrate the requisite degree of civilized repression); “selfishness” (failure to work for the collective good—a somewhat selectively imposed requirement in corporate America); “boorishness” (failure to achieve proper class behavior). Or the extra fillip of moral trumping: “People will get hurt!” (Though perhaps amputated desires hurt too.)"(63)

"Ambivalence may fade into resignation, and given a high enough tolerance for swallowing things, this is supposed to count as a happy ending. But ambivalence can also be another way of saying that we social citizens have a constitutive lack of skill at changing things. Understandably—who gets any training at this? Even when not entirely resigned to the social institutions we’re handed, who has a clue how to remake them, and why commit to them if there could be something better?" [mijn nadruk] (64)

[Maar ze is bepaald niet naïef. Zie dit lange citaat: ]

"Still, before signing up for the thrill ride of adultery, a word to the wise. Let’s all be aware that passionate love involves alarmingly high degrees of misrecognition in even the best of cases... (...) So watch out, baby—a few missteps, a couple of late-night declarations, and everything could be up for grabs. What started as a fling has somehow turned serious; the supplement has started to supersede the thing that needed supplementing. Perhaps unplanned exposures have forced things into the open, or those “contradictions” of yours have started announcing themselves in some unpleasant somatic form that eventually can’t be ignored. Insomnia. Migraines. Cold sores. Digestive ailments. Heart palpitations. Sexual difficulties. (Sometimes bodies just won’t play along, even when instructed otherwise.) Choices will need to be made. Choices that you, with your terminal ambivalence and industrial-strength guilt, are not capable of making. Antacids aren’t working. Work is suffering. The shrink just says, “What do you think?” But about what? Love is also a way of forgetting what the question is. Using love to escape love, groping for love outside the home to assuage the letdowns of love at home—it’s kind of like smoking and wearing a nicotine patch at the same time: two delivery systems for an addictive chemical substance that feels vitally necessary to your well-being at the moment, even if likely to wreak unknown havoc in the deepest fibers of your being at some unspecified future date." [mijn nadruk] (67)

"“Just pick one and settle down already,” you can hear people saying. But what if you just keep finding yourself looking “elsewhere” as much as you tell yourself not to, because this is really no way to act?"(68)

"But to those feeling a little stultified and contemplating a spin down Reinvention Road: do weigh your options carefully. Don’t forget that all outbreaks of love outside sanctioned venues still invite derisive epitaphs like “cheating” or “mid-life crisis,” while those that play by the rules will be community-sanctified with champagne and gifts in the expensive over-rehearsed costume rituals of the wedding-industrial complex" [mijn nadruk] (69)

(74) Chapter Two - Domestic gulags

Veel over huiselijk geweld.

"Unfortunately, the Justice Department does not compile statistics on emotional violence or subcriminal forms of non-lethal intimate behavior: verbal abuse, or public undermining, or emotional blackmail, or everyday manipulations (often involving children), or all the other varieties of less-than-stellar couple conduct in our midst."(78)

"Cultural explanations for the pervasiveness of mate-brutalizing and aggression tend to have an inherently non-explanatory quality to them. The bad apple theory gets the most play, but the problem is that we’re clearly talking about bushels, not a few stray worms. (...) But consider another explanation: perhaps these social pathologies and aberrations of love are the necessary fallout from the social conventions of love that we all adhere to and live out on a daily basis."(79)

"Despite our paeans to commitment, clearly it proves not an entirely salutary experience across the board. Take the pervasiveness of intimate violence. The problem here is hardly lack of commitment; this is commitment in overdrive: being less committed might mean being able to walk away."(80)

"Clearly the injunction to achieve “maturity”—loose translation: 30-year mortgages, spreading waistlines, and shrunken libidos—finds its raison d’être in modern love’s supreme anxiety, that structuring contradiction about the size of the San Andreas fault, upon which, unfortunately, the entirety of our emotional well-being rests, namely the expectation that romance and sexual attraction will persist throughout a lifetime of coupled togetherness, despite much hard evidence to the contrary." [mijn nadruk] (84)

"The prevailing cultural wisdom is that even if sexual desire tends to be a short-lived phenomenon, nevertheless, that wonderful elixir “mature love” will kick in just in time to save the day, once desire flags. The question remaining unaddressed is whether cutting off other possibilities of romance and sexual attraction while there’s still some dim chance of attaining them in favor of the more muted pleasures of “mature love” isn’t similar to voluntarily amputating a healthy limb: a lot of anesthesia is required and the phantom pain never entirely abates. But if it behooves a society to convince its citizenry that wanting change means personal failure, starting over is shameful, or wanting more satisfaction than you have is illegitimate, clearly grisly acts of self-mutilation will be required."(85)

"In fact, a number of historians consider our version of romantic love a learned behavior that became fashionable only in the late eighteenth century, along with the new fashion for novel reading—the novel itself being a then-recent cultural form, invented precisely to explore all the hidden crevices of this newly burgeoning individuality." [mijn nadruk] (87)

"In other words, despite all the supposed freedom, the social rules governing mate selection are as finicky and precise as they were in Jane Austen’s day. The difference is that it’s now taboo to acknowledge them, which may amount to less freedom rather than more."(91)

"With the central premise of modern love the expectation that a state of coupled permanence is achievable, and as freighted with psychological interiority as we all now are, uncoupling can only be experienced as ego-crushing crisis and inadequacy. Even though such uncoupling is increasingly the norm, not the exception, the grief of failed love is exacerbated by inevitable feeling of personal failure, because the expectation is that it should be otherwise—even though technically everyone knows that as the demands put on the couple form escalated, so did divorce rates, and even knows that given the current divorce rate, all indications are that whomever you love today—the center of your universe, your little Poopsie—has a good chance of becoming your worst nightmare at least 50 percent of the time. (Of course, that’s only the percentage who actually leave unhappy unions, and not an accurate indication of the happiness level or nightmare potential of the other 50 percent who don’t.) Marriage historian Lawrence Stone suggests—rather jocularly, you can’t help thinking—that today’s rising divorce rates are just a modern technique for achieving what was once achieved far more efficiently by early mortality.
Nevertheless, our age dedicates itself to allying the turbulence of romance and the rationality of the long-term couple, hoping to be convinced despite all evidence to the contrary that love and sex are obtainable from one person over the course of decades, and that desire will manage to sustain itself over thirty or forty or fifty years of cohabitation. (Should desire unaccountably sputter out, just give up sex; lack of libido for your mate is never an adequate rationale for “looking elsewhere.”) Of course both parties must also work at keeping passion alive (what joy), given the presumption that even after living in close proximity to someone for an historically unprecedented length of time, you will still muster the requisite fizz to achieve sexual congress on a regular basis." [mijn nadruk] (94)

"Then there are the assorted low-tech solutions to desire’s dilemmas: take advice. In fact, take more and more advice, until it’s seeping out of your ears and pores. Relationship advice is a booming business these days: between print, airwaves, and the therapy industry, if there were any way to quantify the GNP in romantic counsel circulating throughout the culture at any one moment, it would certainly amount to a staggering number. There are now some 50,000 couples therapists in the nation..." [mijn nadruk] (97)

"Check out the relationship self-help aisle in your local bookstore chain, its floor-to-ceiling advice, each book with its own complicated internal logic or complex system generally involving multipart questionnaires, acronyms, charts, and bullet points."(97)

[Inderdaad: relaties en huwelijk zijn big business. ]

"Fundamentally, to achieve love and qualify for entry into that realm of salvation and transcendence known as the couple, you must be a lovable person. What precisely does this entail? Let’s begin with the basics. Being lovable will, of course, require an acceptable level of social normalcy: personal hygiene, a suitable wardrobe, class-appropriate social skills. Any overly evident social abnormality will likely impede your progress toward acquiring love. Conceal where possible. But normalcy just gets you in the door. According to the tenets of modern love, lovability will also require a thorough knowledge of the intricacies of mutuality.(...) Mutuality means recognizing that your partner has needs, and being prepared to meet them. The modern self is constituted as a bundle of needs waiting to be met, meaning that intimacy will be, by definition, rather a fraught and anxious scene. This is largely because modern intimacy presumes that the majority of those needs can and should be met by one person alone: if you question this, you question the very foundations of the institution, thus don’t. Meeting someone’s needs is the most effective way to become the object of her or his desire, which is what we all most yearn to be, and feel ourselves to be worthless failures if we are not." [mijn nadruk] (102)

"Nevertheless, meeting another’s needs is what is known as intimacy, itself required to achieve the state known as psychological maturity"(104)

"Thus mutuality requires communication, since in order to be met, these needs must be expressed."(104)

"The protocols of companionate coupledom do typically require two individuals to coexist in an enclosed space for extended periods of time: in other words, domesticity."(106)

"Successful cohabitation requires reducing the differences between two individuals to, at the very minimum, the point of joint toleration, though often this point will not arrive until the will of at least one of the parties has been shrunken to manageable proportions, not unlike a tumor subjected to massive doses of radiation."(107)

"But scratch the annoyance and you find … anxiety. Because after all, what is more anxiogenic than a partner’s freedom, which might mean the freedom not to love you, or to stop loving you, or to love someone else, or to become a different person than the one who once pledged to love you always and now … perhaps doesn’t? (...) Thus derives the fundamental bargain of sustained coupledom: either individual’s autonomy or freedom of movement is of secondary importance compared to the other person’s security and peace of mind. And thus, the rituals of modern domesticity: anxiety avoidance is so deeply structured into the fabric of domestic routine—knowing where the mate is at any moment, curfews, travel and movement restrictions, even occasional whereabouts confirmations when necessary—you might be led to think that anxiety appeasement was modern coupledom’s sustaining imperative." [mijn nadruk] (112)

"What follows is a brief sample of answers to the simple question: “What can’t you do because you’re in a couple?” (This information is all absolutely true; nothing was invented. Nothing needed to be.)"(121)

[Volgt een bladzijden lange — tot 132! — prachtige opsomming van allerlei zaken waaraan stellen zich bij elkaar kunnen ergeren en die ze dus niet mogen doen van elkaar.]

"Thus we grow to demand obedience in our turn, we household dictators and petty tyrants of the private sphere, who are in our turn, dictated to. (...) And thus you have the psychological signature of the modern self: defined by love, an empty vessel without it, the threat of love’s withdrawal shriveling even the most independent spirits into complacency (and, of course, ressentiment)."(134)

"How very convenient that we’re so willing to police ourselves and those we love, and call it living happily ever after."(135)

"Oddly, there’s no critical commentary about the rather obvious fact that popular culture teems with plots in which love kills, and that we’re surrounded not only by the expected love stories, but equally by anti-love stories: for every film that ends with a happy pair in love-affirming embrace before fading gracefully to black, another shows us the anxiety, perversity, boredom, sadism, and frustration that riddle coupled life. Perhaps it’s that these themes tend to genre hop—from the gothic to the supernatural to suspense to comedy—that prevents us from recognizing the anti-love film as a genre in its own right, but still, it’s as if no one had put it together that there are a lot of movies featuring guys in cowboy hats and wide open spaces. It takes a certain studied ignorance to overlook such blatant cultural repetition. Is this the genre that dare not speak its name?(...) And so, in the interests of greater cultural self-understanding, we will now foray into the uncharted hinterlands of the anti-love genre, to see what we can reveal." [mijn nadruk] (139 en 141)

[Good one!!]

"In the anti-love film, love is fundamentally misrecognition: what looks like love or a beloved is unmasked as something or someone else entirely (...) Love is both intoxicating and delusional, but in the end, toxic: an extended exercise in self-deception. It may not have started out that way, though usually it did; the protagonist was just blithely unaware of it, a naïveté to which any of us might fall prey and probably have. But still, how could you not see what was happening under your own roof?"(141)

"The typical solution is the last-moment rescue of the betrayed party from the clutches of a bad love-object by a potential new love-object or helper character (as in Gaslight). Additionally this permits the anti-love theme to be redeemed by the more reassuring explanatory framework of wrong object-choice. The problem wasn’t love itself, the problem was—once again—one bad apple."(142)

"Kill them with laughs or for the insurance: either way, spousal antagonism finds the requisite cultural outlets.(...) ours would seem to be a culture more at odds with its own dictates about love than it cares to openly acknowledge.(...) it’s why the fundamental premise of the marriage joke is that couples are a prison, spouses each other’s jailers, and house arrest the basic condition of modern love."(146-147)

(150) Chapter Three - The art of love

Vergelijk een normaal huwelijk zoals beschreven met een avontuurtje.

"Let’s say there’s even sex—reliably satisfying, gets-the-job-done sex (and what’s wrong with that?)—but how can that compare to the feeling of being reinvented? Of being desired? Of feeling fascinating?"(151)

"Or maybe you weren’t unhappy at all, and things were just fine at home, and you were just unlucky enough to fall in love. Whatever your type, however it started, the point is that you didn’t plan to feel this way, it just happened—well maybe you didn’t plan not to either, or didn’t have the foresight and “maturity” to put the brakes on before it was too late"(153)

"“Bliss”: often synonymous with intense sexual reawakening—or for a few of us late bloomers, an erotic initiation (who knew it could feel this way!)—that has you stumbling around in states of altered consciousness and electrified embodiment; that has you fantasizing about sex..."(154)

"It feels fun. It feels rebellious. Instead of Bartleby hunched dutifully over that project or report that was due days or weeks ago, there you are on the computer composing witty novella-length e-mails to your beloved."(155)

"You’re a dust-bowl farmer whose dry scrubby fields have been transformed into lush verdant plains by a miracle rainfall, vitality coursing through your thirsty back rows where only shortly ago barrenness and despair prevailed. You’re remaking the world through emotions and desire, which is a full-time job in itself. Fuck work."(156)

"But whatever political valence anyone wants to assign to sexual transgression—not an uncontested question on either the right or the left—at least we can say without risking an argument that it’s a thorn in the side of a conservative vision of collective social life."(162)

"Whatever the mechanics, you third parties will invariably find yourselves in possession of a small arsenal of intimate data on the particularities of the “other” relationship. Depending on your lover’s volubility or discontent, or your own propensities for asking direct questions or making inferences, everything is soon known: an illustrated catalogue of complaints, an unabridged history of couple arguments, many years’ accumulation of disappointments and betrayals, and a psychological profile on the absent mate with a level of detail rivaling one of Freud’s case studies. This is a person you may never meet, but will come to know very well: every neurosis, small and large; every annoying habit, tic, rigidity, or unreasonable expectation; every less-than-charming idiosyncrasy."(172)

"There’s no doubt that catching a mate in a deception is injurious for anyone who holds that transparency is the sine qua non of intimacy, and most of us do. It’s typical to feel that having been deceived means having been disrespected, even humiliated."(183)

"If the mate is willing to saddle some of the blame, renouncing an affair may be just the recommitment gesture needed for a “fresh start.” And maybe things will actually improve. The mate vows to become more attentive, or less critical, or more sexually adventurous. You both make pledges to work harder at the relationship. Marriage counselors are consulted; plans for vacations or domestic improvements are undertaken; real estate purchases are considered: all capital investments in relationship continuation. (Perhaps the thought has even started fluttering around unbidden, somewhere back in the old reptile brain, that being found out wasn’t an entirely bad way to ameliorate domestic conditions?)
Though needless to say, once you’ve been caught in an affair, domestic life quickly transforms itself into the domestic equivalent of a South American police state, subjecting you to periodic search and seizures, ritual interrogations about movements and associations. Independent documentation may be demanded. Desk drawers are rifled for clues, bills audited for improprieties, and so-called friends transform themselves into a network of informants as extensive as former Stasi agents. A Baltimore therapist recommends that couples who survive infidelity episodes create a “family fund” that the betrayed spouse can use to hire a private detective to ensure future fidelity. (Obviously any future affairs are going to necessitate the cunning and sustained duplicity of an Anthony Blunt.)"(192-193)

"“For the sake of the children”: end of discussion. What a noble sacrifice; virtue is in your court. Though needless to say, “for the sake of the children” is rather a selective enterprise, holding sway far more frequently when it comes to guilty matters like divorce than when it comes to pocketbook issues like education spending (America ranks fourteenth in per capita dollars spent on education out of fifteen industrialized countries). Or when it comes to every other form of childhood health and well-being: the U.S. ranks twenty-eighth in infant mortality rates, which means behind virtually every other industrialized nation in the world—and one in five of the surviving American kids lives in poverty. Sentimentality about children’s welfare comes and goes apparently: highest when there’s the chance to moralize about adult behavior, lowest when it comes to resource allocation. Of course, all sorts of dollars are available to be thrown into expensive longitudinal studies gauging the effects of divorce on children, studies whose results invariably mirror the views of the principal researcher: conservatives will discover that divorce is disastrous, liberals will discover that children are resilient. But if women’s post-divorce income drops an average of 30 percent, if the single parent household is a predictor of poverty, it turns out that cushioning children from the economic consequences of divorce or single parenthood is a simple matter of formulating social policy that conforms to the reality of the lives of the citizenry instead of moralizing at them. As Sweden’s system of guaranteed child allocations proves with its childhood poverty rate of under 3 percent compared with 22 percent with our preferred method—which is to ignore reality, let everyone fend for themselves, and blame the consequences on lax morals or not working hard enough—whether at marriage or the minimum wage jobs that produce the poverty in the first place." [mijn nadruk] (201)

"Are traditional families really such happy, neurosis-free places? They seem to produce their share of criminals and sociopaths, and run-of-the-mill unhappiness. Clearly the answer to the much-debated question “Does divorce harm children?” should be “Compared to what?” Compared to contexts of chronic unhappiness and dissatisfaction, to unmet needs as status quo, to bitching mothers, remote fathers, and other gendered forms of quotidian misery?(...) Unfortunately what “for the sake of the children” really means is multi-generational training grounds for lowered expectations as an affective norm; for “that’s just the way it is” as a guide to living; for the idea that change spells catastrophe and trauma, and wanting anything more or different is ridiculous."(202)

(205) Chapter Four - ... And the pursuit of happiness

[Dit hoofdstuk is het minst interessant. Het ratelt maar door over Amerikaanse politiek, alsof dat het model is. ]

Over alle avontuurtjes van politici in de VS die zich voorstaan op 'family values' en het huwelijk, anderen verwijten maken over dat ze vreemd gaan, en meer van dat soort huichelarij van al die fatsoensrakkers, veelal van de Republikeinse kant.

"But it wasn’t only extramarital activities occupying the attention of the politician classes, the entire political sphere had become obsessed with the problem of marriage itself. Public policy debates were preoccupied with salvaging what had come to be seen as a battered institution, in turn dictating decision-making about everything from welfare policy to tax reform to sex education funding, even spearheading a movement to revise the Constitution itself. With a 50 percent divorce rate now established as a permanent feature of the socio-personal landscape, 30 percent higher than in 1970 (and an overall rate closer to 70 percent in the Pacific states, which tend to lead the nation as trendsetters); and census figures revealing a precipitous drop in the overall number of married couples as well as of traditional nuclear families; and a 1999 Rutgers University study reporting that a mere 38 percent of Americans who are married describe themselves as actually happy in that state, the only population now unreservedly enthusiastic about marriage were homosexuals, for whom the right to legally marry had emerged as a key political goal, AIDS having forced an early demise of the gay activism of previous decades, which once battled the vanilla norms of heterosexual coupledom (or in queer theory’s jargon, “heteronormativity”) instead of trying to replicate them." [mijn nadruk] (213)

"Conservative think tanks like the Institute for American Values issued what were billed as “nonpartisan” reports suggesting an end to no-fault divorce, as a way of “strengthening civil society” and “improving the quality of marriage.” How preventing divorce would improve marriages and not just further the unhappiness of the unhappily married remained unspecified.
What this so-called crisis in marriage meant or why the populace and its elected representatives were fleeing its purported delights in record numbers were not permissible questions. The possibility that marriage was an institution in transition or an institution being redefined rather than one in need of life support could not be entertained. Nor could the possibility that these transitions in the family structure respond to larger—even global—economic shifts rather than deriving from individual irresponsibility: perhaps a postindustrial economy produces a post-nuclear family." [mijn nadruk] (219-220)

"Politicians even managed to blame poverty on high divorce rates (because it couldn’t be the other way around)."(221)

"Historical footnote: marriages were once private agreements between individuals, usually undertaken as property arrangements. First the church stepped in to claim authority over them, and then the state, in both cases consolidating their own fledgling institutional power by exerting control over what had once been common-law practices."(240)

"Why should the state license marriages, by the way? Don’t ask, just play along because if you do, the state will show its gratitude by conferring numerous special privileges on you: there are reportedly over a thousand places in federal law where marriage confers benefits not allotted to the nonmarried. (And arguably why the fight for gay marriage takes up the wrong battle: rather than marriage as a prerequisite to access government privileges, shouldn’t the fight be to uncouple resource distribution from marital status?) In exchange for its munificence, the state asks just a teensy courtesy from you in return: fidelity to its particular vision of marriage. This would be the Christian ideal of lifelong monogamy: one wife per husband, one sex partner each, for eternity. (This makes adultery not only an infidelity to your spouse but also to your country, and it is still illegal in more than a few particularly jittery locales. As of 1988, forty-five states still had some form of adultery laws on the books.)" [mijn nadruk] (241)

[De staat en religie zijn helaas op alle fronten nog steeds niet gescheiden. Dat zie je goed aan die huwelijkswetgeving.]

"Despite the official line that the United States has no state religion, the Christian model of marriage is lodged so deeply within American political theory and statehood that they’re effectively interdependent. This makes the matter of polygamy—illegal in every state—an interesting problem."(242)

[Precies. En niet alleen daar.]

"But one man’s social progress is another’s social decay: the conservative response has been to lobby to make divorce more difficult to obtain and to promote so-called covenant marriages—currently an option in three southern states—which makes incompatibility insufficient grounds for divorce and requires lengthy waiting periods to dissolve a marriage. But ironically, despite the conservative premise that more religion would solve all America’s problems, it turns out that religion is actually bad for marriage." [mijn nadruk] (246)

"It’s clear that serial monogamy evolved as a pressure-release valve to protect the system from imploding. No, there’s nothing wrong with the institution or its premises, no, you just happened to get the wrong person. But next time around you’d better make the best of it, because too many strikes and you’re out—you’re the problem. In serial monogamy, the players change but the institution remains the same: liberal reformism writ familial. In the other corner, adultery: mocking the conventions, throwing cherry bombs at the institution; small-scale social sabotage, the anarcho-syndicalism of private life. No, it’s not hard to see why the concept itself might pose a threat to the national project, among other illusory stabilities—these being unstable conventions that hope to appear eternal, typically rummaging through the aesthetic conventions of classicism to buttress themselves: picture government buildings, inaugurals, weddings costumes. But rest assured that adultery doesn’t entirely want to smash the system either: where would adultery be without marriage—it requires it!" [mijn nadruk] (251)

"Fidelity pledges, whether to nations or marriages, do hold particular property relations in place: break those vows and anything might happen. Sentimentality should not cause us to lose sight of the fact that marriage always was and is an economic institution; additionally, that private property always required monogamous marriage to insure patrilineal property distribution through inheritance. (A distribution that is only really ensured to the extent that wives can be convinced to bed only their own husbands, one explanation for why women’s sexuality was always more closely policed than men’s. And why women need to be inculcated with a higher degree of sexual repression than men, so that bedding anyone but their own husbands would be all the more unthinkable.)" [mijn nadruk] (262)