To this day, I refuse to burden Felipe with the tremendous responsibility of somehow completing me. By this point in my life I have figured out that he cannot complete me, even if he wanted to. I’ve faced enough of my own incompletions to recognize that they belong solely to me. Having learned this essential truth, I can actually tell now where I end and where somebody else begins. That may sound like an embarrassingly simple trick, but I do need to make clear that it took me over three and a half decades to get to this point-to learn the limitations of sane human intimacy, as nicely defined by C. S. Lewis, when he wrote of his wife, “We both knew this: I had my miseries, not hers; she had hers, not mine.”
One plus one, in other words, is sometimes supposed to equal two.
But how do I know for certain that I will never again become infatuated with anybody else? How trustworthy is my heart? How solid is Felipe’s loyalty to me? How do I know without doubt that outside desires won’t tempt us apart?
These were the questions that I started asking myself as soon as I realized that Felipe and I were-as my sister calls us-“lifers.” To be honest, I was less worried about his loyalties than I was about my own. Felipe has a far simpler history in love than I do. He is a hopeless monogamist who chooses somebody and then relaxes easily into fidelity, and that’s pretty much it. He’s faithful in every regard. Once he has a favorite restaurant, he’s happy to eat there every night, never craving variety. If he enjoys a movie, he’ll contentedly watch it hundreds of times. If he likes an item of clothing, you will see him wearing it for years. The first time I ever bought him a pair of shoes, he said quite sweetly, “Oh, that’s lovely of you, darling-but I already have a pair of shoes.”
Felipe’s first marriage didn’t end with infidelity (he already had a pair of shoes, if you catch my point). Instead, the relationship was buried under an avalanche of circumstantial misfortunes that put too much pressure on the family and finally snapped the bonds. This was a pity, because Felipe, I honestly believe, is meant to mate for life. He’s loyal on a cellular level. I mean that, perhaps, quite literally. There’s a theory within evolutionary scholarship these days suggesting that there are two sorts of men in this world: those who are meant to father children, and those who are meant to raise children. The former are promiscuous; the latter are constant.
This is the famous “Dads or Cads” theory. In evolutionary circles this is not considered a moral judgment call, but rather something that can actually be broken down to the level of DNA. Apparently, there is this critical little chemical variation in the male of the species called the “vasopressin receptor gene.” Men who have the vasopressin receptor gene tend to be trustworthy and reliable sexual partners, sticking with one spouse for decades, raising children and running stable households. (Let’s call such guys “Harry Trumans.”) Men who lack the vasopressin receptor gene, on the other hand, are prone to dalliance and disloyalty, always needing to seek sexual variety elsewhere. (Let’s call such men “John F. Kennedys.”)
The joke among female evolutionary biologists is that there’s only one part of a man’s anatomy that any potential mate should worry about measuring, and that is the length of his vasopressin receptor gene. The scantily-vasopression-receptor-gened John F. Kennedys of this world wander far and wide, spreading their seed across the earth, keeping the human DNA code mixed up and jumbled-which is good for the species, if not necessarily good for the women who are loved and then often abandoned. The long-gened Harry Trumans, in the end, often find themselves raising the kids of the John F. Kennedys.
Felipe is a Harry Truman, and by the time I met him, I was so finished with JFKs, so exhausted by their charms and heart-splintering whims, that all I wanted was this reassuring bundle of steadfastness. But I don’t take Felipe’s decency for granted either, nor do I blithely relax with regard to my own fidelity. History teaches us that just about anybody is capable of just about anything when it comes to the realm of love and desire. Circumstances arise in all of our lives that challenge even our most stubborn loyalties. Maybe this is what we fear most when we enter into marriage-that “circumstances,” in the form of some uncontrollable outside passion, will someday break the bond.
How do you guard against such things?
The only comfort I’ve ever found on this subject came to me through reading the work of Shirley P. Glass, a psychologist who spent much of her career studying marital infidelity. Her question was always, “How did it happen?” How did it happen that good people, decent people, even Harry Truman-like people, find themselves suddenly swept away by currents of desire, destroying lives and families without ever really intending to? We’re not talking about serial cheaters here but trustworthy people who-against their better judgment or their own moral code-stray. How many times have we heard someone say, “I wasn’t looking for love outside my marriage, but it just happened”? Put in such terms, adultery starts to sound like a car accident, like a patch of black ice hidden on a treacherous curve, waiting for an unsuspecting motorist.
But Glass, in her research, discovered that if you dig a little deeper into people’s infidelities, you can almost always see how the affair started long before the first stolen kiss. Most affairs begin, Glass wrote, when a husband or wife makes a new friend, and an apparently harmless intimacy is born. You don’t sense the danger as it’s happening, because what’s wrong with friendship? Why can’t we have friends of the opposite sex-or of the same sex, for that matter-even if we are married?
The answer, as Dr. Glass explained, is that nothing is wrong with a married person launching a friendship outside of matrimony-so long as the “walls and windows” of the relationship remain in the correct places. It was Glass’s theory that every healthy marriage is composed of walls and windows. The windows are the aspects of your relationship that are open to the world-that is, the necessary gaps through which you interact with family and friends; the walls are the barriers of trust behind which you guard the most intimate secrets of your marriage.
What often happens, though, during so-called harmless friendships, is that you begin sharing intimacies with your new friend that belong hidden within your marriage. You reveal secrets about yourself-your deepest yearnings and frustrations-and it feels good to be so exposed. You throw open a window where there really ought to be a solid, weight-bearing wall, and soon you find yourself spilling your secret heart with this new person. Not wanting your spouse to feel jealous, you keep the details of your new friendship hidden. In so doing, you have now created a problem: You have just built a wall between you and your spouse where there really ought to be free circulation of air and light. The entire architecture of your matrimonial intimacy has therefore been rearranged. Every old wall is now a giant picture window; every old window is now boarded up like a crack house. You have just established the perfect blueprint for infidelity without even noticing.
So by the time your new friend comes into your office one day in tears over some piece of bad news, and you wrap your arms around each other (only meaning to be comforting!), and then your lips brush and you realize in a dizzying rush that you love this person-that you have always loved this person!-it’s too late. Because now the fuse has been lit. And now you really do run the risk of someday (probably very soon) standing amid the wreckage of your life, facing a betrayed and shattered spouse (whom you still care about immensely, by the way), trying to explain through your ragged sobs how you never meant to hurt anybody, and how you never saw it coming.