45 During the White Terror, the police caught two suspects, a man and a woman, who were passionately in love. The chief of police invented a new torture. He simply had them bound as one, face to face. To begin with, the lovers consoled themselves that at least they were together, even though it was with the inseparability of Siamese twins. But slowly each became irksome to the other; they became filthy, they could not sleep; and then hateful; and finally so intolerably loathsome that when they were released they never spoke to each other again.
46 A few rare marriages may be without mutual hatred or quarrels from their very beginning. One could also write music in which every interval was of a perfect fourth. But it would not be perfect music. Most marriages recognize this paradox: that passion destroys passion, as the Midas touch destroys possession.
47 An intelligent married couple might therefore come to this conclusion: they wish to retain passion in their marriage, and so they should deliberately quarrel, and hate, in order to swing back together with more force. Women do indeed initiate marital quarrels more frequently than men; they know more about human nature, more about mystery, and more about keeping passion alive. There may be biological reasons for menstruation, but it is also the most effective recreator of passion; and the women who resist emancipation also know what they are about.
48 But there comes a time when passion costs too much in quarrels. To survive familiarity, dailiness, it needs more and more violent separations, and so either the two poles quarrel more and more violently inside marriage, or they look for new passion, a new pole, outside it.
49 Passion can be controlled in only one way; by sacrificing its pleasures.
50 But this sacrifice is made almost impossibly difficult, at least in capitalist Western society, by our attitude to growing old. With the decline of a belief in an afterlife and the corresponding growth of the demand for equality, the whole tendency of man is to shrink away from death and the age at which it arrives. In every aspect of our societies, from their art to their advertising, we see the cult and desirability of eternal youth maintained… and therefore of passion, which joined with our craving for the virgin experience, explains the enormous change that has taken place in our concepts and standards of marital fidelity.
51 Man is more guilty than woman here, since men have always required public and social – rather than emotional and domestic – reward in life. In spite of the male myth about female vanity, it is the men who are in the more greedy pursuit of this chimera of eternal youth. The Western male has, in our century, become increasingly Moslem in his attitude towards marriage and women. We do not yet practice legal polygamy, but the common contemporary desire of men in their forties and fifties to jettison their similarly-aged wives for an affaire or a new marriage with a girl young enough to be a daughter (or even a grand-daughter) is already a de facto polygamous institution among the rich and successful in the less convention-bound professions (especially those that permit mobility and thus escape the ethical pressures of the close community). This may be a normal, even finally a healthy, innovation in society. But it could be just only if middle-aged women were allowed to follow suit. In fact, they stay at home and suffer, left in a slavery more subtle but no less iron than the one they are generally supposed to have been freed from during these last fifty years.
52 This retrogressive step in the relationship between the sexes is certainly partly explicable as a last resentment of overthrown Adam against victorious Eve; and it may in itself seem to have little to do with my general theme. But it is in fact very symptomatic of our craving for a more sharply-opposed tonality of life – a greater tension. No one will deny that passion is necessary in its season, and we possess nothing until we possess it first with passion. But this passion, and the passionate stage of marriage, is animal; it is the harmonius marriage that is human. In passion it is said, we feel near the heart of things – and so we are: nearer things than humanity.
53 Plenty of books instruct sexual technique; but none teach the equally vital technique of transposing from the passionate relationship to the harmonious one.
TRANSPOSITION
54 The first step is to eliminate passion as a source of tension. The second is to accept the oneness of the marriage. In passion everything is between thee and me; in harmony it is between them and us. I-thou is passion, we-they is harmony. We have the word egocentric; it is time we invented noscentric.
55 Now of course no marriage can be wholly harmonious. But if it becomes noscentric it is immediately equipped to find different counterpoles, outside itself, which can in their turn help to determine the nature of, and establish and cement, the nos, the ‘we’ pole; just as the T pole is determined by its counterpoles. Certain counterpoles, such as the problems of aging, and the approach of death, will be common to all marriages.
56 But there is a second aid to the establishment of the harmonious marriage. We think ordinarily of the opposite of harmony as discord. But as I said earlier there is another and very fundamental counterpole of every existent object, and that is its non-existence-nothingness, the state of ‘God’. In a piece of music we think of the discords as the counterpoles of the harmonies; but there are also the pauses and silences.
And it is this state, not of discord but of ‘silent’ not-harmony, that we need to utilize to establish the harmonious marriage. In practical terms, this means the establishment of private interests not shared by the other partner, a disconnection in the relationship, an acceptance that togetherness becomes as intolerable as that of the pair in the White Terror torture if it is not based on periods of at least psychological separation. Now clearly the ability to form such outside interests, to maintain such a controlled separateness from which the basic harmony will spring, requires both education and economic freedom of a standard we have nowhere in our world today except among the fortunate few; and that is yet one more argument for a greater human equality.
57 All I say about marriage is stale news: every middle-aged and still happily married couple knows it. But my purpose is to point out that in our metaphorical marriage to pleasure, and in particular to the pleasures of being secure, doing good, and experiencing beauty, we develop the same kind of passionate relationship as we do in marriage. We feel passionately about them, but in order to continue to feel so, we have increasingly to resort to their counterpoles.
58 The equivalent in marriage is the malaise known as the seven-year-itch: boredom with fidelity. This metaphorical itch, this boredom with the stable and the socially recommended and the good, comes as a rule between the ages of thirty and forty – in the fourth decade of the marriage to existence. It is aggravated – and always will be – by the group in society who are at the age when the passionate experience is their right, their desire, and almost their duty: that is, the young. And if we idolize (as we do today) the young, then passionate atmospheres (and passionate politics, passionate art, and all the rest) must infest our societies.
INTERNATIONAL TENSION
59 All this conflict between harmony and passion becomes of greatest pertinence in the relationship between different countries and blocs of countries. The suffering we cause by private stupidity is at least confined to a small area; but the penalties now lurking in the underground bunkers and germ-warfare laboratories, lurking and waiting to pounce on any national or governmental selfishness and stupidity, are so gigantic that we cannot afford any personal isolationism in these matters.