“After the divorce, I found out that for all his insane insistence on my fidelity, he was Mr. Cheater in person. He didn’t have affairs as such, he wasn’t geared for that sort of thing. Instead he spent a couple of afternoons a week with call girls. Paid money for absolutely passionless sex. He did a lot to screw up my life, but I can’t really resent him for it anymore. I can only pity him. His whole attitude regarding love and sex and marriage was genuinely sick.”
JWW: Once her first marriage had ended, Helene returned to work, took an apartment of her own, and began to become socially active once again
“I had had several affairs before Maurice and I met. He was also divorced, and had just broken up with a girl he had lived with for almost a year. We met through mutual friends and saw each other several times before we got around to going to bed together. Eventually we began living together and found ourselves considering marriage.
“We were both very apprehensive about taking the plunge again. Maurice said he seriously doubted that any woman, whoever she was, would be able to fulfill him completely. He had had affairs during his marriage and admitted he had become slightly involved with a girl while he and I were living together. For my part, I was determined to avoid anything at all like the situation I went through during my first marriage. My job was an important part of my life, and I intended to continue with my career. He agreed completely on that point, saying that a woman with a stimulating job was a more stimulating companion than a woman who spent her days in front of a television set. Besides that, though, there were certain friendships I had with men that I did not desire to give up. There were men I frequently had lunch with, one man who shared my enthusiasm for chamber music and used to take me to concerts, and so on.
“Once we had started living together, I stopped having evening dates with other men. I did this automatically, but it began to bother me. It seemed wrong, for example, that I should have to give up chamber music concerts because Maurice didn’t care for them. It seemed even worse to drag him along to them when he didn’t want to go. And it annoyed me that having a deep relationship with one man meant I had to forgo having meaningful friendships with other men.
“Until we started to discuss it, I had not thought of this aspect in sexual terms as such. I had never had simultaneous affairs in the past, and thus I had never contemplated having sex with another man while I was involved with Maurice. But in the course of discussing our mutual concern about marriage, I began to discover within myself a capacity for enjoying an extramarital affair. It seemed to me that if I could enjoy a man’s friendship and companionship, I might also be able to enjoy him sexually while still living with Maurice, or being married to Maurice.
“It would be wrong to give the impression that all of this worked itself out in a series of level-headed conversations. But I’m afraid we didn’t reach a plateau of Instant Maturity. What kept happening was that one of us would rebel against the confines of our relationship, would throw that rebellion in the other’s face either to inflict pain or to exorcise guilt, and the fight that followed would eventually resolve itself in discussion, with the two of us moving a little bit closer to our own definition of the proper structure of a marriage.
“As an example, I called Maurice at his office one afternoon and said I would be having dinner downtown and would then go to a recital at Town Hall. I didn’t specifically state that I was going by myself, but that was the implication. When I got home afterward, I confessed that I had gone to dinner and to the concert with a man I was friendly with, adding that I had kissed him good night when he put me in the cab for home. I don’t remember just what form our argument took, but through this and other arguments we gradually came to see that it was possessiveness and exclusivity that makes so many marriages an unendurable proposition for the people involved in them.
“Another time, Maurice said he was working late at the office. Several nights later he admitted he had spent the hours from five to ten with a girl who worked as a receptionist for one of his clients. They had dinner and then went to bed in her apartment. He added that she had wanted him to stay the night. I asked him why the hell he felt compelled to come home, that I wasn’t his jailer, and suggested he go to her then and there. He left the house but came back within fifteen minutes. I said something like, ‘What’s the matter, isn’t she home?’ He said he hadn’t called her, that he really just wanted to be with me. We worked things out, and in the process learned a little more about ourselves and our needs and what we could give to each other as well as what we expected from each other.”
JWW: This redefinition of attitudes and roles was a drawn-out process for Helene and Maurice. Both realized that they could not possibly be comfortable with a conventional marriage, and so they literally had to invent a form of marriage which would work out to their mutual satisfaction, uniting them as a couple without infringing upon their rights as individuals.
“I don’t suppose it would have taken us so long to get around to marriage if we hadn’t both taken marriage so seriously. For a variety of reasons, each of us felt that marriage was a necessary state for lasting happiness. And each of us had been married before, and we shared a real determination not to fail at marriage for a second time. This is not always the way it works for people who have been divorced. I’ve known quite a few who rush into a second marriage very lightly — they were divorced before, and feel that if things don’t work out, they can always get divorced again. We went to the opposite extreme, dead set on getting married only if we were determined to make it last a lifetime.
“Marriage held several attractions for us. The prospect of children was one of them. We both agreed that we would prefer to adopt. There are so many children without homes, and the last thing the world needs is more babies, and also I felt I was a little old to be giving birth to a child for the first time. Nor did I relish the prospect of two years of dirty diapers and all of the limitations involved in raising an infant. I have nothing against women who want that kind of life, but that doesn’t make me one of them. We’re right now in the process of adopting a beautiful little biracial boy two and a half years old. If it works out as we hope, we’ll think about adopting a little girl in two or three years.
“More than the desire for children, we wanted to be married out of a desire for permanence. An unshared life is a very lonely life, and New York is overflowing with lonely old men and women who have no one in the world but their own selves for company. You see them on the streets talking to themselves. I used to think they were all crazy, but you don’t have to be crazy to talk to yourself. All that’s required is for you to have no one else in the world who will listen to you. Maurice and I wanted to grow old together, we wanted to spend the rest of our lives with each of us as the other’s best friend.
“What we worked out finally was the idea of marriage as a relationship in which neither party owned the other and in which each of us was free to come and go as he desired. There would be no strings except one — that we would make sure our marriage survived. We would be honest to each other and considerate of each other, and each of us would gladly accept the fact that the other had his own individual life to live.
“This meant that I wouldn’t say I was going to a concert alone and then go with a male friend. I could still go with my friend, but I would say in advance that I was doing so, and I would feel free to bring him home for a drink afterward. I would also feel free to have an affair with him, but not if I was going to bring him home for a drink. We both agreed that those aspects of our individual lives which involved sexual intimacy ought to be kept private.