“We’ve also found that it’s best to keep extramarital sex not only private but not to discuss it. At first we had the feeling that we had to be honest and open and tell each other what we did, and we learned that we were getting a distasteful childish pleasure about bragging about what we had done sexually, and that it was lowering our mutual self-esteem. Now, I’ll generally know when Maurice is having an affair, and I’m sure he knows whether my dates are purely platonic or not — they almost always are — but we don’t tell each other about it, nor do we ask each other questions.
“I’m not at all jealous of Maurice, and I don’t believe he’s jealous of me in any way. On two occasions he’s called me at night to tell me he’ll be staying out overnight. I’ve never done this myself. The first time he did this, it bothered me, although I don’t think the feeling was jealousy exactly. It was more that I felt I wanted him to be with me while we both slept. When he did it the second time, I told him how I felt, and we talked it over, and he said he’d felt uncomfortable himself waking up in a bed without me. Interestingly, the second time had not been a sexual occasion, but an all-night poker game...
“Jealousy is an immature emotion, as I see it. There’s no way in which one person can belong entirely to another person. People have to have time away from each other, and they have to have parts of themselves which can’t find expression within marriage. If you give up those parts of your life which your husband or wife can’t share with you, you’re only making yourself smaller and more limited as a result, and your partner doesn’t gain anything from this; in fact, he loses, because you become stifled and less exciting and wind up resenting him for the change in your life.”
JWW: I asked how friends and acquaintances feel about their version of permissive marriage.
“Most of the friends we have in common are the sort who have little trouble understanding our relationship. The majority of them are couples in which the wife works, and they also have found it necessary to allow themselves a lot of independence within the framework of their marriages. I don’t know that we’ve actually discussed our concept of marriage at any length. They know that one of us will attend a party without the other, and that we have that kind of freedom.
“The men I’m friendly with are usually taken aback to learn that Maurice knows I’m going out with them. For instance, one man whom Maurice and I both know socially has taken me to lunch maybe half a dozen times. He’s in a lot of personal difficulty right now, unsure whether or not to quit his job, up in the air over a lot of things, and what he needs is a sympathetic ear. Evidently my ear was the sort he was looking for, so once a week or so he buys me a lunch and tells me his troubles.
“The last time I saw him, I mentioned something to the effect that this was a favorite restaurant of Maurice’s and that he would wish he could have joined us. He went white and asked if Maurice knew we had lunch together. I said of course he did, and why? He said he hadn’t told his wife, that she would be very upset, not just at the idea of his having lunch with another woman, but that the woman was one she was friendly with. He obviously thought I would be in the same position with Maurice and wanted to make sure that I wouldn’t let anything slip in front of his wife.
“Now, this struck me as so utterly ridiculous! Because there could be nothing more innocent than our lunches together. He has never made the most embryonic pass at me, and I’m sure one of the reasons he feels comfortable seeing me this way is that I don’t happen to turn him on sexually. Nor does he appeal to me sexually. But by keeping something so innocent a secret, he’s actually taking a big risk. If some mutual friend sees us together, and mentions it to his wife, she can’t help but conclude that we’re having an affair. And there’s no logical way he could deny it.
“In contrast, I don’t have to lie to Maurice, nor do I have to hide a part of my life from him. If something comes up in one of our lunchtime conversations, I can share it with Maurice over dinner. My lunch partner has to suppress it, and it builds another wall between the two of them.”
JWW: Would she be inclined to recommend her form of permissive marriage to everyone?
“Yes, definitely.
“Let me qualify that slightly. There’s no denying that a great many people are not ready for this sort of marriage, and that some of them will never be able to make themselves ready for it. And the idea of sexual freedom is the least important aspect of it, Jack. That’s the first thing that comes to everyone’s mind, that Maurice and I can have affairs with a clear conscience, but I doubt that we have any more extramarital sex than we would if we had not elected to permit it. It’s possible we have less. When you know you can do whatever you want to do, there’s no forbidden fruit element to lure you into it.
“No, the point that would be hardest for most people to swallow is the idea that two people can belong to each other without owning each other. That they can have a better life together by virtue of the fact that they have lives apart as well. For a person with a conventional mind and a conventional attitude toward marriage, this would be hard to get down. And for a person with anxieties and insecurities he’s unable to face, I would guess it would be impossible.
“Otherwise, I think it’s the only sensible and realistic and honest and open way for two people to live. I don’t believe the institution of marriage is on its way out. I think that’s a lot of bullshit rhetoric. I do think the concept of marriage has to evolve in order to fit itself to the realities of modern times. And in that sense, yes, I would recommend our style of marriage to all couples who are mature and self-confident enough to handle it.”
JWW: Helene and Maurice have made mutual permissiveness an integral part of their whole relationship. This arrangement suits them both, and they have been able to carry it out with little difficulty. The fact that they live and work in New York City certainly has something to do with this. Were they transplanted abruptly to a small town in the middle of South Dakota, it would be far more difficult for them to lead their lives as they do now.
Faye and Alec do live in a small town in South Dakota, where Alec owns a grocery store. They are in their thirties and have two sons, ages nine and eleven. Their version of the permissive marriage is not constant, as with Helene and Maurice, but intermittent — i.e., they take separate vacations, at which times the usual rules of marriage are suspended.
For Helene and Maurice, a permissive marriage was needed to allow for full self-expression; sexual freedom, while a significant component of this self-expression, was by no means the overriding concern. The separate vacations which Faye and Alec take no doubt facilitate overall self-expression, but they do not hesitate to assert that their motivation is specifically sexual.
FAYE: “We first started to have marriage trouble about five years ago. At that time we had been married just seven years, so you could call it the seven-year itch. It was partly that, and partly on account of my youngest being in nursery school, which left me with more time on my hands. Also, that was just about the time when the business started to do better, and Alec didn’t have to struggle so hard to come out ahead. All of these things came together at once, along with both of us being just out of our twenties and just into our thirties and the feeling of life passing us by.
“We would make love, and even when it was good, I would lie there feeling unsatisfied afterward. I would have an orgasm, the same as always, but it would not do me any good. I would still feel empty. I would find myself daydreaming about boys I went out with before I was married. I had this fantasy of running into one boy or another on the street and the two of us driving off to a motel for a wild afternoon together. Of course, this never happened, and then I found out that Alec was having an affair with another woman, and this just threw me for a loop.”