FAYE: “I went to Kansas City, but I couldn’t tell you why, Maybe because we were there once together, so at least I knew the name of a good hotel. Once I was there, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I thought nothing would happen and couldn’t decide whether to make up a story for Alec or tell him the truth. What I found out is that if you’re a woman there’s nothing easier than finding a man who wants to take you to bed. I had dinner at the hotel restaurant and then sat at my table having a drink afterward, and the bartender brought over a fresh drink and pointed out a man at the bar who had bought it for me. I smiled at him, and he came over, and not twenty minutes later his face was between my legs and I was moaning like nobody’s business.”
JWW: There is a definite element of braggadocio in their talk as Faye and Alec recount their experiences on their separate vacations. They make a special point of describing in detail just what they did and how many times and how great it was. At first I thought this might be a form of one-upmanship or a method of self-assertion. I later came to see that it was more a matter of habit. They capped their vacations by telling each other as erotically as possible of their experiences, with the teller reliving the act while the listener enjoyed it vicariously. This narrative pattern evidently persisted in their conversations with me.
Their first separate vacation was a successful one, and since then all of their vacations have been occasions for permissive extramarital ventures. Each winter they spend a week in Florida, each in a different city. Each summer, while their sons are at camp, each spends several weeks at a resort. The resorts are ideal, I am assured; you can have a regular summer romance with no feeling of cheapness to it, and yet your partner takes it for granted that the romance will end when the vacation does.
This reminds me of a version of swinging developed by a couple of my acquaintances, and I mentioned it to them. This particular couple makes a practice of going to resorts in the Catskills during singles’ weekends. They register individually, the wife using her maiden name, and of course take separate rooms. They then operate sexually as free agents, letting none of their new friends know that they are married. Once they managed to arrange a double date together. Another time, both unsuccessful at finding a suitable partner, they wound up taking each other to bed.
Faye and Alec find the story amusing but agree they would not be interested in such an arrangement. It would conflict with their chief aim of being apart from each other, and also struck them as fundamentally sadistic; they felt the couple was getting special kicks out of deceiving others.
A great many married couples do take occasional separate vacations, feeling that they need a spell apart from each other as well as a break in the day-to-day routine. These vacations do not necessarily involve any extramarital sex, although it is frequently assumed that a dalliance at such a time is a far less serious matter than an affair in the normal course of things. For Faye and Alec, however, these vacations are specifically and unequivocally sexual.
Thus they have rendered their marriage permissive in a compartmentalized sense. Each, I know, would b roundly shocked if the other had an affair other than in the course of an out-of-town vacation, and the likelihood of this happening seems remote.
Similar forms of compartmentalization are not uncommon. The country is full of businessmen who are strictly faithful to their wives except when away from home, and undoubtedly many of their wives take this sort of casual cheating for granted, and can overlook it more readily than the same offense committed on home ground. Certainly, convenience and safety are factors that help to explain the attitude of both the businessmen and their wives, but I’m sure another element comes into play — the feeling that the traditional rules apply less strictly on foreign soil.
Here is Alec’s summary of their general feelings about their permissive marriage:
“Faye and I both grew up with the usual image of marriage. A man and woman met and fell in love and got married and had children and were faithful to each other for the rest of their lives. When you’re brought up to believe that’s how everybody lives, it’s hard to get over it. Even when you know better, there’s a long spell of time when you’ll find yourself worrying that you’re not normal, that what you’re doing is wrong, that if you had a really good marriage you wouldn’t feel the need to go outside it for sexual pleasure.
“But this is just a damn lie. Maybe there was a time when men and women were faithful to each other after marriage. I suppose years ago it was harder to be unfaithful, what with the risks of disease and pregnancy, things you don’t have to worry about today.”
JWW: As both Faye and Alec have undergone surgical sterilization, the possibility of pregnancy as a result of their sexual contacts is nil.
“Even so, I’m sure most people ran around then as they do now. Probably more wives were faithful, while the husbands catted around on them. It’s still that way, and was probably more so years ago.
“Nowadays you have to be blind not to see that it’s a natural thing to want sex outside of marriage. Because everybody is either doing it or wanting to. The fellows I’ll meet on vacation, say, at a convention, nine out of ten them will be hoping to get something before the trip is over. They’ll bring their wives along and send them out shopping and quick get a hooker up to the room and then worry about getting her smell aired out of there before the little woman comes back. It’s just human nature to want it, and how much you love each other isn’t going to change it.
“The arrangement Faye and I have, it gives us a chance to get what we want without interfering in other areas of our lives. Living in a town like this, we have no choice but to work out something like this, but now that we’ve discovered it, I’m sure we’d be the same wherever we live. We have our vacations to blow off steam and get things out of our system, and then when we’re back together again, we have the closeness of marriage with no threats to it and no need for more running around until the next vacation comes along.
“As far as the folks around here are concerned, we are the straightest couple you could hope to find. A nice home and a good business and two clean-cut boys and church every Sunday, and not the slightest breath of scandal. The people who know about that one girl I got together with — if they even think about it — they regard it as the one fling that every man’s entitled to once in his life. They figure I’ve reformed and settled down permanently and am all the better for getting it out of my system. And they know we’re together all the time, and we’ll never flirt around at a party or go in for dirty jokes, so I suppose the more modern element around here would say we were pretty damn square.
“And if you told them what our vacations are like, I don’t guess they’d believe a bit of it.”
JWW: Can the category of permissive marriage embrace a union in which only one of the partners engages in extramarital sex?
At first glance, the answer would seem to be no. Such unilateral permissiveness looks to be outside the bounds of the marriage where each party is free to go his separate way. Surely it is a different matter if the husband has a life of his own while the wife exists only within the framework of marriage. Such an arrangement would seem to be no more than the “understanding” that we discussed earlier and dismissed from consideration.
There are borderline cases, though, in which understandings evolve into permissive marriage. A voiced or silent recognition of one partner’s right to extramarital sexual relations leads in time to mutual freedom for both partners. Yet the expression of this freedom need not take a sexual form for both persons, as the comment of the wife of a college professor shows: