As people get older, courtship becomes more secret. A majority of people over thirty are in long-term relationships, so much courtship over that age will be adulterous. When a friend starts to talk about ‘needing something for me’, ‘searching for something’, or even ‘having a mid-life crisis’, you know you are going to hear an adultery story. There is no knowing how many people have affairs. Research will probably underestimate the numbers involved, because some people are going to keep this secret part of their lives hidden even from sex researchers. A recent ICM survey found one in five people admitting to having an affair while in a steady relationship – and it seems reasonable to assume that this is a conservative estimate.14
In her book, Adultery, Annette Lawson writes, ‘If the social institution of marriage is changing, adultery, as its underside – as another but hidden institution, deviant, like the Mafia, the rules of which are secret – must also change.’15 And what of the courtships by which adultery is arranged? Do the sexual negotiations in these deviant relationships mirror those in socially approved relationships, or do they have their own rules?
There are ways in which adultery is formally different from the classic courtship story. The love-into-marriage narrative is linear: the courtship gradually intensifies, with more intimacy, more sex, more disclosure, and with marriage or cohabitation as its climax. But the adultery story has a different structure. Unless it leads to the break-up of the marriages and the lovers marry one another – in which case it reverts to the shape of classic courtship – the adulterous relationship has no momentum: it isn’t ‘going anywhere’. This is reflected in our fictions. David Lean’s 1940s’ film, Brief Encounter, and Harold Pinter’s play, Betrayal, are two of the most wonderful adultery stories of the last half-century. Both start with the end of the affair, and Betrayal moves backwards in time throughout, so the moment of high drama at the end of the play is the beginning of the relationship – the disclosure of attraction.
There may also be differences in courtship behaviour where the intention is to form a secret relationship. There are some kinds of sexual strategy – playing games, blowing hot and cold, playing hard to get – in which we may create deliberate obstacles to heighten tension. It’s plausible that there will be less of this behaviour when people have adultery in mind, given that obstacles are built into affairs – practical restrictions like separations, and psychological impediments like guilt and emotional conflict. So in some ways the courtships by which adulterous relationships are negotiated may be a little different. But research suggests that, in general, adultery is arranged much like any other form of sexual relationship. The rules about who initiates, who pays, who waits for the phone to ring, are much the same.
The high rate of adultery is part of a wider picture: for a host of reasons – including the availability of contraception, women’s greater financial independence, and the fact that we live so long – our relationship structures are becoming increasingly fluid, with a new tendency toward serial monogamy. And because men tend to pair up with younger women, there is now a huge number of women in their forties and fifties who find themselves back on the dating scene. If they’re looking for another lasting relationship, they may have a sense that time is running out. Geraldine, who is forty-five and just separated, said, ‘My sister told me, “You’d better get a move on.” My solicitor said just the same – and I know what they mean. I know I’ve got about four years – I’ll keep my looks for four years …’ Often women in Geraldine’s situation find it hard to meet available men – or they may work with men they like but struggle to know how to transform a companionate relationship into a sexual one if the man isn’t making any moves. These women, more than any others, are acutely aware of the advantages of making the moves themselves. They’re also ideally placed to take the initiative because they’re experienced enough to know they can survive rejection. But, even among this group, it’s rare to meet women who ask men out.
COURTSHIP STORIES: What a man's still gotta do
Courtship is the narrative part of our sexual behaviour. With its clear goal and many potential impediments, it lends itself to story-telling. In a sense this book is about stories – the stories that shape our sexual interactions. Courtship stories are about what it means to be male or female, about money, about danger, about heroism, about guilt and punishment, about waiting around.
Our stories have a complicated relationship to the events of our lives and how we experience those events. They shape what we feel; they may also shape what we do. They are a rich source of morality and help us to make predictions about experience. But they can also be fallacious, because the very act of ordering our experience into a story necessarily involves simplifications and distortions.
There are different genres of courtship story. First, there are the stories we tell ourselves about what happens to us. Often these private stories concern our closeness to or deviation from the traditional scripts. Hannah says no to sex on a first date because she believes that if couples make love too soon the relationship is less likely to last. Here, she’s using a story as a guide to her own behaviour. Gaby believes she lost a man she loved because she made herself too available: her story provides Gaby with an explanation for what went wrong, and also prescribes how she should behave in future.
Then there are private stories that enter the public world. These are invariably formulaic: personal experience is shaped into predictable patterns. Some radio shows invite people to write in with their own love stories. Classic FM for instance has ‘Classic Romance, sponsored by Black Magic chocolates’. Here the climax to the narrative is invariably the couple’s realization that they’re in love – a realization that only comes after many weeks of looking into one another’s eyes to the accompaniment of music from the popular classical repertoire: ‘As we listened to “The Lark Ascending” in the beautiful setting at Kenwood we knew we were deeply in love …’.
On ITV’s ‘Blind Date’, the public and private spheres are entangled in a thoroughly post-modernist way. Though these are real people having a real relationship, the viewers share in the narrative tension. We guess who’ll be chosen, we’re there at the moment of revelation, we speculate on what will happen – and we’re there, too, when they come back and say how it all went, to see how the actual narrative matches up to our imagined one. The programme is set up on principles of scrupulous equality: a man chooses one of three women, and a woman one of three men. But when the couple return from their date, the real world breaks through the egalitarian veneer, and the carefully scripted innuendo of the earlier dialogue – ‘If I were a beer and you pulled me, I’d certainly make your legs wobble’ – is replaced by the clichés of our unequal courtship rituals – ‘He respected me’, ‘I told him I had a stop button’, or, from a man, ‘I came away with nothing’.
And then there are the stories that are purely public and shared – our novels and films. These public stories reflect collective preoccupations – but they also shape those preoccupations. And our public stories tend to take the same line as many of the people I interviewed: they may question male initiative but in the end they always sanction it. The plot dénouements – like the things that people do, as opposed to what they say they do – reaffirm men in their traditional role.