A World in Us Page 3

  I consulted my two best friends over the phone in the eight hours I had left before I returned home. Eight hours is not long to make a life-changing decision, but by cheating I had already irrevocably changed my life.

  “OK, so you made a mistake,” said Linda, “but telling him will only hurt him. You’ll force his hand. Do you want a divorce?”

  I didn’t. But wasn’t it fair that he should have been able to ask for one?

  Even Charlotte, the best believer in honesty when it suited her purpose, said, “Believe me Louisa, he couldn’t survive without you right now. Just logistically speaking: he has no career, no qualifications. On top of feeling guilty for cheating, you’ll feel guilty for abandoning him. Or making him abandon you.”

  Damned if I did. Damned if I didn’t.

  “I don’t want a divorce, and I don’t want to hurt him,” I said. “But I’ve done it already. My choice now is whether to compound the hurt by lying and risk a bigger discovery later or tell him now and get rid of this.”

  In that moment I was peculiarly proud of myself, even if I had nothing to be proud of. I was a cheater. I had betrayed trust. But truly, I spent those eight hours alternately weeping from guilt and shame whilst trying to strengthen my resolve. Because if there was anything left to salvage of my integrity, I no longer wanted to be a liar.

  Finally, in desperation Linda said, “Do you realise what you are risking? You have huge issues around rejection yourself. If he leaves you, what will you do?”

  Charlotte gave me another way out: “Do you think you have precipitated a rejection scenario? Have you just been a coward? If you want to break up with him, why don’t you just do it? You don’t have to tell him you cheated.”

  My friends knew me too well. But apparently not enough to understand that this was not what I wanted.

  “I don’t want to break up with him. I love him.”

  “So why did you cheat?” came the retort from both.

  “I was drunk.”

  Yes, the little voice inside my head said, but you weren’t drunk when you went to London. When you organised the dinner. You just had to get madly drunk to carry it out. Any court in the land would convict you of premeditation.

  Slam dunk! Judgement.

  On my way back from London, the argument raged back and forth in my mind over whether or not I should tell him. Perhaps telling him was a pure act of selfishness on my part…after all, I still loved him and intended to stay with him for the rest of my life. It would do no good to tell him.

  But didn’t we trust each other to tell the truth? To be whole people united instead of building our future on a tissue of lies? Was my act a symptom of a deeper-rooted unhappiness? Or was it simply a secret selfish desire to relive my youth, to reconnect with my first love? Was it really important? Was it worth causing my husband so much pain? If it wasn’t to happen again, why upset the applecart?

  Because I could never conduct an affair and look him in the eye.

  Because I couldn’t even do it without a copious amount of alcohol.

  Because he was too good, too guileless and too innocent.

  Because he was beautiful in body and spirit.

  To look at him day after day knowing that I held a secret that could destroy both him and me in his eyes was impossible. I couldn’t let him love an illusion. And I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t tell him. I would fall apart because of the guilt. Because try as I might, I couldn’t find any justification for what I had done apart from that I still loved my first love.

  Just not in the same way as Gilles. And I loved Gilles too.

  I needed something to change…although at that point I wasn’t sure what could change. The only options before me were divorce or long-term therapy.

  He knew something big was coming. The fact that I had only sent him one text that day, which was to confirm my arrival time, meant something was wrong. As I walked in the door, I said those infamous words…

  “We need to talk.”

  Oh, the enormity of cheating. The ultimate betrayal. How many tomes have been written on how to cope with infidelity? How many couples go through the scripts of adulterer-adulteree? I, as the cheater, assumed my role of the wayward, defensive-yet-apologetic spouse. My husband adopted the role of the jealous and hurt cuckold. He offered me a cup of tea…I took it from him, but still I could not force myself to say anything.

  “So what happened?” he asked at last.

  “I cheated on you.” And that’s all I could say.

  So he asked again. “How long has it been going on?”

  “It was just that one time.” Full stop.

  “Who is it?”

  “His name is Stefanos. Not that it matters.”

  “Why doesn’t it matter?” he said, tiring of my one-line responses.

  Then, with an avalanche of emotion that made my voice weird and high like I’d never heard it before, came words I didn’t even recognise. “Because it could have been anyone. I have been unhappy for a long time. I just didn’t realise it.”

  “Why have you been unhappy?” He was bewildered, and rightly so. We still laughed. We still partied. We still threw enormously disorganised dinners.

  I whispered it out because I knew it would hurt: “Because I see no future with you. You can’t hold down a job. You haven’t finished any qualification. You haven’t finished anything ac­tually in your life. Your last job was a year ago and even then you went on sick leave for two months. I can’t depend on you for anything. I can’t build a family with you.”

  I didn’t mention the big elephant in the room. That we hadn’t had sex for a month, and only a handful of times in the last year. Usually after alcohol.

  Then he suddenly got very French. His shoulders puffed, his mouth twisted into a sneer and he said, “So you go and cheat, and I am the one in the wrong?”

  Of course he was right, and I knew it.

  “No. What I did was inexcusable, I know. But I think it is a symptom of the larger whole.”

  For hours I spouted reasons about how my relationship with him was unsatisfactory. I listed all the reasons, all his failings. He was crying, and I hated myself.

  But throughout my outpouring I said nothing of how ashamed I was. Of how my decision to cheat was a subconscious effort to prompt change because I had found myself too scared to talk to him about what I really wanted, what I really needed out of life. Love. Connection. And sex. Better sex.

  I’d previously claimed that sex wasn’t important to me. Sex as a need? My mother would have been horrified.

  Yes, my needs were covered by layer upon layer of denial. I was scrambling for reasons. But the truth was, even if he had had a successful career, I would have used it as an excuse to complain about neglect. He could never actually win. I was running a very common script, that of deciphering why he wasn’t enough for me and why I needed someone else — as if someone else could give me everything. As if there were one person who could be my Mr. Right and who could satisfy every ever-changing facet of my personality. At that point I still believed that this was possible…desirable…and necessary.

  Once the first blow had fallen, the initial decision was made that we would try to avoid the divorce courts. We talked and talked about what had to change in our relationship to avoid this situation happening again. But we ended up stuck.

  To his question “Do you still love him?”

  My answer was “Yes.”

  To his question “Do you still love me?”

  My answer was also “Yes.”

  I couldn’t get away from the fact that I held love in my heart for two men. One from long ago and one now.

  To his question “Will it happen again?”

  I replied “I don’t know.”

  To Gilles’s credit, his reaction was not that I must choose. His anger did not consume
him, and he did not act out of impulse. For one thing, Stefanos, my first love, had no intention of pursuing anything with me (he was my first love, but I was not his). In examining my feelings and what I could do to eradicate the memory of this other man, I discovered to my horror that I had love in my heart not only for my first love, but also for at least two other past boyfriends and a multitude of friends. Our relationship had to start with zero deception; otherwise it wouldn’t work.

  So to his question “Do you want it to happen again?”

  My answer was “Yes.”

  The connection with someone that I had loved and still loved had been such a magical experience that in all honesty I couldn’t say that I regretted it. I was sincerely sorry for the hurt that my husband was feeling and for my betrayal of our contract. But in trying to be honest I had uncovered my deepest, darkest desire: I loved connecting with people. I loved falling in love. I loved touching someone else’s soul and feeling the thrill of a truly empathetic and private conversation. It was what made me come alive. And in many cases those people were people I continued to care about. Some connections happened in a matter of minutes, and the love lasted a lifetime. Good friends, male and female, with whom I had bonded in an instant and had built a relationship with over a period of years. I wanted the freedom to follow these relationships to their natural conclusion. Even if that conclusion was love…and sex.

  The relationship with my first love was passionate — and would always be, no matter whether we pursued it or not. These things did not die in me, and I did not want them to. My marriage represented an ultimate commitment for me: an agreement to spend my life with someone. But if my agreement meant that I had to disable my inclination to bond with others — the very thing that had made me bond with my husband in the first place — then it was clearly something I could not stick to. Stopping me from forming relationships was asking me to be something I wasn’t. So my alternatives were to be alone for my life with the ability to form free bonds, or be married and limit — or completely stop — forming bonds with others.

  All the reasons I had given in the first place — my dis­satis­fac­tion over his procrastination and lack of ambition — were true. They were true in that he did procrastinate and he did have a lack of ambition. But they were not the only reasons that I had looked elsewhere. I had looked elsewhere because of my inherent character.

  That he had his own set of issues about his career didn’t stop me loving him and wanting to be with him. But it had made me realise more quickly that he couldn’t satisfy every side of me. I had three business degrees and a strong competitive streak, and he didn’t. I loved cheesy pop music, and he loved jazz. I loved to go out and party, and he loved to develop computer graphics. But at the same time I had so much in common with my husband in other areas of my life, sides that I wouldn’t find with anyone else. A deep understanding of how we were driven. And above all, love. But neither of us had a firm grasp on what love was.

  “How can you still love me if you love someone else?” he demanded.

  To which I simply said, “I don’t know how it is possible…but it is possible.”

  “Then what you feel for me cannot be love.”

  He turned away. His unhappiness shrouded him, and I clutched desperately for the broken straws.

  “Why? Why can it not be? What is love if not this — the desire to be with you for the rest of my life? The desire to plan and build a future with you? Why am I so disappointed that I am unable to build a future with you if I do not love you? On the contrary, I love you very much. In fact, maybe it’s you who doesn’t love me. You want me to be unhappy and to squash parts of my personality because you can’t live with them.”

  I realised that being able to be myself was even more important to me than my love for my husband. I could not change who I was to be with him. Was I promiscuous? Destined to be alone for the rest of my life? Undeserving of love? But with that realisation something had clicked into place. The dis­satis­fac­tion and internal conflict that I had felt throughout my life wasn’t due to my husband or my marriage or my career. It was because for the majority of my life I had been trying to be something that I wasn’t. I was not true to myself.

  What’s wrong with being a slut? I wondered.

  It means you have no respect for yourself or for your body, said my mother, metaphorically sitting on my shoulder.

  But I don’t want to sleep around with numerous blokes or put myself in danger. I just want to be able to love many people. I love to love and be loved.

  But clearly there was something wrong with that because promiscuity, they said, was a mental disorder. So the next day I took myself off for therapy.

  “I cheated on my husband!” I announced dramatically, throwing down the gauntlet as if to say, “Judge me if you will!”

  The therapist, a bald man whose head was so perfectly shiny that it looked like no single hair had ever grown there, said only, “Did you enjoy it?”

  “I don’t really remember it, to be honest. Maybe. I was very drunk. But I know I don’t enjoy the guilt.”

  “How is your sex life with your husband?” he asked.

  “I think it’s normal. We both enjoy it when it happens. But that’s not very often nowadays. It’s a little mundane. But I guess that’s what happens when you are married.”

  “Where do you get your idea of what being married should be like, then?” he enquired.

  “Um, well, Hollywood…Jane Austen…my parents.” Wasn’t that where everyone got their marriage ideas from?

  “And how is your parents’ relationship?”

  “They’re divorced,” I said. “They hate each other.”

  “But what about before they divorced? Were they loving?”

  “Only if loving includes throwing plates,” I said with a hint of sarcasm.

  “Ah!”

  We were both silent for a moment. Then he said, “Of course, you realise that most of your values and behaviours are inherited from your parents. You see the ultimate commitment as a sexless state. You also see that marriage requires fidelity.”

  I picked up on the second part because it was really what would let me off the hook and said hopefully, “So it doesn’t?” Finally a call to authority. If a doctor said it, was there hope? Was there such a thing as a non-monogamous marriage? I hadn’t heard of it.

  “Why are you asking me?” he said, throwing it back in my face. “Surely that’s for you and your husband to decide.”

  “But it’s already decided,” I said, wondering what branch of religion he subscribed to. “By definition. It’s in the vows.”

  “In the Christian vows, yes,” he pointed out. “Do you believe in Christianity?”

  “No,” I said firmly. “I’m an agnostic. Have been for years.” As if indeed a state of doubt and questioning could be termed in any way a firm belief.

  “So why do you believe in a Christian marriage?”

  One sentence changed my world. I didn’t believe in Christian marriage and had been outspoken against it for years, albeit without any framework. But what other kind of marriage was there?

  With bewildering speed and deafening bangs, everything else started falling into place as well. How many well-thumbed values and standards did I have that were inherited, un­questioned and constrictive? The fabric of my existence was woven from threads that I had played no part in making. A judgement here, a value there, an opinion decided upon to please someone else and never disputed. Nothing could be a given anymore unless it had been brutally tested and added to my repertoire (and even then I reserved the right to change it).

  My husband felt the bottom plummeting out of his world. He, as I, believed that it was impossible to continue being married if I could not at least promise that I would try to remain faithful. Fidelity was one of the cornerstones of marriage as we knew it. If I felt the desire to bond with other
people, then our marriage was over.

  In our society, we are conditioned to think that you can only feel passion and be intimate with one person at a time. The choice is forced upon us: married and faithful…or single and non-exclusive. The princess gets married and lives happily ever after; the fairy tale never ends in consensual, mutual non-monogamy.

  But my therapist had planted seeds. The next few days we limped through communicating whilst I spent hours throwing words around in Google. “Love without limits,” “open marriage”…and what I found made me hope.

  But the word hope is terribly understated. My stomach was heated wires; my gut was a hollow vacuum. I could suddenly touch and taste the future. There was a concept and a name for what I wanted.

  It was called polyamory. The more I read, the more things made sense.

  3

  “Poly” is from the Greek meaning “many.”

  “Amory” is from the Latin meaning “love.”

  The clue was in the name. The polyamory philosophy was of acceptance. That some of us were not meant to be monogamous. This didn’t mean cheating or betrayal. It meant that non-monogamy could be carried out honestly, ethically, responsibly and without hurt.

  I’d heard of polygamy, the institutionalised, patriarchal, Mormon-like paradigm. One man. Many women. One penis. Many vaginas. But polyamory, it seemed, was the opposite. Freedom. Trust and equality. Women too were allowed to express love for more than one. And, for that matter, the love didn’t have to involve a penis. Gender was fluid. Sexuality was fluid. Relationships were fluid. The structure was not imposed, but instead evolved. Unlike polygamy, relationships could be defined in various levels of seriousness. It appeared that I could even have a short-term fling, if underpinned by the flutterings of love. To put it bluntly: I could have my cake and eat it too.

  Polyamorists held a different view on love from the one I knew. It was not one true love; it could be several. Love was not a scarce resource. I could love someone one hundred percent and someone else also one hundred percent. It was instead something that functioned as a miracle, the loaves and the fishes: the more you give, the more you have the ability to give. Was I polyamorous? The lightness in my heart told me yes. I was like a marble, settling into a hole I’d always searched for.