I have recently felt sympathy for an adulterous woman. Such feelings are ill advised, I know. Proverbs says that the adulterous woman is bitter as gall and that her house is a highway to the grave. It says to stay away from her. Yet I can’t help being drawn in as I read Melissa Matthewson’s recent essay, On Coupling.
My sympathy is partially due to the quality of Matthewson’s writing. She weaves autobiography, confession, and zoological reflection together in a way that feels at once sober and urgent. Yet her intentions are plain. “I don’t want to follow the rules of marriage, of monogamy.”
She proposes open marriage to her husband, who is uninterested. “He muses over my idea that maybe we aren’t meant for one person. He doesn’t agree. He wants only me.”
Matthewson is careful not to present her husband as the problem. She describes him as loyal, steadfast, hardworking, and accommodating. “I think of my husband’s identity, unwavering in his love, his steady focus on work, on pleasing everyone but himself. I think, He’s selfless. And I’m not.”
Her issue, rather, is that domesticity has become a trap. Married life is a pallid imitation of what she’d hoped it would be. She mourns the loss of passion and “how domesticity might drown your identity.” She expresses apathy towards the mundane realities of housekeeping. “I don’t like doing dishes,” she says. “I’m not interested in how a vacuum works.”
It would be easy to dismiss Matthewson’s complaints as selfish, to condemn her with a ready-made script. For instance, to point out that she made a commitment to her husband, and that her kids need their mom. Or to tell her to stop complaining, act like an adult, and do what’s right.
In fact, I hope she knows someone that she trusts, who is wise, who can say something like that to her. But I doubt it would do much good for me to rail against this stranger. Instead, I’d like to point out something curious.
The woman in this essay is, to use the currently ubiquitous phrase, privileged. She has travelled internationally, earned multiple advanced degrees, and found myriad outlets for her creative energies. Her website says that she is a farmer, a writer, and a dance instructor who runs an organic market. In short, she is not living the life that Betty Friedan warned us about.
Despite this, she is unfulfilled. She suspects that there is something more to being human than her domestic life offers. “Everywhere I go….I judge the nature of married couples, believe they aren’t subversive enough, their lives too ordinary.” She reminds me of the character from Tolstoy’s short story, Family Happiness.
I wanted excitement and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life.
Privilege seems largely to be a term of dismissal. We are assured that anyone to whom that pejorative has been applied can be safely ignored. Yet, the privileged are able to consider the ways in which life, even at its best, is unsatisfactory. Those who lack basics such as food and safety are likely to focus their efforts on satisfying those necessities. Such efforts leave little time for nursing a vague feeling of dissatisfaction.
The French philosopher Rene’ Girard stated the phenomenon in this way, “once their natural needs are satisfied, humans desire intensely, but they don’t know exactly what they desire, for no instinct guides them.” Indeed, Matthewson desires intensely. She articulates that desire well, giving voice to a profound human need. But her solution to that need is tragic insofar as it is damaging to herself and her family and hopeless to satisfy her.
(Here I am making assertions rather than arguments. I am claiming that infidelity damages the person who commits it as well as the person against whom it is committed. Further, I am claiming that it isn’t a sufficient response to longing. I believe such assertions are defensible, though it is not now my task to defend them.)
Perhaps caution would seem like the proper Christian response to longing. Don’t take it too seriously, and maybe it will go away. Such a path may seem prudent, but Augustine took a different approach. In a homily on the first epistle of John, the great African theologian claimed that, “the whole life of a good Christian,” consists of desire. God alone can satisfy our longings, and so he reasoned that those longings ought to be taken seriously.
I am confident that Matthewson’s experiment will fail. Humans are not so simple as to have their longings satisfied by promiscuity. Yet, to say so is no indictment of longing. Rather, it is a call to reject insufficient answers to our longing. “Let us desire therefore, my brethren, for we shall be filled.”