Can Open Marriages Ever Work? No, Women Are Too Corralling And Men Need To Know If The Child Is Theirs

Randall and Margot Thompson had an open marriage.  It didn't happen by contract, conscious decision, or some socio-political belief.  It evolved, happened over time - matured as Margot said - and before too many years had gone by, they both were involved with other people.

At first it was the missing dinners, the Saturday office meetings; then the business trips to New York, and finally St. Bart's and Eleuthera. 

Although some open marriages are ideal - Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson were two very independent people with wide-ranging interests, sharp intellects, social ambition, and intelligence - most are idealistic fantasies and never survive suspicion, jealousy, and infidelity. 

 

There was a mutual respect between the couple - neither one took lovers out of their milieu.  It was important for both to maintain an air of superiority, an insouciance, and most of all a disregard for bourgeois sentiments, and this assumption provided a context for their affairs. Vita was known for her literary work, her celebrated garden at Sissinghurst, and her friendship with Virginia Woolf, and Sir Harold was a successful diplomat and scholar, so both were beyond innuendo. 

In other words neither Vita nor Harold were promiscuous, but selective  It was a 'Would Harold/Vita approve?' libertinage, never anything seedy or uncomely. They both took lovers the other would approve of, who would fit into their social circle, be at home with literature from their library, the art collection, and their music. 

Romantic love, ever since the 14th century and the ghastly, longing poems of Petrarch to his lover, Laura has been persistent.  Most ordinary people willingly accepted the ties that bind, the adoration, the flowers, the ceremonial respect, birthdays, anniversaries, dinners together; but Vita and Harold were insistent that they would never fall into that bourgeois, discredited role. 

They both defied traditional sexual norms nd both took both male and female lovers - that eclectic sexuality added to their cachet and social prominence.  The Sackville-West-Nicholsons were a model couple for the intelligentsia and the aristocratic crowd of Europe - above the fray and the common man. 

Perhaps most importantly, they both had money, and neither one was dependent upon the other.  Most women of Sackville-West's era were dutifully bound to their husbands, dependent on them for everything.  Vida's sexual independence lay on a foundation of wealth. 

It is not surprising therefore that such a marriage could exist, let alone remain stable throughout the years.  Vida and Harold did not love each other in any traditional way, so the one basic, permanent rule of marriage - fidelity - was never an issue.

Jealousy is standard fare for all societies. A woman’s infidelity, never certain and always suspect, can lead to illegitimate birth, questions of lineage and heritage for the well-to-do and questions of economics for the hoi polloi. Why should a man, hard pressed to survive in a marginal environment, invest anything in a child who is not his? Issues of misogyny, machismo, patriarchy, and sexual abuse all derive from male uncertainty. It is a matter of security, let alone male ego and pride, to know paternity.

As much as one can accuse men of hateful misogyny - a fair assessment if one reads Shakespeare's Cymbeline, Othello, and A Winter's Tale, jealousy is standard fare for all societies. A woman’s infidelity, never certain and always suspect, can lead to illegitimate birth, questions of lineage and heritage for the well-to-do and questions of economics for the hoi polloi. Why should a man, hard pressed to survive in a marginal environment, invest anything in a child who is not his? Issues of misogyny, machismo, patriarchy, and sexual abuse all derive from male uncertainty. It is a matter of security, let alone male ego and pride, to know paternity.

Some bio-ethicists such as Megan Doe have suggested that jealousy provided an evolutionary adaptation for males to assure paternity and to avoid spending resources on other males’ offspring and led females to guarantee protection and support for her offspring by having a steady partner. Men need to be sure that their children are theirs; and women, once having secured an economically viable mate, need to be sure that he doesn’t stray.

Whether hardwired or a social construct, jealousy is the one common trait of all traditional marriages. One might expect that after decades of feminism, women's liberation, and constitutionally assured women's rights that female jealousy would have disappeared.  A wayward husband? Get rid of him with no consequences and a generous settlement. 

Yet women are still as jealous as ever, almost as if they lived in a Victorian era.  No matter how professionally successful, how independent, and how financially secure, women still want faithful husbands.  If there is something hardwired in the female psyche or even deeper in some yet undetected genetic strand, it is jealousy.  Women don't need men but once they have them, they want them all for themselves. 

Men are no different, and they behave no differently that Shakespeare's cad Posthumus who believes that his wife is unfaithful to him, and like Othello will stop at nothing to rid him and all men of such treacherous, deceiving women.  The centuries have not changed the calculus - men do not want their wives to bear other men's children, and will do anything to prevent it. 

The fulcrum in all this is romantic love.  Men and women still marry for love, and that is the predicate and sine qua non for jealousy. A man wants the woman he marries and vice-versa.  They are desirable, ideal, prizes to be kept, protected, and preserved. If there is no love, there is no jealousy, and that is why the Sackville-West-Nicholson marriage prospered. 

Shakespeare’s Sonnets to his young man express a jealousy which is romantic and purely felt.  The poet expresses no anger, no hostility, or no vengeful thoughts. It is simply love which demands an emotional fidelity to be returned and requited:

Sin of self love possesseth all mine eye/And all my soul, and all my every part;/And for this sin there is no remedy/It is so grounded in my heart…

Their marriage was a kind of imagined idyll for the aristocratic set - having everything with no consequences, an easy ride through life which for ordinary people is short and brutish. 

 Marcel Proust was perhaps the most eloquent about jealousy:

It is not even necessary for that person to have attracted us, up till then, more than or even as much as others. All that was needed was that our predilection should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled when – in this moment of deprivation – the quest for the pleasures we enjoyed in his or her company is suddenly replaced by an anxious, torturing need, whose object is the person alone, an absurd, irrational need which the laws of this world make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to assuage – the insensate agonizing need to possess exclusively.

Vladimir Nabokov was equally compelling about jealousy, and in the final scenes of Lolita Humbert has Claire Quilty read this poem:

Because you stole her
from her wax-browed and dignified protector
spitting into his heavy-lidded eye
ripping his flavid toga and at dawn
leaving the hog to roll upon his new discomfort
the awfulness of love and violets
remorse despair while you
took a dull doll to pieces
and threw its head away
because of all you did
because of all I did not
you have to die

So Randall and Margot's experiment was doomed from the start.  They loved each other.  They were no Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson. It didn't take long from Margot to notice that Randall was spending more than just a casual amount of time with Mme. X; and no time at all for Randall to notice his wife's thickening waist. 

They were simply not cut out for the libertine life, and that sexual affairs were corrosive, debilitating, and ultimately destructive. If carried forward the open marriage would end in jealousy and both partners would marry again for the same hopelessly Petrarchan reasons. Better to stay put. And they did.