What's Wrong with Adultery

In a curious little book called Good Behavior, Harold Nicolson quotes Montaigne as saying, "I'd rather commit adultery than tell a lie. "I've never been able to find this in the Essays myself, but I've always thought it was a really great line, a perfect example of the funny stuff you can get off when you have a principled morality. But what I've never been able to understand about it is how Montaigne could manage to commit adultery without telling a lie. Lying and adultery seem to me to go hand in hand; in fact, arm in arm, (continued on page 196) Adultery (continued from page 133) grappling each other right into the motel room. Maybe adultery was simpler in Montaigne's time, in 16th Century France, and easier for him, a charming man and a nobleman. But for most of us now, even in these permissive times, adultery is often a pretty complicated business, and that's of course what's wrong with it.

Of course it's a sin, too, adultery is, and I don't want to seem to be saying sin is good. But still ... still there is something there that is good, isn't there? I mean, why would people commit adultery all the time if it weren't good? So what we have to do is separate the two parts of the sin, simply separate the part that is good from the part that is bad. Now if you don't know the part of adultery that's good, you shouldn't even be reading this. The bad part, clearly, is the complicated and involved rigmarole that comes before and after the good part.

What I mean by rigmarole is definitely not the old-fashioned courtship or pursuit, the wooing and seduction that a woman might put a man through, or vice versa, for nobody seems to mess around with that sort of thing anymore. The rigmarole I mean is all the arrangements nonsense you have to go through, even after both people involved are not only consenting but maybe even anxious. The trouble is that everything in modern life is already fantastically complicated and involved. When you add to all your normal involvements the involvement of being involved with someone extra-- someone you're not even supposed to be involved with--it can all get to be purely too much. People are always having to make complicated arrangements and plans in their normal, nonadulterous life, and it fantastically compounds the complicatedness of everything (both the normal and the adulterous) when these two kinds of life get mixed up together.

The worst of it is that all these sinister, essentially superfluous adulterous arrangements have to be made in secret, without the advice and participation of the person you'd normally be planning how to spend the afternoon or evening or weekend in question with--your spouse, of course. But the adulterous arrangements have to be made to fit in with all the already complicated normal arrangements. And they have to fit in secretly! Thus, the secret plans often have a very irregular and ill-planned shape--invisible adulterous secret plans shaped to fit secretly and invisibly between all sorts of maybe already odd normal non-adulterous plans.

It doesn't work out most of the time anyway. Split-second timing is required of the sort of people who may not even wear a watch. It might work out more often if you could do it the way they do in the movies: hand-pick ex-underground people and tough convicts, glib and resourceful types who're already well schooled in commando cunning and precision; then discipline them and train them and rehearse them for the mission for months; clock their routes, synchronize their watches, then send them off to make the rendezvous. Even then it's a scary business. And, anyway, who wants to have an affair with a tough convict?

The difficulty with secret plans is inherent in the very point of them: The people they're secret from don't know about them and are always liable to do something unexpected to mess them up. Adulterous secret plans are always contingent on the often tentative plans of at least two other parties--her husband and your wife. The poor little invisible secret contingent adulterous plans that try to nestle into the crevices between these open-but-tentative spouse-dominated non-adulterous plans have only the remotest chance of ever coming to fruition; they can be crushed instantly by the slightest shift in regular planning. They're so contingent, most of them, that they're really just hypothetical, sheer wishful thinking and fantasy, nine times out of ten a bloody incredible waste of time. Complicated arrangements are made to meet precisely at such and such a place at exactly such and such a time if so-and-so does go here or there and if so-and-so doesn't come back, and if this thing or that thing does or doesn't happen, and if a million other and ifs. All this ingenuity and carefulness and organization and contingency planning wasted on something that usually doesn't come off and even if it did is something you shouldn't be doing in the first place!

Phone calls, for instance--what a mess they are! There doesn't seem to be any other way to arrange anything these days, and adultery just makes them, like everything else, more complicated. It's bad enough at the office, where your secretary or your boss always seems to take the calls. But what about phoning each other's home? Whenever she phones you, she gets your wife. Whenever you phone her, her husband answers. "Well, how are you?" you say to him, real warm and friendly. "I thought I'd just phone and see how things are going." Are they puzzled? Of course they're puzzled. How puzzled are they?--that's the real question. Puzzled enough so they suspect? When you're home alone and could receive a phone call from her, she never phones. She said she'd phone Wednesday afternoon, so you spend all Wednesday afternoon waiting by the phone. You can dial their number, let it ring just once, or just start to ring, then hang up quick, as a kind of signal you're free to get a call. But what does her husband think when the phone goes "ping" all the time and when he answers there's no one there and then right afterward she goes out? Does he believe she's just going to get a Time magazine and an extra carton of milk? Does he realize she's gone to phone you, or is he just puzzled? How puzzled? You can do it just so often.

Then suppose there's the question of long toll calls that appear on the bill. She can phone you collect so as to get the charge on your phone bill, which your wife doesn't see, instead of on their phone bill, which her husband does see. But then suppose through some ball-up your wife's there and gets this collect call from her, what in the world does she think? That would puzzle her enough, I'd think--more than enough. And even if she (not your wife, the other one) has been real clever and has put through the collect call in some fake name, there's a limit to how many collect calls "for anybody from Ms. Lila Ovington [or some other outrageous fake name] in Garden City" that your wife will suspicion-free get and politely refuse: "I'm afraid we don't know anybody by that name, operator; you must have the wrong number." What if by some real ball-up, confused, she accepted the call anyway, even if she'd never heard of any Lila Ovington? She can hang up quick (the other one). But you can do it just so often.

And phoning from a public phone booth, either the one on the corner near your apartment or one of the ones down in the parking area of the shopping center, is no help--in fact, the opposite. Just being seen in one of those glass booths is enough to give you away. You figure that if people see you, they'll just think you forgot the grocery list and are phoning home. But that isn't what anyone thinks. What everyone thinks is just what's the case. "Uh-oh," is what everyone thinks. "What's he doing in that phone booth? Must be some call he can't make from home." Being seen in a phone booth is like having a giant scarlet letter A drip-painted on you, front and back. And the phone booth can't do you much good, anyway: at least one of you has to be at home. To think you could phone her from one phone booth and have her answer in another phone booth is to hope for a fortuitous kind of connivance on God's part that you really oughtn't expect of Him, considering what you're up to.

Surreptitious phone calls, mail drops, confidants, borrowed apartments and rooms rented for an afternoon, lame excuses for not being where you're supposed to be, neglected work, extra baby sitters and special dog walkers, asking old friends to cover for you, secret codes and double meanings, obviously significant glances that you aren't quite sure what they mean--everything and everybody involved in an affair of this sort is just as complicated and unpleasant as can be. There are even some women, one hears, who like the intrigue-rigmarole part best. These of course should be avoided as the plague, but as there aren't many plagues these days, one doesn't get much practice avoiding them. And all this is not to speak of what a mess it would be if you fell in love with the other person, which of course isn't likely but would lead to that sure sign of disorder and sorrow: lawyers. Remember the saw:

O what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive!

and a tangled web is clearly a mess. A nice neat web might be OK, especially if one has a tendency to be devious and a talent for organization--but not even a spider likes a tangled web. Everything involved in adultery militates more or less directly against one's ideal of a simple, orderly life.

And adultery is ultimately wrong, too, because it separates you from the very person you ought to be close to and planning carefully with (your spouse, for heaven's sake, not the other one). It's the effect of the rigmarole that does this, though, not the effect of the act. It isn't that the spouse gets cheated out of sex that "belongs" to him or her, or anything like that. Everybody knows that among couples who have been married for a long while, or maybe even just for a while, sex is pretty much dormant, and that one of the signs that a man or a woman is having an affair is if he or she is suddenly interested in, or offers, more sex at home.

The rigmarole, however, is insidiously divisive. If adulterous, you're living a secret life, like an undercover agent, right in your own home, except it's worse, because even an undercover agent usually lets his wife know what he's up to, and you can't. Instead of arranging and planning things for you and your wife to do together--dinner out or a night at the movies or a trip to Mexico--things that might bring you together, you're always secretly planning, or half-planning, or always have in the back of your mind things that will keep you apart, give you time on your own, "free" time, so you can get away to your doxy.

The whole thrust of your thinking goes in another direction--not an entirely opposite direction, maybe, but just a confusingly oblique direction. It's hard enough to plan anything with someone else anyway, God knows, especially one's wife. But there she is, poor soul, trying to work something out with you and you're trying to figure out how it will "fit in" with something she doesn't even know about. Or she's doing that to you, being maddeningly difficult and contrary, even more so than usual, and you, poor soul, haven't the foggiest idea why. The plans that emerge, needless to say, are often very bad plans indeed, from everyone's point of view. Knowing this secret reason, and remarking how much bad planning there is in this country, we've got to be alarmed by all that must be going on.

Making not just itself but everything else involved, then, is ultimately what's wrong with adultery. It's involvement--making a simple pleasant thing like sex all complicated, getting involved in extraneous goings on with extraneous people--involvement itself, that's our big basic vice these days, and it may be an inevitable evil now, forced on us by the complexity of the society we live in. Sex, like everything else--like organizing family picnics or setting alarm clocks or eating ice-cream cones--should be as simple as possible. I know it's easier said than done. Everything I say is always easier said than done. But doing things as simply as possible, as long as they're still done right, is one of the key things to doing things right. You wouldn't want to commit adultery wrong, would you?