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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

No regrets
I was an unashamed mistress.
By Anna Sorelli
[11/17/99]

This Is Now
Ask the madame: Two days of foreplay does the trick

[11/17/99]

That Was Then
Keep it clean

[11/17/99]

"Drop 'em, babe!"
I have two words for married twosomes: Oral sex.
By Carol Ormandy
[11/16/99]

A cooler head prevails
Psychologist Robert Firestone rejects the quick fix for bad marriage.
By Fred Branfman
[11/16/99]

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To attack marriage because it happens to be regulated by church or state, as Griffin is wont to do, is beside the point: What matters is not governed by papal bull or federal statute, but rather by the law of what Kurt Vonnegut has called the "nation of two," that state of states in which the married couple alone holds citizenship.

To attack marriage as a cliché, to make a straw man of so-called conventionality, as Griffin does, is equally unjustifiable. If the mistress' overriding wish is to be pink-party-dress special, if distancing herself from the bourgeois norm to which she belongs is its own end, she'd accomplish just as much by standing on her head.

But still there persists that nagging suspicion: If he isn't free to leave me, how do I know he loves me? Even Heloise, the 12th-century heroine whose letters to her estranged lover, Abelard, made her a poster child for romance, couldn't dismiss that concern. As Abelard depicted her feelings in his Historia Calamitatum, "It would be dearer to her and more honorable to me to be called my lover than my wife so that her charm alone would keep me for her ..."

Heloise believed that a mistress' love was more pure than a wife's because it was disinterested: While marriage was a matter of financial security, the only currency exchanged in the affair was love.

What has to be measured, though, is the worth of that currency. The mistress and her lover give their love freely; the supply can be as limitless as the number of potential partners on the planet, the number of days in a lifetime. (To be fair, Griffin attempts to protect mistresses from charges of promiscuity by suggesting a spending limit of one lover per year, and budgeting herself even fewer than that; but her own laissez-faire premise prevents her from providing any legitimate reason why anyone ought to be so frugal.)

So, what the mistress calls "love" has no cost. And without cost, it can hold no meaning, no more value than a gift of Confederate banknotes.

Marriage may not have the merit of an empirically sound love-me-or-leave-me litmus test, but it doesn't need it. The price of married love is independence, with interest paid in domesticity. When a man gives himself to a woman to have and to hold, and when a woman gives herself to a man, both have put the highest possible value on their love: Possession in the absolute. For the couple that marries honestly, for that nation of two deadset against the world, the unit of love is life.

Not that the mistress is a fool. Mistressing may be emotionally bankrupt, but bankruptcy has its advantages: Gamble nothing of your own and you have nothing to lose.

Because the mistress fears loss more than she desires love, what she seeks is to eliminate emotional risk. "[I]t's far more exciting to be the mistress than the wife," Griffin claims. "There is far less chance of a relationship going stale when meetings are separated by gaps, or at least it will take much longer to reach that point." By which standard the great romantics of our day are insurance actuaries.

True, actuaries know one thing about love: They know that the likelihood that any two people will be compatible (i.e., that they can without incident go grocery shopping together, let alone spend the rest of their lives in each other's arms) is only slightly greater than the chance that, say, a world war will be begun over the assassination of an Austrian archduke named Ferdinand.

There are so awfully many impediments: She snores. He wears mismatched plaids. That's why dating services, and roommate referral agencies, are so lucrative. The survival of most relationships depends on distance. Friendships, for example. And sexual liaisons. Where the formula goes awry, though, is in the calculus of love.

Love is not magnified friendship; it is its own lens on the world. Energy is produced, not consumed, as inevitably happens when a mistress spends too long with her boy-toy. Two people in love hold a common point of reference: Love in marriage is unique because it permits, because it demands, that total unity.

Next page | Love is something more than an exchange of services