Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

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]

Complete archives for Mothers Who Think

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Whither marriage? For a week, Mothers Who Think examines the battered but unbowed institution No regrets I was an unashamed mistress. Wisdom ancient and new That was Then: Keep it clean This is Now: Ask the madame: Two days of foreplay does the trick - - - - - - - The winners of "Is this marriage doomed?" First place Second place Third place

Perhaps I'm being unfair to Griffin, implying that she's an emotional coward without saying the same of her married lover. We don't know a lot about him, but, given the occupational requirement that he lead multiple lives, he might as well be H.G. Wells, commenting to a friend about his mistress, "Would I ruin myself for her? Would I even interrupt my work for her? 'Not a bit of it,' I said, 'for you or anyone.'" If the mistress reduces her emotional risk by keeping her bets to herself, her lover reduces his by shuffling up a game of three-card monte.

Wells, a man of many mistresses, undeniably represents the extreme, but the psychological trick he plays on himself is demanded of any man who wants his affection in stereo. In Wells' mind, his wife and various mistresses never meet: Each has her own space -- what Griffin aptly calls a "compartment" -- leaving him free to make mental housecalls.

Wells' women exist for him contiguously: When he turns on the lights in one compartment, they go out in all the others -- and woe to the trollop who ventures outside. How easy for big H.G. to stop paying the electrical bills the moment any unreasonable demand is made, any real emotion betrayed. Wells' women aren't women to him. He won't permit that. They're coin-operated nudie shows in a matinee porn theater.

What Griffin, intoxicated by the Wellsian formula, would like us to believe is that the mistress' lack of involvement in her man's life is paradoxically what brings them together. "A busy late twentieth-century wife," she points out, "just does not have the time, even if she has the inclination, to listen to the tales of her husband's day, to provide him with the glass of wine, the soothing music, the sympathetic ear," from which she concludes, "Maybe it's still true -- however unpalatable -- that no woman can be everything to a man."

Or maybe, just maybe, love is something more than an exchange of services that can be performed by any qualified sex worker, or rather -- in keeping with the unequal pay endured by women in virtually every other line of business -- by any two or more qualified sex workers. Maybe, just maybe, the woman willing to trade in bordeaux and violins is engaged in an act of pseudo-romantic self-delusion inappropriate even for a 14-year-old trailer park tramp meeting her first big city john. And maybe, just maybe, the man who collects his love like baseball cards, hoping to assemble a dream team by buying up all the players with the right stats, is engaged in an act of pseudo-dramatic self-amusement befitting a 6-year-old boy.

But who's to tell the difference? The remarkable thing about an affair is that when both the mistress and her lover play their roles as they're supposed to, love never changes hands: Why go through the trouble of loving someone else when you could love yourself instead?

To have multiple partners, to hold their interest and to hold his own, the mistress' lover dare not fall in love with any of them. If Adam gave his rib, H.G. Wells took it back.

The mistress, though, has it even worse. The skills a mistress needs to succeed, cites Griffin, are skepticism, self-interestedness and, of course, independence. In other words, the skills needed to be a good mistress are those needed to be a good day trader. Can somebody so frigid honestly be expected to fall in love with anybody? And if she does do something so grossly unprofessional as to betray feeling, how can she still play the role of mistress with any competence whatsoever? For the mistress, love is an occupational safety hazard.

Yet, the mistress desperately wants to fall in love. (Otherwise why would she go through all the trouble of cheap motel rooms when she could just service men all night long at the neighborhood singles bar?) Her mistake is that she forgets that "love," unlike "masturbate," is a transitive verb. She seeks love, but she neglects to include anyone else in the pursuit: She seeks love but not a beloved.

Is it any wonder that, standing alone in her emotion-proof compartment, the only one the mistress winds up falling in love with is herself?
salon.com | Nov. 17, 1999

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

  Get a printer-friendly version

  E-mail a friend about this article

  Backflip this article to find it again

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon