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Title: Adultery (and other half revolutions) Author: CrimethInc. Date: September 11, 2000 Language: en Topics: marriage, free love, Harbinger Source: Retrieved on 6th November 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/adultery-and-other-half-revolutions
If the two-party relationship system is the pinnacle achievement of a
hundred thousand years of human loving, why is adultery so common that
it’s practically counted on as material for bourgeois drawing room humor
… and employment for a whole army of marriage counselors? If all any of
us truly desire is our “one true love,” why can’t we keep our hands off
everyone else?
If you really want to know, you should cut straight to the source and
ask the adulterer himself. Or maybe you don’t have to go that far—maybe
you’ve had adulterous affairs or inclinations of your own, as the
statistics suggest.
Growing up in an environment dominated by capitalist economics teaches
certain psychological lessons that are hard to unlearn: Anything of
value is only available in limited supplies. Stake your claim now,
before you’re left all alone with nothing. We learn to measure
commitment and affection in terms of how much others are willing to
sacrifice for us, unable to imagine that love and pleasure could be
things that multiply when shared. In a healthy relationship, conversely,
friends or lovers enable each other to be able to do and live and feel
more. If you feel, in your gut if not your head, that monogamy means
giving something up (your “freedom,” as they say), then the patterns of
exploitation have penetrated even into your romantic life. Such
cost-benefit calculations just don’t compute.
We all know that Good Marriages Take Work. There it is again, work: the
cornerstone of our alienation culture. Wage labor, relationship
labor-are you ever not on the clock? Do you accept stifling limitations
in return for affection and reassurance, the same way you trade time for
money at your job? When you have to work at monogamy, you are back in
the system of exchange: your intimacy economy is governed, just like the
capitalist economy, by scarcity, threat, and programmed prohibitions,
and protected ideologically by assurances that there are no viable
alternatives… again, just like the capitalist economy. When
relationships become work, when desire is organized contractually, with
accounts kept and fidelity extracted like labor from employees, with
marriage a domestic factory policed by means of rigid shop-floor
discipline designed to keep the wives and husbands of the world chained
to the machinery of responsible reproduction-then it should be no
surprise that some individuals cannot help but revolt.
Adultery, in stark contrast to the Good Marriage, comes naturally,
arriving without even being invited. Suddenly you feel transformed:
awakened from the graveyard of once-vital passion that has been your
relationship, to feel that excitement again. You shouldn’t be feeling
any of this, damn it, and yet it’s the first time you’ve been carried
away by pure, unforced happiness in who knows how long-and oh, the sweet
optimism of something new, something that isn’t yet fucking predictable…
it’s as if surprise, risk, gratification, fulfillment were again
genuinely imaginable possibilities. Who, if they could feel what you’re
feeling right now, could possibly demand you resist?
The adulterer gets a crash course in just how occupied the space and
time he lives in is. It immediately becomes clear just how little free
time he has, time when he is not under observation—it turns out that the
workday does not end when he leaves the workplace, but extends in both
directions before and after it, consuming practically his whole life.
The domination of his space, too, is revealed: how many places are there
for him to spend time with his new lover, places he need not rent with
money, respectable explanations, and the image of social responsibility?
In what few moments of his life is he not held to guidelines imposed by
outside forces, guidelines which plainly have nothing to do any longer
with his emotional and physical needs?
The adulterer becomes a virtuoso of petty theft, stealing the moments of
his life one by one from their “rightful owners”: his spouse, his
employer, family and social obligations. Just like the vandal, he
resists the ownership of his world in the only way he knows how-by tiny
and largely symbolic acts of daily sedition, out of which he carefully
constructs an infinitely fragile alternate universe. There he hides, in
spirit when he cannot in body, hoping not to be found out and called to
account for what he has become: a traitor to the entire civilization
that raised him.
Society, personified by his unfortunate spouse, demands that the
adulterer be honest and frank about all things, when it will only punish
him for this. It attempts to secure his compliance through routine
interrogations (“who was that on the phone, dear?”), surveillance (“do
you think I didn’t notice how much time you spent talking to her?”),
search and seizure (“and just what the hell am I supposed to think this
is?”), and more serious intimidation tactics: the threat of total
expulsion from the only home and community he is likely to know. The
adulterer who would like to be able to tell the truth is forced to use
the Misery Quotient to compute whether he can permit himself to: divide
your current unhappiness by the harmful consequences of contesting it,
multiply by your fear of the unknown, and then think twice about whether
you really need to act after all. This is the same formula used by
exploited migrant workers and children locked in private school hells,
by battered wives and sexually harassed secretaries.
What our society is missing here is the wisdom to know that telling the
truth is not just the responsibility of the teller. If you really want
to know the truth, you must make it easy for people to tell it to you:
you must be genuinely supportive and ready for whatever it may be, not
just make self-righteous demands or play good cop/bad cop (“just tell
me, I promise I’ll understand… you did WHAT?!”). That can only lead to
evasive action, or at best to the subject of your cross-examination
finding ways to lie to himself as well as you. Neither our society nor,
consequently, its cuckolds and cuckoldesses, are ready for the
revelation of truth that the adulterer has to offer; it is only safe in
the sheltering ears of his illicit lover.
Inevitably, despite the best intentions and most secretive schemes of
the adulterer, people get hurt. More to the point: people already were
hurting, only invisibly, in the enforced happily-ever-after of domestic
silence, or else such drastic measures would not have been necessary in
the first place to bring dead hearts to life. Would it be better that
the routines and illusions of the marriage remain undisturbed, forever,
so that everyone’s ennui could proceed on course to the embittered end?
Could it be preferable for the unsuspecting partner to go on measuring
her value as a lover and spouse according to the standard of a fidelity
that boils down to self-denial, a standard which has already been
violated in spirit of not in letter? Of course, instead of cheating you
could always have gone to counseling, been “honest” with your spouse
instead of yourself and turned away from the new landscapes you saw
about to be born in the eyes of your potential lover, trying instead to
achieve a passable imitation-substitute with your officially sanctioned
partner-or resorted to medicating yourself into numb submission with
television or Prozac, if that failed…
To cut to the heart of the matter: is it ever really wrong simply to
desire not to be emotionally dead? What vast measures of self-confidence
and entitlement would it take the modern married man or woman to risk
feeling alive, unarmed with the twin weapons of self-justification and
self-abasement, the excuses and apologies and self-recriminations? The
adulterer discovers that he is trapped in the life he had adopted under
the encouragement and threats of the established romantic standard, and,
despite his best attempts to restrain himself, has begun to plot an
escape. Were he to reflect lucidly on his situation, his secret self
might rebel and begin to ask the important questions: What kind of life
does he really aspire to live? How much freedom and fulfillment does he
deserve to feel? How has it come to be that he hurts others just by
reaching for what he needs for himself?
The fact is, people always get hurt whenever someone contests the long-
entrenched order, even “innocent” people, and sometimes not the same
innocent ones who were suffering at the hands of the old regime. That’s
why anything less than complete prostration to the status quo is
considered bad ethics. But once the itch to mutiny has struck, the
alternative to it becomes unthinkable (consider how much thinking those
who opt for it do)… so the adulterer takes it upon himself, often
unwillingly but without being able to resist, to do things that hurt
others, but no more than he absolutely has to. If he were prepared to
embrace and proudly proclaim his outlawed desires (rather than
ultimately rejecting them in a fit of apologetic revisionism: “I didn’t
know what I was doing!”), and take responsibility for the further pain
that would cause, he would finally stand in a position from which he
could step out of the circle of hurt that is the scarcity economy of
love. But he lacks the courage and analysis for this final act: that is
why he is still a mere adulterer, one who makes half a revolution-and
the worst half, at that.
“What about the children?” demand the shocked sentries of the
bourgeoisie when they hear about yet another marriage endangered by an
affair, terrified that their own strayings might come out next. Well,
what about them? Do you think you can protect the next generation from
the tragic tension between the complexity of desire and the simplicity
of social prohibitions just by knuckling under yourself? If you smother
your own aspirations for happiness, displacing them instead onto your
expectations of future generations, you will end by smothering your
children as well as yourself. Your children would be better off growing
up in a world where people dare to be honest about what they want,
whatever the consequences. Would you prefer that they learn to beat
their own longings into flattened reminders of shame and remorse, as you
do?
And it’s worth pointing out that nuclear-family monogamy, which these
self-appointed judges would protect from the assault implied by
adultery, is the very thing that replaced the broader, more fluid,
extended family structures of the past. By all accounts, children were
better cared for in those environments, and their parents had more
freedom as well. Could it be that adultery is a blind, desperate lunge
for the extended community that we once had, from the cage of the
contractual relationship-or at least could act as a stepping stone to a
new form of it?
Ultimately, adultery is only possible because the questions it asks are
left unanswered. Just like the shoplifter, the rioter, and the suicide,
the adulterer makes only half a revolution: he violates the decrees of
authoritarian convention and law, but in such a way that they remain in
place, still dictating his actions-be those actions obedient or
reactive. He would do better to expose what he is and wants to the whole
world without guilt or remorse, and demand that it find a place for him
and his desires, whatever they might be—then his own struggle could be
the starting point for a revolution in human relationships from which
everyone might benefit, not just a flash of isolated passion and
insurgency to be stomped out before it even becomes aware of itself.
Let us shelter and defend him from the shaming of this society whenever
he does step forward, so that he may do so-for he acts, as we do, out of
a passion burning unquenchably for a new world.
“Hell yes I cheated!”