Time And Timing

Many problems in marriage can only be understood if carefully examined in terms of time and its various elements: timing, mutual rhythms, synchronization of needs. There is evidence that each organism contains many biologically pre-timed processes, although the mechanistic imagery of programming, or of the biological clock, is far too rigid for the reality of even physiological events, let alone emotional ones. But each of us contains a number of basic responses to "external time" (night and day, seasons, phases of the moon). We also contain a series of basic rhythms which can be called "internal time" or "own time." When a couple is getting on well they share the same timing, they are "in synch." Their internal rhythms may be almost identical. Particularly at the beginning of a relationship, many "coincidences" occur which seem to show that the respective rhythms are becoming almost superimposed. The subsequent success of the relationship is reflected by how much the couple is able to stay mainly in shared time.

One of the most conspicuous signs of a failed marriage is that everything has become out of synch: the partners want to eat at different times, go out at different times, and (most important) make love at different times. With the arrival of children, the introduction of new internal times into the marriage causes inevitable problems. But even without this or other challenging external events, the couple may become out of synch in a process of fading interest on one or both sides. The partners' rhythms, instead of being identical or complementary, become disengaged. Finally, one or both partners may end up having a relationship elsewhere. Is this an inevitable process? Is it too much to hope that a marriage can endure in time?

The answers to these questions cannot be clear until natural rather than compulsive marriage has become the norm. Obviously, in present society, we can look at many marriages which last a lifetime. But this may be because they have been compulsory. Some natural marriages have lasted and seem to have been lively and happy; they are rare. But it is noteworthy that most people when they start on a life together, and especially later when they want to have children, want their marriage to last a lifetime. This is true in many cases where, so far as I can see with my therapist's (suspicious) eye, there are not merely the classical "incest motives" for wanting continuance (we want Daddy or Mummy for always). Rather, in feeling a shared joy in marriage, we want the joy to last forever. This is only natural!

Perhaps the marriage does not go on forever, but most people try hard to ensure that it does. And it is healthy to work for a lasting marriage so long as this is not compulsive and the work is done in love, not out of obligation or fear. Whether or not the marriage has its ups and downs, the love between the partners is the fuel for the work put into problem solving.

Natural marriage seems to be a natural need for an adult, but it has its restrictions. These are not the moralistic restrictions of compulsive marriage, they arise from respect for the partner's feelings. A natural marriage may indeed be threatened by the natural event of falling in love elsewhere, but this is its only major threat, apart from that of fading marital love. No partner in a marriage based on love would be interested in an "experimental affair," although these are the stock-in-trade of the compulsive marriage from which all love has departed.

Spontaneous faithfulness is based on the capacity for feeling for the partner. In the last analysis, it is total surrender to someone other than the marital partner which makes unfaithfulness difficult: the moment of orgasm is so special that it is associated with the feel and embrace of the beloved. Therapeutic experience suggests that many people who find themselves impulsively making love to someone not their spouse feel great excitement during foreplay with the new person, but a sudden poignant regret at orgasm which may in fact impede full sensation. This is so often the case that I would guess the real reason for most infidelity to be the fascination of different foreplay possibilities with a new partner. Frequently in my practice I have had people tell me that they have had an affair because of some foreplay need that the spouse either does not gratify or does not know about. Sometimes a person will find it easier (because of the internal split between tenderness and sensuality) to have an affair with a new person than to make some simple request about foreplay of the partner. In a paradoxical way, the purpose of the affair is to avoid pressure on some area of the marriage—in foreplay, in frequency of intercourse, or even in some such minor matter as change in dress or perfume.

A need for sexual variety can be argued. But orgasm, like sobbing (or vomiting, for that matter), is a universal pulsation and does not need to be varied to be intensely felt. Thus it is clear that variety here means variety in foreplay. This does not mean variety in partners. At the moment of orgasm, the partner may be sensed and perceived with almost miraculous acuteness, but it is not so much the individuality which is perceived as their essential man-ness or woman-ness. The intense uttering of the partner's name, so common at orgasm, is the final anchor of individuality in an experience which goes beyond it.

Reich wrote of the "dulling" effect of making love with the same partner for a long period in a marriage. I am suspicious of this notion simply because I have not experienced it in my own life. I have known other people who also claim that their experience of sexual pleasure with the same partner becomes more, not less intense over the passage of time. Foreplay between long-established partners may become dull but not because of familiarity with the partner's body. When a person complains that they need variety this probably means a failure in end-pleasure for that person; foreplay then has to carry too much burden of excitement as compensation. In these circumstances, the variety can be sought elsewhere, or in Kama Sutra type changes in position, or experiments with climax through pregenital means. But the number of options is finite. The lasting bond between partners is repeated sexual fusion, a sharing of intense experience in orgasm.

This is not an argument that marriage must last for ever, although when a marriage is good most people will want it to, and with luck it may. But it is an argument that, if the possibility of unfaithfulness arises, the emotional and sexual fulfillment of the marriage should be considered closely.

Apparently the main protagonists of the modern North American open marriage, George and Nina O'Neill (Open Marriage), have now concluded that it does not work. This is no surprise to the therapists and counselors, such as I myself, who have been dealing with its debris over the last decade. Open marriage is too painful. In the last analysis, you have to be capable of sitting at home some evening, reading a book or minding the children, in the certain knowledge of your partner's physical and emotional intimacy and surrender in bed with someone else. If you can do this, how alive are your feelings for your partner?

Another frequent problem is imbalance between the partners in using the open marriage permissions. Is an equal time solution then desirable? Group sex may, in fact, have become popular as an answer to this problem: it assures roughly equal time and the partners can keep an eye on each other. But where is total concentration on genital fusion with the partner when more than two people are involved? What is being sought, again, is not more intense fusion, but more varied foreplay. In turn this is a running away from the possibility of full commitment to a partner.

Of course, there are problems in maintaining a fulfilling marriage. If you are partners in a good relationship and in fairly decent health, you can work to dissolve many of the blocks to an optimum joining together. If at some point your marriage ends, at least it will not be for trivial or neurotic reasons; you will have made every effort to be open and nurturing to each other.