Where do you draw the line?

Posted by Sappho on August 17th, 2005 filed in Sexuality

There’s someone with whom you’re sure you should not be having sex. Maybe because you’re married to someone else. Maybe because he or she is. Maybe because you’re taken a lifelong vow of celibacy, or because that person is not quite legal, or maybe you’re waiting till marriage, or maybe you’re just waiting till the third date. Maybe the person is attractive to you, and you’re trying to manage your attraction. Maybe the person isn’t the least bit attractive to you, but others might suspect you if you do the wrong thing, and you’re trying to manage your reputation. Whatever the reason, if you seriously want to be clear that you’re not going to have sex, there are probably a bunch of things, short of sex, that you’re also not doing. Where do you draw the line?

Several different recent blog discussions converge to bring this matter to my mind. There’s this post at Sed Contra, where chastely living with same sex attraction David Morrison is challenged about the fact that he’s living with a man who was once his lover, and he explains that there is more than one kind of love, and he and Dan now share philia rather than eros. There was the point in the discussion of Monsignor Clark and his attractive secretary, when some people remarked that we don’t, after all, know that he had sex with her, and others remarked that, even if he didn’t, the act of spending five hours in a hotel room with her was in itself not innocent. And there’s the discussion about monogamy/polyamory that’s been going on at Figleaf’s not especially work safe blog.

As I remarked to Figleaf in email, part of what interests me about the question is the fact that both extremes – hue really closely to a narrow definition of infidelity, while
ignoring your partner’s feelings and the actual effect on the relationship, or apply a really broad rule of avoiding anything whatsoever that looks remotely like infidelity – pretty much seem as if they’d suck as an actual way to live. You can see this especially if you look at the emotional ties we have to other people. I would not want to live the life where I was my husband’s only close friend. And I wouldn’t want to live the life where he was my only close friend. At the same time, if he were treating one particular friend like a lover, it wouldn’t necessarily mollify me that they hadn’t had sex yet.

Another thing is that people’s personal lines vary really widely on these matters, and, besides, there are certain situations where you want a narrower line than others. Someone remarked, in one of the Monsignor Clark threads, that Billy Graham never closed the door with a woman alone in his office. If true, this might be a very good policy for Billy Graham. But it’s not the way any of the offices I’ve worked at have functioned. I usually have male bosses; my boss has always closed the door with me alone in the office where appropriate (such as when giving me my evaluation), and, really, all the offices everywhere I’ve ever worked have big glass windows, so it’s not like anyone could start wildly making out, once the door is closed, without being seen. But there are some situations where a stricter “don’t be alone” policy may be applied than appropriate for adults working together. Hugo, a youth leader at his church, has said that he’s never alone with any of the teenage girls in his group, and this makes a lot of sense to me, as a matter of keeping youth leaders accountable.

At this point I come to Figleaf’s thought experiment for long-term partners:

For now I’ve got a couple of questions that comprise a little thought experiment about our own relationships (for those of us in them.)

1) How would your relationship be different if you and your partner were married to other people?

2) If you were married to someone else and then met your current partner how would you react?

I’ve found those are good, hard, clarifying questions. (If you think they’re easy I think you’ll still find them satisfyingly productive to ponder further.) They’ve clarified my feelings for my partner even as they’ve complicated my feelings about monogamy.

Figleaf speculates that, if he met his current partner while married to someone else:

I would readily (if guiltily) be unfaithful to be with her and it wouldn’t trouble me if she remained in a primary relationship if that’s what it took to be with her.

Others take varying positions in his comments. I’d like to say that I wouldn’t be unfaithful with Joel, if I were already committed to someone else. I’d like to say that, because I believe in marriage, not as everlasting romance and always hot sex, but as choice and commitment, and decision regardless of your feelings. Sara Butler Nardo quotes frequent commenter Peter in this Family Scholars blog post:

So don’t promise eternal love. Instead, promise to stay married. Promise to be nice to your spouse when you’re feeling pissed off. Promise to treat each other with respect. Promise to talk and promise to listen. Promise to try to see things from your spouse’s perspective. Promise to say “thank you,” “I love you,” and “you’re right” as often as you can, and promise to say “I’m sorry” as often as you must.

I’d like to say all these things about how I’d be faithful anyway, but it wouldn’t be fully honest to say them, actually. I’m not a finished saint, and I don’t always do what I’m convinced I ought to. And a vow is a promise, not a certainty. We vow to stay married and faithful for life, not because we’re sure we actually will – we actually stand a really good chance of failing at one or the other – but because we want to bind our future selves. And so, if I were married to someone else, maybe unhappily married, to someone no longer all that appealing to me, and I met Joel – who, after all, in real life I liked enough to marry – maybe I would succeed in staying faithful, and maybe I wouldn’t. What I do know is what things I would do to try to stay faithful.

I imagine I’d still like Joel, and want to be friends with him. I might well still find him attractive, and I wouldn’t cut off all thought of friendship with him because I had sexual thoughts – I don’t necessarily work that way – but there would be certain lines I’d be drawing. Make it clear from the start that you are married. Introduce your new friends to your husband. Pay attention to his comfort level. Don’t talk about your marital problems, in private, with a heterosexual guy, because that could look like an invitation. Etc.

The interesting thing is that I’m looser about all of these limits with bisexual and lesbian woman than I am with straight men, even though, in principle, I could have an affair with another woman as well as with a man. I’m not sure why this is: I assume men are more likely than women to read what I do sexually? I assume the world is more likely to read my interactions with men sexually than the same interaction with a woman? I expect Joel to be less threatened by a woman than by a man? But for whatever reason, I’ll spend time alone with a lesbian or bisexual woman, at her house, and just don’t do that with an unrelated straight man, and I touch women more freely than men, etc.

At any rate, I think if I met Joel today while married to someone else, I’d like him at first meeting, as I actually did, but aim to stick with the choice I had made, just as now I aim to stick with Joel, regardless of whatever other new, attractive person may turn up.