Adultery as a Moonshot

The Persistent Search for a Different Future

Continued meditation on the 7th commandment, on adultery as the search for a different future. You can read the first two installments on adultery here and here.

What To Make of A Desire for Freedom

The longer I am married, the less I understand the leaving your spouse to find a better future motif, in part because we bring ourselves into whatever future relationship we might be in. There is no gaining escape velocity from the self.

The motif or leaving one’s spouse to find fulfillment has , I regret to inform you, gotten a lot of discussion in recent months, as exemplified by the popularity of the Miranda July book All Fours. The protagonist departs her marriage for sexual discovery, ultimately bringing it back to the marriage, which, not shockingly, becomes an open marriage: an amplification of what she discovers outside marriage. I won’t rehearse the political dynamics of the novel, as Freddie de Boer summarizes it well here. As he so delicately puts it:

The more relevant question is, will the women who attempt this actually achieve satisfaction and happiness? And I’m profoundly skeptical. Because life doesn’t work that way. We live mundane lives in a boring existence on a finite planet. We negotiate little bits of happiness where we can find them. We never, ever get everything that we want, and we are remarkably consistent in no longer wanting what we want once we get it. For those of us who are lucky enough not to face poverty or disability or abuse or addiction, a vague-but-tolerable disappointment is something like the most common state of human life. And I think Miranda July and all of these ruling class thinkpiece peddlers are selling a lot of impressionable women on a fantasy, no different from the kid hawking crypto to gullible people eager to believe that they can get rich quick. What comes next, sooner or later, is the rug pull.

I want to return to de Boer’s point about fulfillment, because I think it’s the most important one, but first, we need to ask about what helps make this vision of July’s attractive in the first place.

It’s important to distinguish this genre from its more common counterpart: women who rebuild their lives relationally after being left by their husbands. This is the premise that is well-loved, for it celebrates triumph over tragedy. It’s why we cheer for Emma Thompson’s character in Love Actually, or why the romance of Waiting to Exhale works: an injustice has been done, and the woman is rebuilding a life. The version of this story that July brings to the table borrows the empathy which is given to this more common version, by expanding the tragic from “a marital injustice has been done” to “unfulfilled life is injustice”. There are fewer examples of the July version (Dying for Sex; Eat, Pray, Love; Kramer v. Kramer¹), but growing in number.

The empathy expansion is curious, and we can detect that curiousness by the relative lack of works which flip the script: imagine empathetically depicting men who leave their wives and families for sexual and emotional fulfillment. More frequently, the acknowledgment is that when men have affairs, their literary and film description is decidedly not one of justification, but animalian: “men are dogs” or “men have needs”. Nothing about the men’s depiction smacks of the need for self-betterment or self-fulfillment, but of failure to be the kinds of human we expect men to be.

One way to view this asymmetry is that men, in having affairs under this cloud of accusations about being animals, are just as oppressed as women. But again, this would be reading generations of literature against the grain: when affairs are described by men, they are described as being less than men, not fulfilling their vocation to be men. While men remain more likely to commit adultery, this is different than the cultural judgments about it.

One obvious way of reading the negative judgments on the affairs of men in literature is that the men in the stories of Run Rabbit Run, or Freedom, or The End of the Affair are just getting greedy for freedom, enjoying political freedom but confusing that with sexual freedom. Men, in the West, have become those creatures who were given more latitude in careers, politics, self-discovery beyond the home in abundance, and so, sexual affairs become too much of a good thing.

But this seems to me to not be asking the question deeply enough: what if the problem was with the explorations themselves, and that the escape from home in career, politics, and culture was anticipatory of the sexual affair?

What if enabling men to live unfettered lives of discovery beyond the mundanity of home was preparing the way? The pursuit of meaning in exploration, and affairs as part of that exploration—from the Odyssey to The Unbearable Lightness of Being—is well worn. But that these works involve not only political and vocational journey but sexual wandering points to a perennial connection between endlessly escaping home and endlessly escaping one’s one spouse.

Photo by Ellie Cooper on Unsplash

Marriage is soul-forming, and marriage requires a great deal of us: two things can be true, and these two truths about formation and difficulty frequently travel together. There are many moments which call our commitments into question. All the more reason, then, to pay attention to the precursors which lead away from the ordinary and into the ether.

For if endless expansion of the self is that which expands into adultery, all the more reason to call into question the long tradition of literature which exalts the voyager and traveler: they are asking for more than they can handle.

Adultery as Moonshot

Adultery, as we have been describing it, brings into view the twin possibilities of a body’s life: fidelity to God, and fidelity to the idols. That which makes possible love bears the possibility of abandoning the shoreline and dissolving into it.

To this, then, let us add one more dynamic: the desire for freedom from the ordinary, a freedom from the mundane and from fidelity to God in the same movement.

In 1 Samuel 2, we find this judgment of Eli’s sons:

¹² Eli’s sons were scoundrels; they had no regard for the Lord. ¹³ Now it was the practice of the priests that, whenever any of the people offered a sacrifice, the priest’s servant would come with a three-pronged fork in his hand while the meat was being boiled ¹⁴ and would plunge the fork into the pan or kettle or caldron or pot. Whatever the fork brought up the priest would take for himself. This is how they treated all the Israelites who came to Shiloh. ¹⁵ But even before the fat was burned, the priest’s servant would come and say to the person who was sacrificing, “Give the priest some meat to roast; he won’t accept boiled meat from you, but only raw.”

The repetition of the priestly work requires stability in the place of sacrifice: there is no roaming for the priest, but the constant work of the altar. There is no expansion of territory, for the priests had no land. There is no building of commerce or namesake, for the Lord’s house is the only house they have.

In that repetition, all the conditions for sexual faithfulness are there. And yet, it is the very place that infidelity begins to take root.

The irony here is thick: in chapter 1:13-14, Hannah was charged with being drunk and wicked by Eli, only to see in chapter 2, that it the wickedness is actually within Eli’s own house. But the infidelity of taking food that was not theirs to take was, like the adultery of the free wanderer, a first step toward adultery:

²² Now Eli, who was very old, heard about everything his sons were doing to all Israel and how they slept with the women who served at the entrance to the tent of meeting. ²³ So he said to them, “Why do you do such things? I hear from all the people about these wicked deeds of yours. ²⁴ No, my sons; the report I hear spreading among the Lord’s people is not good. ²⁵ If one person sins against another, God^[d] may mediate for the offender; but if anyone sins against the Lord, who will intercede for them?” His sons, however, did not listen to their father’s rebuke, for it was the Lord’s will to put them to death.

As we have seen already, adultery and idolatry are often companions; here once again, the sons of Eli take the affordances of stability and fidelity, and use that very location to be the launching pad into adultery.

That adultery occurs in the house of the Lord is bad enough. But against the backdrop of them being priests, bound to this work of the Lord’s house, to this life of landlessness and dependency, we can detect the dynamic of a desire for a different life emerging in their affairs:

What if we were not Eli’s sons, bound to the altar?

What if this was not our vocation?

What if, perhaps, we were not even of Israel, but free to pursue meat, women, life as we sought fit?

What I have proposed here with Eli’s sons is that there is not some adultery-proof life: adultery comes to those who are stable and to those that wander, both as the desire to escape the bounds of the ordinary and routine, and to those immersed in endless novelty of travel.

But this is what makes Hophni and Phineas’ adultery all the more tragic: all of the conditions of faithfulness were present, and yet, the pull to the gods of another place remained, the desire for a different kind of life enacted in the optimum conditions for faithfulness².

1. Kramer v. Kramer is included here not because there is sexual fulfillment involved: the empathy for Meryl Streep’s character works precisely because her interest is in being a better mother, and so her return to the family and to motherhood is part of a larger arc. Could she have sought therapy without leaving? In the hypothetical, yes. In the cultural world of the 1970s, I cannot say. I was coming into the world in the late 1970s and not aware of such things, being fully immersed in Sesame Street.

2. There is another layer to this tragedy to note: Phineas is named for another Phineas in Numbers 24, who put to death a Moabite woman and an Isrealite in the midst of sexual congress, by putting a spear though both of them. Abstracting from the gruesomeness of the story, we can see the battle against idolatry/adultery was part of what Eli’s Phineas was meant to inherit. But Eli’s Phineas apparently learned that threatened violence, adultery, and idolatry were cool.