JoANN WYPIJEWSKI

CAN MARRIAGE BE SAVED? Why, it's saved every day, the good old-fashioned way, by divorce and adultery.

The mistake is in believing those things to be outside the marriage system, spanners in the works or, from another angle, bold, "transgressive" enunciations of sexual liberation. Of course household to household, divorce or adultery may mean any of that. There are real tears and sighs of relief among that 50 percent of straight married couples who dissolve their contracts, and real excitement (tears can come later) among the majority who tryst in spite of vows. For capital-M marriage, though, they are beside the point. Divorce saves the institution of marriage the way an escape clause saves the institution of the business deal, freeing the partners, in the bargain...for another marriage. I'll never forget a feminist friend explaining, among the positives of her divorce, that her little daughter, who at the time liked nothing better than to play bride, would not have to endure the example of a loveless marriage spoiling her own dreams of a white wedding and the happy-ever-after.

No one talks this way about adultery. It promises no new beginnings, no second chance for monogamy, for the "good marriage" this time, with the good wife and good husband in which no one is ever insecure, ever needy beyond the embrace of home, ever even intrigued; in which everyone is happy, while happiness wreaks its impossible demands. Yet adultery rarely brings absolute rupture. Most adulterers don't leave home for wedded bliss with their lover. What adultery brings is something harder, a confrontation with the lie and, beyond the bric-a-brac of forbidden love, with plain old desire in a monogamy system in which sex is currency, withheld as punishment, doled out as reward, or sometimes just another thing on a To Do list that is already too long.

Of course, the lie is more comforting than its unmasking, and so the "other woman," ghoul of married women's fears, is a hornèd thing, symbol of failure, delusion, selfishness. The dark angel, she is as necessary to the totem of the ideal wife as hellfire is to heaven. But is it reasonable, or just an article of faith in the marriage religion, that apostates must all be cynics or manipulators? A woman I know, single, 50-ish and by chance or design long involved with married men, answered the question this way:

"The fact is a lot of us are single and the longer we insist on that the smaller the pool becomes of single interesting men. Now, the boxes lined up conventionally for someone like me are celibacy, computer dating, husband-hunting, broken heart. No thank you. So I see these men, and let's just say we engage in a free love. I don't expect them to leave their wives. I want their interest and their care, intimately, mentally, and I offer them the same. They go home to their wives. I don't know what they say or do about that, and it's not my business. They love their wives, or need them, or need their families, or need the image of themselves that comes along with twenty-five years of marriage or whatever even if love is dead, and maybe it was never alive in the first place. Or maybe it's good, but how much can it give? Life demands a lot, you know, and sometimes a person just needs to be weak. Or just needs, wants, a different kind of loving. We act as if comfort were evil--and curiosity, God forbid! For the time that I'm with these men I know something deep and loving occurs. Apart from everything else, I am their intimate friend. We're talking years here. The Dr. Phils of the world would say that I'm a fool. The gay men I know get it completely. The women mostly I don't discuss this with. It isn't perfect, but nothing is. And I'd be lying to say I never want for more. In the pie-in-the-sky there's always the 'great love,' the soul mate and comrade and lover combined. It's a wish; it happens or it doesn't, and, let's face it, most of the time it doesn't. But we live in a tyranny of the couple. Only single people understand this. And I guess what I resent most is the assumption that there is only one way for love, and if you haven't found it, or if your man 'strays' or if you are the one he's 'straying' with, then you've failed. I don't think these guys' wives have failed any more than I think the men have or I have. The supposed experts on love can hawk all the stuff they want about commitment, denial, avoidance, and people can lap it up and repeat it back to their single friends and their children. But at the end of the day there're all these broken marriages, all these broken hearts, all these needs unmet. The rules for love everlasting are a bit like the rules for making it in the opportunity society, where really nothing is equal and nothing is fair."

Maybe instead of asking whether marriage can be saved, we might think about how love is achieved, and not just couple-love, contract-love, but love in common too?

JoAnn Wypijewski is a writer in New York City.

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