The School of Life

On Adultery

Is sexual liberation over? You may think so, reading Jealousy, the sequel to The Sexual Life of Catherine M. In it, lusty Parisian academic Catherine Millet, who hung out with the whores in the Bois de Boulogne, reveals something controversial: a heart. When her man slept around, she went barmy.  

Hypocrisy is the most logical attitude to infidelity, as it fuses many issues, and beliefs about it formed in a world very different to our own.  It has a religious dimension.  As an infidel betrays God, so infidelity betrays the faith between two people.  The assumption is that loyalty in body, mind and spirit are interchangeable.  But arguably, people began disapproving of infidelity for a more practical reasons, to stop rows about property.  


Avid debauchee Alexandre ‘Three Musketeers’ Dumas lamented, ‘Why is what was called cuckoldry in the seventeenth century called adultery in the nineteenth?’  His answer was inheritance law.  Once, first-born sons got it all, then the law changed, giving every child a portion of the estate.  So husbands who once worried only about the paternity of their heir grew to fear every cuckoo in the nest.  And society grew fiercer about female infidelity, while in men a mistress remained a badge of success.   

Female sluts got it in the neck since Eve bit the apple.  Katie Price is slated for cavorting with her cage fighter.  But male sluts are less tolerated than before.  The court of public opinion is still out on randy Ashley Cole, while Cheryl is a latter-day saint for fighting for her love.  But for those whose private lives are private, now we have DNA-testing, good contraception, fidelity seems less relevant.  With the internet and the liar's friend, the mobile phone, slipping the marital leash is ever easier.  Why can't we act on passing fancies without breaching emotional loyalty?  


I understand infidelity’s fans.  Yet I believe monogamy, with the right person, is the least-worst path through life. Even empty sex threatens a relationship, as nobody can guarantee it will not come to mean more.  This belief is less old-fashioned than imagining that mind rules body, like 17th-century rationalist, René Descartes.  On the contrary, scientists have found neurochemicals released in sex, vasopressin and oxytocin, mean that where lust leads, territorial feelings often follow.  Love and sex, mind and body, are as interchangeable as ever. 

 

- Catherine Blyth

Alain de Botton on Seduction

In the season of romance, as we head out on dates across the city, we should bear in in mind that seduction is never easy when it's a case of seducing someone one actually likes. It is one of the ironies of love that it seems easiest to confidently seduce those we are least attracted to, desire eliciting a crippling sense of inferiority compared with the perfection we have located in the beloved.

 

Out of this perceived inferiority, there often emerges the need to lie or be absurly reserved: to take on a personality that is not directly our own, a seducing self that can locate and respond to the demands of the superior being we're having dinner with. Does love condemn us not to be ourselves? Perhaps not for ever, but at least initially, for it leads us to ask What would appeal to her? rather than What appeals to me?

 

Silence and clumsiness can sometimes be forgiven as rather pitiful proof of desire. It being easy enough to seduce someone towards whom one feels indifferent, the clumsiest seducers could generously be deemed the most genuine. Not to find the right words may ironically be proof that the right words are meant. When in the Liaisons Dangereuses, the Marquise de Merteuil writes to the Vicomte de Valmont, she faults him on the fact that his love letters are too perfect, too logical to be the words of a true lover, whose thoughts will be disjointed and for whom the fine phrase will always elude. Language trips up on love, desire lacks articulacy (but how willingly most of us would swapped our tongue-tiedness for the Vicomte's vocabulary).

 

Seduction is a form of acting, but just as an actor needs to have a concept of the audience's expectations, so too the seducer must have an idea of what the beloved will want to hear - so that if there is a conclusive argument against lying in order to be loved, it is that the actor can have no idea of what his or her audience will actually be touched by. Most of the time, we charm people for reasons we don't entirely understand and cannot fully control. There's no better reason to try to be that most tricky of things on our dates: ourselves.

 

For more on Seduction come to The School of Life's Sunday Sermon this weekend, where the preacher is none other than Sam Roddick, founder of erotic emporium Coco de Mer.

 

Or sign up to The School of Life's Love course.

Read your way out of a Valentine's crisis

 

As February 14th approaches, The School of Life’s bibliotherapists asked writers Matt Thorne and Toby Litt to pick their favourite books about love.

If you are in the terrifying position of being madly in love with your best friend, but too scared to confess to it, send them Joshua Spassky by Gwendoline Riley. It features a couple who are clearly made for each other, but they're both too cool and too insecure to make the first leap. Then you'll have to make the first leap. For a book to give your secret Valentine who is unaware of your all-consuming love for him or her, Matt suggests A Certain Smile by Francoise Sagan, the tale of a young woman bored of her lover who begins an affair with an older man; it’s witty, amoral and French. Also Vox by Nicholson Baker, a story of telephone sex, written almost entirely in dialogue -well, it worked for Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton. Matt’s all time favourite love story is that of Merteuil and Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which would be a great book to leave on your love-objects desk. Toby suggests John Donne’s poetical works or The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke for seducing your love, either as a gift, or for reading aloud by candle-light in a remote cottage on the coast; and if you want to impress your secret love, give them Ulysses by James Joyce, which Toby holds to be literature’s greatest love story.

Long-term lovers might need a reminder of the all-consuming passion of youth, and First Love by Ivan Turgenev captures that with knobs on. The young hero falls entrancingly in love with a beautiful guest who is politely uninterested in him. The truth behind her indifference sneaks up on the reader like your mum walking in on your first snog. Equally engrossing is The Go-Between by LP Hartley. Seldom has unqualified besottedness been better described; the ultimate loss of innocence is agonizing, but the atmosphere of heatwave-intensified lust and longing will take any jaded lovers back to the discovery of Love itself. For a dose of magic and fate to remind mature lovers of the role of destiny in their own narratives, Four Letters of Love by Niall Williams is one of the most enchanting tales ever to grace your bedside table. Full of lyrical descriptions of the colours of the sea, sky and rain painted by ex civil servant William, who throws his sensible job to the winds in order to capture God’s elements on canvas, this is a complex tale of converging fates that will rekindle the fires in many a long-term union.

If it is, frankly, lust rather than love, and you're a girl, send him In the Cut by Susanna Moore, in which we found one of the most erotic and charged couplings we’ve read about recently. But it has a deeply scary ending, so you'd need to communicate somehow that you're not suggesting things should end up as they do for the characters here (which is very, very badly for the heroine). Matt offers Letters of a Portuguese Nun, by Myriam Cyr (the true story of the first romantic bestseller), or Marry Me by John Updike (particularly if this an adulterous scenario).

If you are a sad or jilted Valentine, lonely and loveless on the 14th February, Toby suggests you curl up with Woody Allen’s Complete Prose to laugh your way out of lovesickness. Matt recommends Ex and the City: You’re Nobody Till Somebody Dumps You by Alexandra Heminsley,- a hilarious account of the numerous ways that Alexandra has been dumped, how she got over it, and the wisdom she can pass on to others on the rebound. He is also a fan of Gwendoline Riley, putting forward Cold Water (or indeed any novel by her) as an antidote to smug coupledom, in which slightly spiky women generally end up preferring to be alone than with men who don't live up to the dream.

Bibliotherapy consultations cost from £35. For information about giving bibliotherapy as a Valentine's gift click HERE. The Love Gift Box shown here costs £60. To view The School of Life's full range of bibliotherapy gift boxes click HERE.

Mark Vernon on some of the ideas about love we explore at The School of Life

Love is becoming one whilst remaining two. Love is action in freedom. You do not fall in love, you stand in love. Love is not found, it is made. Love is giving more than receiving. Love is union through knowledge. Love is the combination of cunning and desire in the search for what you lack. Love is creativity inspired by the presence of beauty. Love is selfish genes longing to spread. Love is the irrational striving of the will to live. Love is compassion. Love is the attempt to form friendship inspired by beauty. Love is the search for your lost half. Love begets love. Love doesn't run out. Love is blind. Love is mad. Love is short. Love means never having to say sorry. Love conquers all things. Love is the opposite of fear. Love is that which kills the thing it loves. Love is not gazing at each other but gazing in the same direction. Love is a strategy for manipulating another. Love when sentimental is pathological. To love is to rejoice. Melancholia is the loss of the capacity to love. To love is to take pleasure in. To love is to be happy that someone else exists. Love is care. Love is the rubbing of flesh and the excretion of slime. Love is timing. Love hurts.

The next Love course taught by Mark Vernon starts this Thursday at 18.30.

A weekend version taught by Roman Krznaric runs on 29 and 30 November.

For details and to book click here.

Image by Nan Goldin.

John Armstrong suggests the best books ever written on love

John Armstrong, author of The Conditions of Love and contributor to The School of Life's Love course, recommends his top ten books on love.

(The photo, by the way, is by Matt Stuart, The School of Life's photography expert.)

1. The Symposium by Plato. Discussion of same-sex love at an Athenian drinking party; perhaps the most entertaining work of philosophy ever written (although the competition has not been terribly intense). The first really systematic and serious attempt to say what love is, weighing up the relative merits of different points of view. Two big claims. One: love is based in weakness - we love because there is something missing in us, because we are incapable of being happy on our own. Two: love is the most important experience in life - we love what is good in the beloved, and through this learn to love goodness itself.

2. First Letter to the Corinthians by St Paul. Mixed in with bizarre pronouncements (many of them about women's hair) are some of the most profound and influential assertions about the nature of love. Love is essentially linked to kindness, forgiveness and modesty. Not a very romantic message.

3. The Sonnets by Shakespeare. Often quite confusing, but Shakespeare's Sonnets include some of the most touching expressions of love. Filled with lovely, melancholy reflections.

4. Roman Elegies by Goethe. Guilt-free holiday romance; intelligent erotic poetry.

5. Elective Affinities by Goethe. Probably the first analysis of sexual chemistry. We don't have rational control over who we love. Tells the tragic story of the perfect couple whose idyllic life is destroyed when each falls in love with someone else.

6. Love by Stendhal. Obsessive, but insightful, study of the process of falling in love. Wonderful mixture of self-pity, philosophy and anecdote. Stendhal's 'tone' is a high point of civilisation - witty, cultivated, confessional.

7. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. The most intelligent and perceptive romantic novel ever written. Contains amazingly lucid evocations of every stage of love. Superlative narrative treatment which holds everything together with complete naturalness.

8. Family Happiness by Leo Tolstoy. Brilliant study of the revival of love in a marriage grown stale over many years.

9. The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm. Love as the antidote to loneliness - but only if we get past our own romantic egotism and concentrate on caring for the other person. Wise and mildly depressing. Modern life feeds our selfish demands and therefore makes love harder to achieve, but all the more necessary.

10. Essays in Love by Alain de Botton. Charming analyses of the various phases of a relationship (from first sight to separation). The intellectual insights are so well digested and pleasantly expressed that one may fail to see just how serious they are. De Botton is currently the finest English prose stylist.