I hate Margot

[deleted]

Hey, I'm not trying to crawl backward to a state where women -- or men (I don't know why we're being specific as to gender here) -- don't "own their sexual experience." I'm just saying, ownership also implies the ability to give it to somebody else, which is essentially what you're doing, at least in a partial way, when you take vows of fidelity. You're not exploring your sexuality with anybody else. It's all for this one individual person. In a larger context, it's a way of saying individuality and personhood matter. If all I need is to get from A to B, I get a car, which is a thing, not a person, to do it. If this one won't do, another one will. Ten other ones. Ten thousand other ones. But if we're talking about a person, and a commitment for life, it's a statement that "only you will do." Limiting your sexual activity to that one person for life isn't a matter of not owning your sexuality, and betraying that person and breaking the vow to have an affair is not a noble expression of that ownership. (I know you're not saying it is.)

Anyway...you're right, as usual, about what a little clarity and up-frontness might've done, how it might've changed things. You would think this school-of-coyness thing would've died out some time ago, but it hasn't. I don't think that's necessarily all bad. I think there's a tendency for a decent person to feel a little selfish about saying "hey, I'm feeling a little neglected over here." It feels a little wrong, but if you look at it as a kind of contract, obviously it's not. You got into the deal because you thought the other person was interested in you that way, as you're interested in him or her. It matters when somebody changes the terms. You have to be reasonable about expectations, but when it dwindles to near nothing -- when you can see Michelle Frickin' Johnson walking into the shower in front of you, and you just keep flossing -- I mean...come on. Being reasonable cuts both ways. And I don't even think it takes an "ideal world" for that to happen. Just a sensible one with real adults, to whom their marriage means enough to do it. That's part of the damned tragedy of this story. I actually think the tragedy is exactly what happens in so many actual affairs: Things go wrong. Maybe they just go dead, complacent, whatever. Neither person knows what to do. They make halting efforts to do something or to figure out a way to get where they want to be. They're not direct and explicit. They hint and fumble. They honestly don't know what they're doing and don't know what to do. One of them ends up puzzled, the other one ends up in somebody else's bed, and that is the absolute end of whatever they had before. It's just awful.

It wasn't investigated too deeply or closely, but that's an aspect to consider: that Margot, that steamy summer, was embarking on this discovery of her own desires. She may have felt a longing for something beyond tickling and baby talk and comfortable steady love from her husband.

Well...yes, but that (and the rest of the graf) sound a little too detached, in a way, from any concerns about right and wrong. It's possible that if my wife has a couple of bad months at work and is a real pain at home, maybe I need to explore something, and a young-and-attractive little thang comes along just when I need her, and we explore. But it's more than that kind of clinical, nonjudgmental, casual sort of description, isn't it? (I actually doubt you mean it that way, judging by everything else you've posted.)

As for calling your reaction to the extended scene between Daniel and Margot (et al) "harsh" or overreactive, I don't think so. Not unless you're talking about what somebody like Margot might've been perceiving at the time. It's true that a person like Margot probably wouldn't be experiencing it as "empty" at the time. And it's not like Polley filmed that chain of images in a concrete garage, with trash blowing all around and tragic music playing. It seems like a pleasant enough environment (although I did think it was sterile and bad-'80s-movie-ish compared to the home with Lou), and maybe somebody like Margot experiences it as "exploration," or whatever. But every moment of it is a knife into Lou and their life together.

However, it is important, I think, that she sees it as positive or pleasurable at the time, even if she's conflicted about that, because that would be more true-to-life for two primary reasons I can think of:

1. Of course it would be "pleasurable" at first, especially if "pleasure" divorced from everything else in your life is what you're after. You can get that, alright. There's an analogy here to something like drug use. People who tell their kids that drugs are horrible right from the get-go, that you'll mess yourself up the first time you do anything, are doing their kids a real disservice. We've always put it this way to our kids: If you get involved, you're going to find that at first, it's not only not bad, it's absolutely wonderful. It might be the best feeling you've ever had in your life. If we tell you otherwise, and then you go find out it feels great, you're going to stop listening. So yeah, it's stunningly great, at first. For most people, it's only over time that problems develop, your health suffers, some people are debilitated, some people die, lots of people commit crimes so they can afford whatever drug they're on, etc. So now you're a thief, an addict, and probably a liar. If you're in a relationship or married, the money and time and effort that would've gone there start getting eaten up by trying to repeat those early days of absolute bliss, that great feeling. So really, your problem isn't "drugs." It's your need to seek a feeling to the exclusion of all other concerns. It's your decision to start down a road that isn't so bad now but probably won't end well, or in other words, your preference for the short term over the long run. The drug is just the medium, or the mechanism.

The parallels are obvious. People generally don't get sexually interested in somebody else and then fall into bed with that person because it feels bad. Of course it doesn't, at first. Detached from all other concerns, isolated from the rest of your life, including your history and your future, and everybody else in it, hey, it's a fun ride. Of course, one thing you'd have to ask yourself is why you're operating on a simple pleasure/pain principle, why pleasurable consciousness-altering seems to be your highest value even if it destroys everything else in your life. There's something very unevolved and lower-organism about it. And, just as with substance addiction, at some point you have to think whether you "own your sexuality," or whether it owns you in a really destructive way. (I'm talking about either gender here.)

2. Ambiguity and conflict tend to get pushed out of the way when a decision gets made, and for at least some time thereafter, all evidence tends to get read in favor of the decision. This is why polls of soldiers' families about the rightness of a particular war always end up overwhelmingly in favor, because what's the alternative? That their sons and daughters, and husbands and wives, are going off to fight a war for oil, or political advantage, or whatever? The position of "definitely justified, definitely right" is a statement of how much they love their family members and how they don't want them to be involved in a meaningless effort, not an objective statement of the actual rightness of the war.

Here, it has to do with Margot's decision. She's jumped. That's it. She has a stake in considering it "right," at least in the short term. For some time thereafter, she's trying to make a go of it. That's what actual human beings do. If she'd thought it was the wrong thing to do at that time, she wouldn't have done it. So she sees it as "good" for a while.

And just for what it's worth: I'd say the same thing about how people act not just when leaping into an affair, but also after a decision to marry and after an actual marriage, too. Maybe even Margot-and-Lou's marriage. Once they find themselves wanting to move toward and then into marriage, couples tend to lose objectivity and judgment. Sometimes that's because of love or some other positive thing; sometimes it's resignation or some kind of learned helplessness. But either way, any evidence to the contrary that would suggest it's the wrong thing to do is just ignored or bypassed, or altered.

In fact, I'd say that deciding to marry (or actually taking the vows) OR taking the leap into an affair is frequently (I'd say most of the time) like entering into a temporary kind of insanity, or fantasy, or insane fantasy, which may or may not work out or seem right in the long run -- if so, it's almost completely a stroke of luck, given the circumstances in which that decision is made and acted on -- but in the short term all evidence is read in favor of the decision that's already been made. There's probably some kind of primal survival advantage in that tendency, in terms of evolutionary biology; but then, I don't think we necessarily ought to be ruled by what's "natural" in that sense. Otherwise, we'd be lopping off the heads of neighbors for food and sex with the surviving significant other, and other such ugliness and incivility.

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