J Wells - Wide Open - The New Marriage

“Lately I’ve thought about my father’s main sexual ethic, though. I think it made more sense years ago, when pregnancy was not only more of a possibility but more of a disaster. Between the pill and legal abortion, pregnancy just doesn’t seem like a legitimate line for determining whether or not a girl is one you should sleep with.

“Sexual ethics interest me. A friend of mine was very pleased with himself when he made the decision that he would never ball a girl unless he wanted to go down on her. He felt that if he didn’t like her that much he had no business getting in bed with her. I can relate to that...

“My own sexual ethic is that I don’t really want to have sex with a girl unless I want to live with her. I’ve had enough one night stands and short-term affairs so that I’m honestly not interested in them anymore. That sounds phony as hell when you say it out loud, maybe because I used that line on girls before it happened to be the truth. I was very good in the bullshit department at one time. I did a Mr. Sincere number that could really make you puke.

“But now it happens to be true. I’m past thirty, and I want to get married and yet don’t want to get married, to the point where I’m very unclear as to just what it is that I do want out of life. I’m not a success, I’m just starting in private practice, but after all those years of no free time and not much money, I’m on level ground for a change. Unless I suddenly turn into someone who spends money hand over fist, I’ll never really have to worry about money for the rest of my life. That’s one of the most attractive things about being a doctor, you know. You don’t get rich, you can’t possibly accumulate real wealth, but you can be sure of making a decent living to the point where you don’t have to think about money. And I’d prefer to go through life without thinking about money. I’m more interested in two things — my work and my emotional life.

“Thank God I never got married. That’s such a fucking temptation. Marry a coed and let her work your way through med school for you. Marry a nurse, she’ll support you through your internship, and you’ll support her for the rest of your life. I’ve known guys who literally marry for that immediate money. I was never that broke, and I’m sure I’m constitutionally incapable of marrying someone for money anyway, but there are other pressures. Especially during an internship. You put in these incredible hours, like twelve or sixteen hours a day under intense pressure, and your shifts keep changing, and it gets impossible. You need something stable, you need a home, you need a woman you can get into whenever you happen to have the time and the strength to throw her a fuck. This is an enormous temptation, and there are tons of guys who swear they couldn’t have hacked the whole thing without a wife.

“Trouble is, the marriages usually go to hell. Doctors have the worst marriages of any vocational group in the country. They have a sky-high divorce rate, a high suicide rate, a high coronary rate. Believe me, it’s not that they work themselves to death. An established doctor can take it very damned easy, and plenty of them do. As far as I can tell, the ones who take it easy don’t do any better than the ones who lose themselves in their work.

“During all the early years of marriage they neglect their wives because they have to — their work has to be their whole life, their time isn’t their own, let alone their wives’. And they generally turn out to have married the wrong girls for the wrong reasons, and by the time they realize it, they’ve got kids, and... Christ, I don’t want to get started on this. I spent all last night drinking with a buddy who’s going through a marriage crisis, and I’m just playing back everything that came out of that conversation.

“Ultimately I want very much to get married. I don’t think it’ll be to Anne. I want to go on living with her for the time being, but I don’t think we’ve got the kind of thing going that could have any real future. In fact, I think she’s beginning to feel confined, and I’ve got a feeling she’ll want to split before the year is out.

“With the right girl, and at the right time, I want very much to get married. I want a wife, I want children. These things are very important to me.

“Very important. But I’m damned glad I decided to wait for them.”

JWW:Lewis, an earnest and evidently dedicated ophthalmologist, provides a good illustration of yet another facet of non-marital cohabitation. Ruth was careful not to live with anyone unless she felt close enough to him to marry him; Lewis, on the other hand, was interested only in sexual relations in a cohabitational context. It does not matter much to him if such a relationship has no future; indeed, although he is now on the verge of marriage (admittedly to a woman as yet unknown), one of his chief satisfactions is that the living arrangements he has had in the course of the past several years did not lead to marriage, and that he thus avoided what he regards as an enormous pitfall for a doctor, an early marriage.

Lewis’s history is not particularly relevant in the context of this book. Indeed, the several conversations we had were not formal interviews in any sense, and centered more upon certain physiological aspects of sexuality, on the sex lives of physicians in general, etc. (He believes that there is a particularly high incidence of impotence among members of the medical profession, and what I’ve read on the subject seems to bear him out.)

Some of Lewis’s experiences in living with sexual partners, and some of his views on that general subject, deserve inclusion here.

“Of the doctors I know, the ones who do the most chasing are the married ones. Not all of them, of course. But the majority of the guys who play grabass with the nurses are the ones who got married in med school or shortly afterward.

“I don’t think it’s just that their marriages are in bad shape, although I’m sure that’s a big part of it. I think it’s because they didn’t have that great a variety of sexual experience before they were married. It’s easy to say that hit-and-run sex is a drag, but it’s hard to be sure of it if you’ve never had your fair share of it. It’s a little difficult to get tired of something you never had.

“I’ve gotten to the point where I literally can’t imagine myself knocking off a quickie with a student nurse or pitching a stewardess in an East Side bar. I’ve done these things, and I remember them with a good deal of pleasure. But they’re not consistent with the sort of person I am today. I can’t even flirt with any real enthusiasm. There’s a constant sexual patter that you hear with any hospital staff, propositions and innuendos and all of that, and probably ninety percent of it is not serious at all. If a nurse doesn’t hear a dozen lewd remarks a day, she runs to a mirror to make sure her face is still there. It generally doesn’t mean anything more than a kind of sex-oriented camaraderie.

“I can’t even get very interested in that sort of scene anymore. I guess what it amounts to is that I’ve evolved into a wholly monogamous personality. I don’t want to fuck a girl unless I know her. Otherwise it’s masturbation. As a matter of fact, I prefer masturbation under such circumstances. It’s honest, it’s not exploitative, you don’t have to put on masks with each other.”

JWW:And, I say, you don’t have to look your best.

“That’s Boys in the Band , isn’t it? I never saw it, but I must have heard half the lines in it at one time or another... A friend of mine finds it as incomprehensible that I don’t want every stray piece that comes along as I do that he does . Each of us keeps telling the other that he’s going through a temporary phase. I’ve considered that possibility. Naturally, I prefer to think that my attitude represents maturity, but people always think that whenever they go through changes. It’s possible that once I go through the commitment of marriage I may find monogamy stifling. Right now I’m monogamous without having any formal commitment to it. That may make a difference. Maybe I find sexual relationships with just one girl satisfying because I know that I’m not going to spend the rest of my life with her, and maybe that would change after marriage. I can’t say one way or another until I go through the experience...