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“It did nothing of the sort, of course, and ended in rancour
such as I have never known in any other relationship. “I wanted relationships with human beings beyond the sexual-social
(I always hated casual sex, but usually had brief liaisons with tourists
or academics on short postings, regular ‘cinq a septs’ with
married women returning from work, stolen weekends away, the occasional
pied a terre relationship with someone living hundreds of miles away – ‘romances’,
I suppose), but as soon as there was affection, these fluttered tentatively
but insistently about possession and enduring rights of ownership. “It wasn’t just the women in question who claimed such
rights. I too expected fidelity and dreamed of an assurance which
no human being of her nature could give – that she would be
true as steel, immortal as adamantine rock, loving through inconceivable
thick and imponderable thin.
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I too hoped to build a life upon the foundations of a variable,
fallible, susceptible, mortal woman. I shared the impossible dream
and signed up to the unconscionable contract.“So my marriage
bust up, and I was left with what? I still wanted adventure and
romance and sex, but I did not want to hurt people needlessly.
The normal wine-bar charade/parade of preening and lies was just
a recipe for pain. One of us was always looking for something subtly
different from the other. Even when I came out openly with, ‘I’m
looking for sex and fun with a good friend’, she would agree,
and mean it, but one of us would be lying. “Well, in the end, I found my own way, though it meant sacrificing
a certain number of dreams and illusions, but now I have loads
of friends and quite a few lovers and can concentrate on all the
things which really matter. Above all, I learned that I could not
let convention or the expectations of others ordain my course…”
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