Emotional Fidelity, Part I

Recently, I wrote a post about sexual fidelity. It wasn’t all that hard to do. I played off of author Andrew Greeley’s well-polished incredulity that “fidelity” was the only virtue defined entirely by what you did not do. So far, so good. Greeley followed up with some ideas about what sexual fidelity could mean in a positive sense—actions you are committed to taking, not actions you are committed to not taking--and gave a breathless chapter or two on what such a relationship would look like.

I drafted comfortably behind Greeley in his rejection of the negative standard and his notion that sexual fidelity mostly meant putting your mind and your heart, not just your plumbing, into the project. So I liked that too.

But then I got to thinking. Don’t you just hate it when that happens?

And then, to make matters worse, some people who read the blog asked me to push the relatively easy case for sexual fidelity over into some aspects of marriage that involve “fidelity” just as much, but that are harder to think about. I’m choosing “emotional fidelity.”
What is emotional fidelity? Greeley said that sexual fidelity is not doing, outside the marriage, anything that will damage the husband’s and wife’s sexual intimacy with each other, and doing, within the marriage, whatever it takes for the sexual relationship to be robust and mutually satisfying. [Footnote one] When you look at “sexuality” as “that element in a host of social relationships that bears on sex,” you see instantly that it is a complex web.

Emotional fidelity is a good deal more complicated, but I think it follows the same contours. One of the best movies I ever saw about this phenomenon is the 1984 “Falling in Love.” This sense of starving the relationship—this happened in two couples at the same time—was not something that occurred to me in retrospect. I experienced it while I was watching the movie.
Streep and DeNiro are drawn slowly toward each other, although each of them thinks it is a bad idea. There are two reasons for this outcome. One is that each has a “friend” who is pushing this match, more for their own entertainment than out of any genuine concern. The man and the woman do encounter each other casually during a commute to “the City,” as they say in Connecticut, but nothing would have come of it without the pushing of the friends. That’s one reason. The other is that there is nothing at all going on in either marriage. I’ve lost track of who the other partners are, but Streep, in her marriage, and DeNiro in his marriage, and not seeking the intimacy that will make the relationship whole and strong. They are resting on their oars while the boat drifts over the falls. Here they are meeting on the train. I really do wish you could hear Dave Grusin’s music in the background.

In the next essay, I am going to call that emotional infidelity because the partners do not seek the emotional intensity they should seek—the “not too much, not too little” level--with their mates. In this essay, I want to call it emotional infidelity for another reason. Each seeks emotional comfort outside the marriage rather than inside.

In this case, neither Streep nor DeNiro is finding in the marriage enough intensity to make the meter tick over at all. But let’s imagine it another way. Let’s say that Streep’s need for emotional intimacy is very great and DeNiro’s is not. In a situation like that, what would the standard I am developing for “emotional fidelity” imply? It seems to me that it is Streep’s job to do whatever she can outside the marriage to reduce her intensity needs to levels that her husband can accommodate. It seems to me that DeNiro’s job is to do whatever he can outside the marriage to make him ready both to want more intimacy with his wife. [Footnote two]

I’m not saying what, outside their marriage, would have those two highly desirable effects. For one thing, anything I think of could be turned into a horror story and I don’t want to be responsible for that story. For another, “what would do that” for Streep and for DeNiro is impossibly varied. If collegiality among his fellow workers sharpens his appetite for emotional intimacy with his wife, fine. Fine, especially, if he knows about that effect and does it, in part, for that reason. If exacting pursuit of an art project burns Streep’s intimacy needs down to a level where she can share them with her husband, rather than inundating him with them, fine. Especially if she does that with the knowledge that reduced level it is a gift to her husband as well.

So as dicey as this proposition is, the outlines are simple. Deal with your appetite for emotional intimacy, in your life outside the marriage, in a way that will give you a better chance to share emotional intimacy with your partner inside the marriage. I am hoping that the simple good sense of that will carry the day.

On the other hand, I’m not naïve. I know that it is much easier to blame your partner for not being “what you need” than it is to work at needing what your partner has to give. First, blaming is easier than doing anything about it; but beside that, it is true that you the “too muchness” or the “too littleness” of your partner in the marriage and at the time. It is pretty sophisticated to say, while you are experiencing the conflict at home, “Oh dear, this is not good. I’m sure he (I flipped a coin to see which sex was going to be the example) is doing the best he can right now, but he has not been able to nurture at work, the feelings that would be expressed here at home as a desire for emotional intimacy with me.” This would have to be something she said to herself; saying out loud would be like kicking him where it would really really hurt.

On the other hand, what I am calling emotional fidelity really can be affected positively by planning for your time with your mate and using the time away from him (still using the same example) to help you bring home an emotional appetite that will be a gift and not a demand. And it really cannot be affected by blaming your partner for not having the same kind of emotional needs you have.

So if there is an outside facet to emotional fidelity, it is this: doing, outside the marriage, the things that will support the most rewarding and satisfying sharing of emotional intensity within the marriage. Not doing that is infidelity. Not caring enough to do it is infidelity. Not knowing how to do it, is just work to be done, but refusing to take the trouble to learn what will work—I think that’s emotional infidelity, too.

[Footnote one] I should remember to add, every time I write one of these, that I know these questions come up in relationships that are not marriages. I am presuming marriages when I write these because I am more interested in these issues as they appear in marriages.
[Footnote two] It might be worthwhile to point out here that it is not at all uncommon for the husband to need more emotional intimacy and to be better at giving and receiving it than his wife is. But it is wearisome always to be making both cases when I am arguing that the contours are symmetrical, and the relationship in which the wife wants more intimacy than her husband is more common. At least, it is more commonly written about.
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