What people want to know, whether
they ask it directly or not, is how I fell in love with Stuart and married him,
then fell in love with Oliver and married him, all within as short a space as
is legally possible. Well the answer is
I did just that I did just that. I don’t
especially recommend you try it, but I promise it’s possible. Emotionally as well as legally.
I genuinely loved Stuart. I fell in love with him straightforwardly,
simply. We got on, the sex worked, I
loved the fact he loved me—and that was it.
And then, after we were married, I fell in love with Oliver, not simply
at all, but very complicatedly, entirely against my instincts and my
reason. I refused it, I resisted it, I
felt intensely guilty. I also felt
intensely excited, intensely alive, intensely sexy. No, as a matter of fact we didn’t ‘have an
affair,’ as the saying goes. Just
because I’m half French people start muttering ménage à trois. It wasn’t remotely like that. It felt much more primitive for a start. And besides, Oliver and I didn’t sleep with
one another until Stuart and I had separated.
Why are people such experts on what they don’t know about?
The point is you can love two people,
one after the other, one interrupting the other, like I did. You can love them in different ways. And it doesn’t mean one love is true and the
other is false. That’s what I wish I
could have convinced Stuart. I loved each
of them truly. You don’t believe
me? Well, it doesn’t matter, I no longer
argue the case. I just say: it didn’t
happen to you , did it? It happened to
me.
And looking back, I’m surprised it
doesn’t happen more often. Long
afterwards my mother said, apropos of some other emotional situation, I can’t
remember, some twosome or threesome, she said ‘The heart has been made tender,
and that is dangerous.’ I could see what
she meant. Being in love makes you
liable to fall in love. Isn’t that a
terrible paradox? Isn’t that a terrible
truth? (Barnes 15-17).
No comments:
Post a Comment