When I first met Klara at a social gathering and struck up a brief but intense conversation with her after which she asked me for my business card, I did not know she would really call my office. Married, 2 children, a dog, a career in a first tier law-firm, she appeared to have her life all figured out.
She told me right off the bat she was in a marital crisis after 12 years of marriage. A self-induced, intrapsychic crisis, extremely painful nonetheless. She had fallen in love with a colleague at her office, nothing had happened yet, but all the signs were there. One day they were working on a case together, she lifted her gaze from the document they were examining and met his, and she knew. An undeniable, mutual attraction, that old feeling, like an electric wave going through her body and obfuscating her mind.
”I don’t know what to do”, she concluded. ”The last thing I want is to hurt my family for what could be just a passing infatuation and I can’t lie to my husband. The only way out would be to talk to him about opening up our marriage to other relationships”.
Klara was alluding to the concept of ”Open marriage”, where two committed partners give each other permission to have sexual and emotional experiences outside of their relationship.
A book by the revealing title “More”, a memoir of open marriage, came out 2 months ago becoming an immediate hit in Brooklyn, especially, where the protagonists live, and all over town. The author, Molly Roden Winter, is Klara, fast-forwarding a few years. She and her husband Stewart have made the fantasy of the open marriage a reality for about a decade, it’s a diary, written with candor and precision, of how it worked out for them.
The need for an alternative to the old model of monogamous marriage felt by many couples these days seems evident from the splash this publication has made. The crucial question is: If we have a reasonably happy relationship, why do we want more? Believe it or not, everything happens in the brain, not the heart!
Studies on the ethereal subject of love done at the Harvard School of Medicine ( Richard Schwartz and Jacqueline Olds)show in neuro/imaging ( fMRI) what parts of the brain” light up” when you are in love. Dr Fred Nair, neurologist in Mission Viejo, Ca, author of the book ”True love: how to use science to understand Love”, also underscores the biochemical matrix of falling in love.
“Love, nature greatest high is all about the chemicals in your brain — a potent mix set up by nature to get you to procreate, give birth to a healthy child”
Testosterone and estrogen drive lust; dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin create attraction; and oxytocin and vasopressin mediate attachment. Unfortunately these endogenous ”drugs” have an expiration date, 2/3 years, after which ”passionate love” turns, in the best hypothesis, into ”compassionate love”, a quiet, less exciting affection between two partners with compatible personality traits. At this stage, the desire to reactivate the” feel good” chemicals of the beginning phase and start anew with a different partner may erupt.
Is open marriage the way to go ? This poses not only moral but practical questions, as Molly Roden Winter confesses in her memoir, such as facing explicit questions by your adolescent son” Mom, are you sleeping with other men?”.
Dr. Nair prospects an alternative, more optimistic scenario: two people who have once been in a passionate love relationship that morphed into a compassionate partnership can rekindle desire through memories of their past love. Falling in love at the beginning is always the pre -requisite. So ….forget about biochemistry, neuro-imaging and all that dry scientific stuff and continue to fall in love the old romantic way, monogamous or open relationship: your choice.
