Affairs are delicious, and doubtless, once in a while, they are not altogether out of order, particularly in the unimaginative, dismal marriages that seem to be the statistical rule in our rather grim and loveless world. On the other hand, to put my cards on the table. I am rather stick-in-the-muddish, and am sold on the institution of marriage, as it might be if not as it is. This does not mean, of course, that I am opposed to having affairs. I am highly in favor of it. I am particularly in favor of having them with one’s wife, but real affairs, not pretend affairs.

Later in this book I will explain the strategy of having an affair with one’s wife.

Indeed, later in this book, I will describe and detail a remarkable variety of delicious love games and love episodes which a husband and wife might not only share, but which, ideally in my opinion, are to be shared by a husband and wife. Other lovers are possibilities, particularly if both are unmarried, but the husband-and-wife relationship, the partnership of long standing, the durable and mutually respecting and understanding relationship, supplies, it seems, a desirable framework for these remarkable exploitations of human sexual capacity.

This is so particularly because most of these games require authentic affection and trust. One could not so reveal and trust oneself to a stranger. (Many of these games, of course, require each partner to think of the other as a stranger, to whom he, or she, is forced to reveal himself, or herself, whom he, or she, is forced, perhaps mistakenly, to trust.)

I have said that affection is needful. That is true. For these games, however, love is not needful. Rather it is one of the consequences of these games and episodes. These games can produce not simply pleasure, but love between a man and a woman. They twine together their bodies and minds and imaginations in so fantastically subtle and intimate a modality that trust, interdependence and full love is an almost inevitable result. Many people, of course, fear love, doubtless rightly, for love is a vast, tender, profound, binding instinct, which makes great differences in those lives it floods. The human being is both a single organism and a double organism. The human being consists either of a man or a woman, or the two in love. It is natural for the single organism in each of us to fight for its independence, its freedom to be self-seeking and selfish, and self-striving. But it is natural, too, for the single organism to desire its completion in the mated pair. The matter can be argued subtly but those who have been touched by love, usually briefly, have no doubt as to its superiority. Love, once tasted, is in no danger of ever again being regarded as inferior to egotism. Those who have tried both, and we have all tried the latter, would, were it possible, choose the former.