On the couch Sex and Ethics


When love dies… how much should we keep? By Girl on the Net


A


part from the occasional heartbreaking comment, I can’t remember the fights I


potentially alienating avalanche of options with the comforting notion of a point of fixity. Your spouse will have some idea of who you are, who you were, and who you want to be. Te downside of this is that one or both of you might feel overwhelmed by the very consistency of it. Marriage can be uncomfortably dense and sticky. Two unsettling portrayals of marriage


bracket the 20th century: Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Story (1923) and David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997). Each puts forward the idea of a spouse as someone radically unknowable. You might eat, sleep, watch TV and shop alongside them, but no amount of familiarity can close the chasm between you. You’re always necessarily married to a stranger, no matter how much they talk. And, as everybody knows, strangers are sexy (if also a bit frightening). Perhaps the thing that saves marriage is the


fact that it’s so weird. On the one hand it’s an airless chamber, on the other it’s a wide-open void. But maybe somewhere between too close and too distant, one can keep aiming at that sweet spot where one no longer feels alone.


had with my first boyfriend. Most of our discussion has long been lost to my fading memory. So when I search my email inbox, it’s a shock to occasionally stumble across powerful rows with more recent ex partners. With one glimpse I can instantly recall all the reasons why we broke up, the truth laid out precisely – with bullet points! Selfish. Cold. Jealous. I could spend the rest of my emotionally masochistic life beating myself up over every paragraph, reliving each point in great detail. The more optimistic among you will see the bright side: I can also relive the love. The pictures that he sent of one slender hand gripped tight around an aching erection, or stories he told me to turn me on when we were apart. Sometimes searching for the email address of an old mutual friend brings up his emails reminiscing about sexual adventures I thought I’d forgotten – suddenly so vivid that I can practically smell the lube and the sweat. When we think about ex-partners and the digital world, we usually focus on the visual: worrying whether it’s okay to keep nude photographs or video. More difficult is the issue of what to do with the rest – our old arguments and digital pillow-talk can be just as rich in memories, and the medium lends itself to a more painful type of nostalgia than that we had 30 years ago. Love letters take time and attention,


so they tell a flattering story: one in which we’re the heroes and heroines of a passionate romance. High frequency, low-effort emails are different. If my ex asked me to choose between publishing my email correspondence with him, or an explicit video of me giving him a blow job, I would choose the latter, and be grateful I’d got off so lightly.


Given the intimacy, then, why


shouldn’t emails fall under the same rules as photos? Wiped if your ex asks you to, leaving only hazy memories and comforting lies? But that feels wrong – ‘delete all my emails’ is an unreasonable request, with which it would be unforgivably rash to comply.


Sometimes searching for the email address of an old mutual friend brings up emails reminiscing about sexual adventures I’d forgotten – suddenly so vivid that I can smell the lube and the sweat


Painful though the memories are,


they’re also valuable – to learn from, laugh at, or relive. And if we know they’re valuable in the long term then the problem with digital ephemera isn’t that it exists but that it is so immediate. So accurate. So easily searchable. You can stop yourself trawling your ex’s Facebook page only to be ambushed later when an email search brings up the subject line ‘Couldn’t sleep last night so I had to write this.’ Happily I think this is one ethical question where the answer is as good for you as it is for your ex: put things away.


Give yourself time and space until you’re ready to address them. On a practical


level, most email programs will let you tag and archive, or download and place in a folder marked with your ex’s name. There’s no moral imperative to delete your online relationship, as you wouldn’t be compelled to forget your ex’s bad behaviour in person. But you can banish the worst excesses to a folder earmarked ‘not yet’. The online equivalent of a box under the bed; filled with things you’d like to remember one day, but for now you need to forget.


The Amorist May 2017 19


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