Fidelity Is a Promise, Exclusivity a Fence

Desire feeds on uncertainty, a relationship promises security, and we spend our lives trying to reconcile the two. An interview with Amélie Nothomb handed me a key I had never thought to look for: fidelity and exclusivity are not the same thing.

The Taboo of Vertigo

There is a conviction I have carried for a long time and never quite dared to put in writing. Up to a point, women are drawn to the emotional instability a man stirs up in them. Love, grief, anger, passion: it is in that constant swing between them that they feel alive. And that particular taboo is one they will never admit.

I know the objection that is coming, and it deserves a full hearing. This inclination is probably not a female trait. It is a human one. How many men have walked away from a gentle, steady woman to chase the one who answers one text out of three? If women confess it less readily, perhaps it is because they were taught to distrust that desire, while men were taught to dress it up as a taste for conquest. The taboo does not belong to one sex. It belongs to our species.

What the Thrill Does to the Heart

In 1974, two psychologists, Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron, ran an experiment that has since become famous, on the Capilano Suspension Bridge in Vancouver. A young woman approached men either on that swaying walkway high above the gorge or on a low, sturdy bridge. The men who had just crossed the wobbly one were far more likely to call her afterward. Their hearts were racing from fear; they thought they were racing for her.

The body cannot always tell an emotion apart from its cause. It registers intensity, and the mind goes looking for a face to pin it on. Add to that what behavioral scientists have long observed: an unpredictable reward creates a far stronger attachment than a guaranteed one. That is the principle behind the slot machine. More often than we care to admit, it is also the principle behind passion.

Denis de Rougemont said as much long before the laboratories did, in Love in the Western World: passion lives on obstacles. Tristan and Isolde never love each other so fiercely as when everything keeps them apart. Give them a house in the suburbs, a mortgage, and Sunday dinners with the in-laws, and the legend dies.

But we have to look squarely at the other side of the coin. This same mechanism is what keeps people trapped in relationships that destroy them. The swing between tenderness and coldness, between promise and injury, forges chains that we mistake for love. Everything, then, hinges on three small words: up to a point. Vertigo makes us feel alive. The fall kills. Anyone who confuses intensity with mistreatment has understood neither.

The Paradox of the Couple

Here, then, is the trap almost all of us fall into. A relationship promises security, and desire demands uncertainty. The psychotherapist Esther Perel has built an entire body of work around this contradiction: we ask the same person to be both our safe harbor and our horizon, our refuge and our adventure.

So we lock things down. We shut the doors, take inventory, and demand guarantees. Exclusivity becomes an insurance policy against the unexpected. And then we are surprised when desire withers in a room whose windows we boarded up ourselves.

I have written elsewhere about why our relationships no longer last as long as our parents’ did: the walls that once held couples together have come down. But we have built new ones in their place, more intimate and more suffocating, at the very heart of the relationship.

What Amélie Nothomb Taught Me

I recently came across an interview with Amélie Nothomb, the Belgian novelist. In it, she describes herself as deeply faithful, yet not particularly exclusive. To her, love is not the enemy of independence; in fact, it fares all the better when independence has been preserved. One can have a soulmate and, alongside that, live other loves. Anything can exist, she says in essence, so long as everyone agrees, everyone is honest, and everyone remains respectful.

I have been through my share of relationships, and I have to admit it: I had never separated those two words. For me, as for nearly everyone, fidelity was exclusivity. One was measured by the other. Cheating meant looking elsewhere, and staying faithful meant not looking. Period.

That simple distinction stopped me in my tracks.

Fides and Excludere

A glance at any etymological dictionary shows how wide the gap really is. Fidelity comes from the Latin fides: faith, trust, a word given. Exclusivity comes from excludere: to shut out. One speaks of a bond, the other of a perimeter. One looks toward the person; the other looks toward everyone else.

Once you see that, everything falls into a new order. One can be exclusive and profoundly unfaithful: lying, belittling, abandoning the other without ever leaving the marriage bed. One can also, at least in theory, love elsewhere without betraying anything, provided the truth has been spoken and accepted. Betrayal does not lie in the act. It lies in the lie.

Sartre and Beauvoir formalized something close to this: a necessary love, their own, and contingent loves, all under a pact of transparency. History has shown that the pact was not without its shadows, and that those who orbited the couple sometimes paid the price. But the intuition holds: one can be bound to another person by loyalty rather than by enclosure.

The Conditions, or Nothing

I do not claim this model suits everyone, or even that it suits me. Jealousy is real; it is not a weakness to be stamped out with theory, and many people could never bear to share. They are not wrong. The three conditions Amélie Nothomb lays down are not pleasantries. They are ramparts. Agreement, without which there is only duplicity. Honesty, without which there is only cowardice. Respect, without which there is only use.

What moves me in this line of thought is less the sexual freedom it permits than the idea of attachment it presupposes: a bond that rests not on prohibition but on a choice renewed. I once wrote that I don’t miss anyone, and yet I care deeply about people: a relationship you force will eventually suffocate. One you allow to breathe at least has a chance to last.

The Last Word

Perhaps the instability that makes us feel alive is not to be found in the pain we inflict, or in the silences we calculate. Perhaps it lies simply in the freedom we allow.

To love someone who could leave, and who stays.

That is the only vertigo that wounds no one.