Therapy

folly. It didn’t work. He never ceased to love her, or think of her, or write about her (directly or indirectly) for the rest of his life; and he left everything he owned to her in his will (there wasn’t much left when he died, but it’s the thought that counts, and in this case reveals). What a fool! But what an endearing, entirely human fool.
    Repetition is a typically teasing, haunting Kierkegaard title. We normally think of repetition as inherently boring, something to be avoided if possible, as in “repetitive job”. But in this book it’s seen as something fantastically precious and desirable. One meaning of it is the restoration of what seems to be lost (e.g. Job’s prosperity, the young man’s faith in himself). But another sense is the enjoyment of what you have. It’s the same as living-in-the-present, “it has the blessed certainty of the instant.” It means being set free from the curse of unhappy hoping and unhappy remembering. “Hope is a charming maiden that slips through the fingers, recollection is a beautiful old woman but of no use at the instant, repetition is a beloved wife of whom one never tires.”
     
    It occurs to me that you could turn that last metaphor around: not repetition is a beloved wife, but a beloved wife (or beloved husband) is repetition. To appreciate the real value of marriage you have to discard the superficial idea of repetition as something boring and negative, and see it as, on the contrary, something liberating and positive — the secret of happiness, no less. That’s why B, in Either/Or, begins his attack on A’s aesthetic philosophy of life (and the melancholia which goes with it) by defending marriage, and urging A to marry. (This is getting quite exciting: I haven’t thought as hard as this for years, if ever.)
    Take sex, for instance. Married sex is the repetition of an act. The element of repetition outweighs any variation there may be between one occasion and another. However many postures you experiment with, however many erotic techniques and sex-toys and games and visual aids you might employ, the fact that you have the same partner means that every act is essentially (or do I mean existentially?) the same. And if our experience is anything to go by (mine and Sally’s, I mean) most couples eventually settle on a certain pattern of love-making which suits them both, and repeat it over and over. How many sex acts are there in a long-lasting marriage? Thousands. Some will be more satisfying than others, but does anybody remember them all distinctly? No, they merge and blend in the memory. That’s why philanderers like Jake think married sex is inherently boring. They insist upon variety in sex, and after a while the means of obtaining variety become more important than the act itself. For them the essence of sex is in the anticipation, the plotting, the planning, the desiring, the wooing, the secrecy, the deceptions, the assignations. You don’t make assignations with your spouse. There’s no need. Sex is just there, to enjoy when you want it; and if your partner doesn’t feel like it for some reason, because they’re tired or have a cold or want to stop up and watch something on the telly, well, that’s no big deal, because there will be plenty of other opportunities. What’s so wonderful about married sex (and especially middle-aged, post-menopausal sex, when the birth-control business is over and done with) is that you don’t have to be thinking about it all the time. I suspect that Jake is thinking about it even while he’s phoning clients and drawing up contracts; probably the only time he isn’t thinking about sex is when he’s actually having it (because orgasm is a kind of slipped second, it empties the mind of thought for an instant) but I bet as soon as he comes he’s thinking about it again.
    What applies to sex applies to everything else in marriage: work, recreation, meals, whatever. It’s all repetition. The longer you live together, the less you change, and the more repetition there is in daily life. You know each other’s minds, thoughts, habits: who sleeps on which side of the bed, who gets up first in the morning, who takes coffee and who takes tea at breakfast, who likes to read the news section of the paper first and who the review section, and so on. You need to speak to each other less and less. To an outsider it looks like boredom and alienation. It’s a commonplace that you can always tell which couples in a