"In that continuity of emotions we see throughout history, passion waxes ever greater in the presence of the real or imagined antagonism of others from whom love must be kept secret. Secrecy propels the twosome into a hothouse, marking them with a sense of criminality, whether self-imposed or imposed by their policing watchers — who may be real, imagined or internalized. Indeed, triangles in whatever configuration can both invent and augment passion. Coded signals that secret lovers engage in, covert glances, freighted double meanings — all add a frisson to passion. Adulteries flourish because they exist in an endangered space dedicated solely to passion, from which the rest of the pressing world is barred. Once secrecy is removed, passion often wanes.
"Within the marriage, the adulterous partner's secrecy creates greater and greater distance between the couple. The safe terrain for talk — in which slips about the secret lover won't emerge — grows ever more restricted, until children and the weather are all that is left to the spouses. While the temperature rises in the hothouse of secret passion, it cools markedly, even if unintentionally, in the home.
Even in our permissive times, adulteries are generally carried on in secret; the secrecy is often one of the conditions of their rapture and also of their eventual rupture. A romantic sensualist, Madame Bovary carries the secrecy through to her doomed end. Anna, a woman of greater moral heft, cannot live with the lie for long and braves convention. But once that secrecy is divulged and the doors of the secret room opened to other social relations, love quickly changes.
"What makes secrecy so potent a stimulant to passion? The answer may lie in the fact that love and sex, both before and after we have experienced any couplings, are such active components of our secret fantasy lives. Indeed, the very whiff of the whole murky terrain of sex amongst adults can establish a space of secrecy, a closed door, within a child. Henry James's precocious Maisie in What Maisie Knew closes a door within herself on the couplings of the adulterous adults around her so that she can maintain her innocence, while still intuiting the 'corrupt' facts of life and letting them rumble on within her. This kind of inner splitting can easily persist into later life, establishing secrecy and the forbidden as the prerequisites for sexual passion. Sometimes this may entail secrecy from oneself. Like sleeping beauties, women, even today, often enough need to be awakened into desire, taking their stimulus from the desire of the other and attributing it to that other person. Meanwhile, both men and women accompany sex acts with their legitimate partners to the secret unfurling of fantasies — those third parties who may make the act itself more pleasurable or possible.
"Secrecy is, of course, also about keeping others out, establishing a guarded perimeter. First of all against the spouse, ever a key player in illicit loves. Without that dangerous third presence to provide a sense of imminent danger and permanent rivalry, the heat of the adulterous passion can fizzle out. Indeed, the sense of the other at the gate is essential. Only in its shadow can the lovers literally be 'out of control', beyond the regulation that governs marriage. Secrecy itself acts as a transgressive liberation. Yet the hovering of the other at the perimeter also provokes a host of attendant hostile emotions and ambivalences. Jealousy, envy, greed and grief stalk the worlds of secret adulterous lovers and of those against whom they guard themselves."
