The Grass is Greener and I Suppose It’s Always Complicated

I’m hoping that if I force myself to write about some of the movies I have been watching of late it will get me back in work mode. Here’s to hoping.

I recently watched both It’s Complicated, recently released with Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin, and The Grass is Greener, an old movie starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. Both dealt with marriage, infidelity, and divorce and it was only quite by accident that I watched them both in the same day. It made for a really interesting experience, however; The Grass is Greener is designed to be a comedy and the whole situation of marriage, adultery, and wedding vows is treated humorously and (dare I say it?) lightheartedly. Oh, as a viewer you know that these are serious issues, but Cary Grant isn’t nearly as distraught in this film as he is in, say, An Affair to Remember (best chick flick ever). It’s Complicated, however, endeavors to show, much more realistically I might argue, the realities of adultery.

I think the reason both got me to thinking was because in Grass Cary Grant gives a very good speech about how marriage is “for better or for worse” and that one spouse shouldn’t simply walk away from the other one when they reach the “for worse” part of marriage. It’s a good speech; I won’t argue that. But contrary to Mr. Grant’s very charming rhetoric, I think adultery is sometimes a good reason not to be someone. It just doesn’t seem very sporting (I’ve been watching a lot of Cary Grant lately so if my syntax seems British just go with it) to sit around an empty house and wait for your cheating spouse to come home and, hopefully, love you again. That’s not cricket.

On the other hand, if you’ve got ten or twenty or thirty years of marriage under your belt and a few kids to boot one little affair (or two or three) might not seem worth calling the whole thing off. I suppose it’s dependent upon how necessary trust is for the particular two people involved and how that trust is defined. Maybe, if you’re Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, you don’t worry about fidelity, but you trust that said adulterous spouse will always come home at the end of the day.

But if you require fidelity from your spouse are you a failure if adultery makes you demand divorce? And there are levels of adultery right? First base--worth getting angry and a mild cold shoulder. Some second or third base action--definitely within rights to throw something at someone’s head. Homerun--all bets are off. And how many times has it happened? What were the circumstances surrounding it?

And there is the other question both films play with: if your spouse cheats first are you allowed to cheat back? Obviously my answer is going to be no because I’m not big on that whole “revenge gig” but I think what has me going here, what I’m really after, is that when it comes to affairs of the heart, love, the unspoken rule is that love, and lack thereof, justifies everything. If our husbands don’t love us we get to cheat on them. If our wives don’t sleep with us we get to have sex with someone else. If we really feel a connection with someone then we can’t possibly be expected to control ourselves. Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan and Isolde, The Bridges of Madison County, etc., etc., etc. And I make concessions for Guinevere, it wasn’t like she could exactly divorce Arthur, but so many movies purport the romance of the affair. At least in An Affair to Remember (I feel I have to acknowledge what it is since I admitted to loving it ever so much) their decision to be together is made with the simultaneous decision to end their current relationships. There’s no hemming and hawing there. (I hate the hemming and hawing.)

And it’s not like these things are easy; I think they probably are always complicated, but lack of ease is so often used as an excuse for wrong behavior. I edited that previous sentence from “bad” to “wrong” because I don’t really think the choice to cheat is often a “good” or “bad” one, but it is a wrong one. Unethical behavior is always wrong, even when understandable or expected. And perhaps that’s what I’m driving at here.

Both films, I felt, didn’t take a strong enough stance against the wrongness of willfully hurting another human being. Now, some would argue it hurt’s them to divorce them, but that’s a false argument. Either you still love them and don’t want to divorce them, in which case you’re simply too lazy to be a good person, or you don’t actually want to be with them but are too lazy to change. At the end of the day if you don’t love someone as they deserve, have no intention of ever doing so, and stay with them out of guilt, laziness, or usury, it’s a sublimation of their life to yours and that’s not okay. Vows or not, I’m gonna go on record and say that’s not okay. And, if you’re the wronged party hurting back the person that hurt you only makes you as wrong as they were. More understandable perhaps, but understanding does not go inevitably with condoning.

It seems to me, after watching these movies and thinking about it, that too often we equate understanding (shit happens) with the need to condone (well it wasn’t that bad you’re right) and I think that’s lazy ethics. And I’m not preaching judgment here, I hope I’m not preaching at all, but putting forth the idea that allowing ourselves off the hook for our bad behavior because it’s understandable only furthers more bad behavior. We all have excellent reasons for why we do the crazy things we do, but how does one work on themselves (assuming of course that one wants to) without acknowledging, painful as it is, that one has screwed up? And, this might be even more tricky, attempting to not make the same mistake again. That second part is key. A revolving door of acknowledged bad behavior doesn’t really get the job done either.

And so, thinking on both of these movies, I have to say I still think one bad does not justify another and adultery, while always wrong, can also be understandable. And I kind of wish both movies would have taken a harder line on that.

But hey, I’m the friend that when you ask “is it wrong?” after sleeping with your ex-husband who is currently remarried answers, “it’s wrong.” Just call me the dreamslayer.