Can sex be outsourced from the relationship?
Sometimes language is treacherous. I was recently sitting at a table with two friends on a cosy evening. «What's it like with you two?» the friend with the glasses asked the other with the lion's mane. «You and your husband have separated, but you're still living together with the children? Are you still a couple?» Lion's Mane wanted to say something in reply, but then fell silent, kept quiet and smiled helplessly.
Helpless was of course also the question. Anyone who has children together is at least a parent couple - how this partnership is structured is another matter. It is difficult enough to put into words how a conventional relationship with children works. And there is simply no term for couples who live together with their children but organise their love life independently of them. Which doesn't mean that people don't try to live the family model differently.
However, anyone who tries to do this is rarely met with much understanding. And they also have to explain themselves all the time. The girlfriend with the mane did this: «I don't know what we are exactly. We still live together as a family, but no longer as lovers.» «And that's possible?» Glasses asked in a tone that sounded like a statement, one that she didn't feel able to believe in - especially as she herself had gone through a difficult separation from the father of her children. Lion's Mane shrugged her shoulders and smiled again. I could sympathise with her. It's often difficult to justify something that lies outside of convention. Especially when the situation arises from such radically personal constellations, explanations are often pointless.
Stay together for the sake of the children?
We dropped the subject, but I asked again at a later date how Lion's Mane and her husband had come to separate and stay together at the same time and whether it actually worked. She explained to me that they were like many others. Their short but stellar career as lovers had led to parenthood twice over and then petered out. Under the pressure of raising children, they had become increasingly estranged from each other and finally only lived together in a kind of shared flat.
Sporadic extramarital partners were added on both sides, and after in-depth discussions they came to the conclusion that they no longer wanted to be together as lovers, but only as friends. Of course, they could have separated, but the circumstances seemed too fragile to cope with the stress of looking for a flat, caring for children, dividing property and so on. So they decided to continue their marriage, but to outsource their love life.
But can that work? The common sense in the question is clear: stay together for the sake of the children? Impossible. And yet most of the people I've spoken to about this know couples who organise the relationship between family and love in a reasonably creative way.
The mane friend said that she had been through a lot with the father of her children and they were still very close as a result. She could even get over the fact that they had fallen out of love. However, she admits that the solution is neither ideal nor particularly tension-free. And of course not for eternity. But it works.
