What I’ve Read: Vow: A Memoir of Marriage (and Other Affairs) by Wendy Plump
Personal memoirs are at their best when they are unflinchingly honest. Plump’s decision to write openly about her ex’s affair—the one that ended their marriage—and their respective numerous affairs that came before makes for an uncomfortable, revealing look at the slow unraveling of a relationship.
Are we meant to be monogamous? Plump asks this question over and over. Throughout the several affairs she had before she discovered that her husband had been seeing the same woman for years and had a 9-month-old child with her, Plump makes clear the blunt facts about how and why she did it. What she questions later in the book is why some people don’t. Her conclusion? “I think you either cheat or you don’t. It’s either hardwired in you or it isn’t. Infidelity may rest latent in you, but if you have that inclination, it will be difficult to resist. Or there will always be the question of it hanging, exhaustingly, in front of you.”
Plump’s unusual situation—having been both the cheater and the one cheated on—makes her uniquely qualified to discuss the consequences of infidelity from all sides. To speak to the honest tone she’s taken throughout the book, she doesn’t leave out the parts she enjoyed either. “The arms that wrapped around me at night or the face that hovered above me during sex or the man who waited in my driveway for a homecoming after South Carolina…”
I’ve no doubt that a person could read this book and dismiss it as an exotic tale—something so far outside the realm of their own life that they could never imagine themselves in Plump’s shoes, as either the one cheating or the one cheated upon. This book is not a warning shot across the bow so much as it is a reminder. A reminder to anyone in a long-term relationship or a marriage that betrayal does not always happen to someone else. It may not strike your relationship personally, but at some point in your life, you will feel the shockwaves. You’ll feel them as you comfort a friend or listen to a teary confession from a family member or learn a dark secret about a parent that you never expected to hear. We’re human, after all. We’re inclined to want more. “The grass is always greener” is maybe the truest description of human nature. So, do you cheat? Or don’t you?
Plump references often her boredom with the safety of her marriage as a reason for her infidelity. Later, after her husband has moved out, she contemplates safety in a new way.
“At those times [in the middle of the night] safe didn’t feel boring. Safe felt like a rescue. Safe felt like the most romantic, knight-on-a-horse, warrior-brandishing-a-sword existence possible. Not because I was insulated from trouble when in a couple, but because I was facing it with someone. […] This is not hindsight. It’s serious, keening, howl-at-the-moon regret over not recognizing the luck that surrounded both Bill and me. The sound of my husband sleeping. The cut and cottony smell of his T-shirts in the laundry. […] These are the details of married life. You could slay a dragon with them. What a pity that we missed the most salient point of union, that we fell prey to the most obvious stupidity—not knowing how good it all was.”
Plump’s affairs, which took place before her husband moved out, were complicated for her: fun, exciting, dangerous, scary, sad. But, she never felt the pull to, as she put it, “make the journey from Other Woman to Woman.” Why? “In my view, crushing, worrisome regret lies in wait for the single woman or the single man who has an affair with a married spouse, pulls the spouse away, and then marries him or her. As the new spouse, you would have to help justify the sacrifice of the first marriage on a too-often basis. If you or he or both don’t cheat again, you will end your days worrying that it’s about to happen. When you are betraying a spouse, one of the things you demonstrate most emphatically is how untrustworthy you are. Not much of a basis on which to hang a new marriage.”
I can’t say this book was an enjoyable read per se. It felt personal, gouging. It is emotionally raw and intensely well-written. It’s a book I won’t soon forget.
Have you read this book? What did you think?