Marriage is a bag which can be stretched in many ways without breaking

One thing that was very admirable about the Bloomsbury group was their determination to cast aside Victorian hypocrisy and be open about their relationships, rather than covert. Perhaps the bravest was Vanessa Bell. She loved Duncan Grant, who was homosexual, so she left her husband and went to live with him and managed to have a child with him; over the years making space for the more passionate relationships he had with a succession of men. She wanted to love honestly and passionately and knew there was no room for a locked-in, watertight commitment. It wasn't an easy or self-indulgent way of life because sharing is hard and demanding, but love survived even though lovers came and went.

I know a woman who was in a very long-standing relationship with a married man and had his child, and he visited and provided for the child. Now there was a wife, and she knew about this, but the marriage survived.  I knew another woman who made the same choice, to have a child with a man she loved, although he stayed with his wife and visited his number 2 family only occasionally. If you read any family story there is very often some instance of illegitimate children and the father having two families. Very interesting. So the advice columns tell you what a healthy relationship in a healthy marriage is, but there are plenty that survive infidelity and, really, polygamy, without collapsing, and in a way, isn't that worth celebrating too?

Women sometimes have 2 partners at once, although this is more hidden, to save the feelings of one of the men. 

One film that made an impression on me is called Pleasantville, with Toby Maguire. It’s a film about an American telly programme where the citizens of 1950s Pleasantville live idealised lives in black and white. Everything is perfect in Pleasantville, orderly and neighbourly, but grey. But when passion comes along the citizens change into pink-coloured people. The mother of the perfect TV family is deeply ashamed that she has turned coloured because of her secret passion for the artistic man who owns the town Diner . Her son (Toby Maguire) helps her to cover her face in grey make up until she looks “normal” again. But the Diner man shows her a painting that makes her cry, and because of the tears he sees that her face is pink under the make-up, and she turns her face away in shame. But he says “That’s beautiful” and he helps her to take all the make up off again. He celebrates her by painting her in lovely bright pinks and blues and making love, and of course he turns coloured himself.

Many aspects of life change in Pleasantville; there is violence because the people are afraid of the fact that people can change. And the message of the film seems to be that life is not nice or tidy and it’s certainly not perfect, but it is dangerous and difficult and beautiful, and we have to deal with that.

In the film the 'mum' character leaves her dull husband because she loves the other man. But the husband  is heart-broken, because he loves her very much in his own way, and she too loves him in a way. So the three of them sit down together and try to work something out. Maybe they can find a way to share the perfect wife. After all, laws and traditions only work as far as they work. Sometimes we need to find a more imaginative solution, and what is really interesting is that people seem to have done so, perhaps always, in their underhand, ad hoc way, although I really know back as far as Edwardian England, and what went on then was truly revolutionary.

post script: Vanessa Bell did not tell her daughter that her father was Duncan Grant, allowing her to believe that she was Clive Bell's child until she was 18, which was, of course, a mistake. Honesty has to go all the way, and must start with the children.