Hugo Schwyzer

This post first appeared in October 2006.

The post that got eaten this morning was a long explanation of a comment I made last week when writing about "wild oats."  I wrote on Friday:

Part of living a radically monogamous life is being intentional about "erasing the mental videotapes" of all prior experiences. 

I need to explain what I mean.  I meant to write primarily about the images of past sexual experiences, but before getting there, I want to touch on something else that led me to this conviction: weddings.

One of the innumerable things that I admire about my lovely wife is her extraordinary courage in becoming my fourth spouse.  As you might imagine, she took a tremendous amount of flak from her friends and family when she and I started dating.  At the time, I was thirty-five, going through my third divorce, with a conversion only four years old and a track record of reckless promiscuity, addiction, and mental instability behind me.  Well-meaning folks rushed to warn her off, but she trusted me, she trusted her instincts, and she trusted in my transfomation.

Still, it was particularly hard when we got engaged in the summer of ‘04.  One clod of a friend said to her: "Hey, just let Hugo handle all the wedding details; he’s done it three times before, he should be an expert."  On the day I went to buy the engagement ring, a colleague said "Hugo, I bet by now you really know your diamonds, huh?"  It’s not that these people were being deliberately cruel — but they were making it difficult to focus on the newness and the excitement of this particular marriage and this particular engagement.

Of course, I had vivid memories of my first three weddings.  But after I proposed to she who is now my wife, I realized that the greatest gift I could give her would be to make a conscious,deliberate, concerted effort to erase the images of these past nuptials from my memory.  I knew it would be hard, and it was.  But in Buddhist meditation, they teach you that with persistence you can direct your thoughts and control where they wander.  I may not be a Buddhist monk, but I appreciate discipline, and I respect its power.  I began to pray a prayer that summer of 2004: "God, make this engagement as new and fresh for me as it is for my fiancee; take from me the urge to compare the now and the yet-to-be to what once was." 

That prayer worked.  It really, really worked.  One of the most important gifts I was able to give my wife during our engagement was that radical excitement that comes when one does something brand new.  I shared her joy, and by an act of will (aided by grace, naturally) refused to reflect on my three prior weddings.

Did I delete the memories, the way one deletes information from a  hard drive?  Probably not.  If I were forced to recall the dates and details, I have no doubt that I could.  But even if they are still stored in some corner of my brain, they aren’t part of my consciousness.  They are stored and packed away in neat boxes, never to be opened again.

The same thing works, I believe, for sex.  Some advocates for abstinence argue that too much sexual experience (whatever that is) can ruin one’s future marriage.    They warn that if you’ve had a fair number of partners and a variety of short or long-term sexual relationships, you’ll find it impossible not to compare your future spouse to these past lovers.  They also warn that your future spouse may be tormented by worry over how they compare to those with whom you had sex in the past.  Thus, they argue, better to remain chaste before marriage — and stay married to the same person for life.  No pesky memories, no debilitating anxieties.

Such warnings give human beings far too little credit.  While it is absolutely true that for many of us, our sexual experiences get seared into our consciousness, it is — in my experience — false that we will invariably be haunted or titillated by those memories.  Obviously, if we choose to dwell on the past we’ll keep our memories of past sexual experiences alive and close to the surface.   Many people I know — including myself in my younger years — feel an intense desire to hold on to these recollections. 

Since human memory is notoriously faulty, what we end up holding on to is frequently a very edited version of what actually happened.  If we think of our memories as videotapes, what we’ve got in our consciousness is not actual raw footage, but a carefully reworked narrative that is edited and re-edited year after year.  Frequently, I’ve noticed, people tend to edit out the awkwardness and the anxiety, and add in extra doses of excitement.  The memory of a past sexual experience thus ends up being infinitely "better" than the actual incident was in the first place!

The danger is obvious: our very real present can rarely complete with the carefully edited film productions of our minds.   For those of us who have had considerable experience, the danger is that our current relationships may suffer by comparison.  In my previous marriages, I often found myself comparing the physical relationship we were actually having to these endlessly exciting, elaborately produced videotape memories in my head. It wasn’t fair at all to my partners at the time, and it made me feel as if i was destined for a monogamous life that I can best describe as "tender tedium."

Just as I made a commitment to my current wife to store and pack away all my memories of my previous weddings, I made a similar commitment a few years ago to do away with all the memories of my past sexual experiences.  For folks like me, who’ve "been around", I think this step is both difficult and vitally important.  This isn’t about denial, mind you.  I’m not hiding from anyone the reality that I’ve been married several times and done all sorts of different things.  Indeed, I’m not particularly sorry for the things I did in the past.  I had a considerable amount of fun, though I also suffered great deal of pain and I inflicted a lot of hurt.   For better or worse, those experiences brought me to where I am today.  But the fact that I am partially the product of my past does not mean that it is healthy or wise to indulge in reveries about what came before. While I am not torn apart with guilt over what I did, I am wary of the temptation to relive my memories.  Nothing good can come of that.

This post stands in parallel to my post in July, 2005, about being respectful of one’s partner’s past.  I wrote then:

When we marry, we promise each other many things: fidelity, devotion, and a willingness to share all one has.  For many of my generation who come to the altar after years and years of "experience", we perhaps ought to give another kind of pledge: the promise to focus on the future together, not on the past.   Real love rejoices in all the things that have made one’s husband or wife who he or she is today, knowing that without those experiences he or she would be a fundamentally different person.  But despite the often overwhelming temptation to pry, I’m convinced the wisest course is to acknowledge that there are some things none of us need to know, and we can give our partners and spouses the gift of an uncondemned, unchallenged, unquestioned past.

The corollary to that is that just as we have an obligation to respect our partner’s past, we also are obliged to place our own past in its appropriate place.  My wife’s job is to do her part to accept who I was and what I did and who I did it with.  My job is to make sure that my own memories of those experiences do not trouble our marriage. That means not allowing images or scenarios from the past to enter into my consciousness, and if they do flash across my screen, to make sure that I quickly redirect my thoughts.  For a long time, I wondered whether this would be truly possible.  Though I have no way of convincing my readers of the sincerity of my words, let me make it absolutely clear that it is possible to let the past be the past, the present be the present.  That’s not an easy thing for a historian blessed with an acute memory!  But it needed to be done, and I’ve done it.