The honey-dripping lips of an adulteress (or, how to claim adulterous sex is a good idea)

Sadly, if not unsurprisingly, a headline of “The recipe for happiness? An enduring marriage and an affair with lots of sex” has rocketed to the top of the most-read articles on The Telegraph’s website.

If you read it, it’s worth playing the “spot the unsubstantiated claim/logical inconsistency/historical inaccuracy” game.

Here were my favourites:

• American and Britain have a high divorce rate because we don’t have enough affairs, but instead have a “sour and rigid” view of them. (The writer, Catherine Hakim, who coincidentally has a new book out, doesn’t discuss the possibility that our divorce rate is due to the fact that we have swallowed the lie that marriage must always be fulfilling or you have every right to walk out, and that sex is the benchmark of fulfilment)
• Religion (by which she means, Christianity) has caused Britain to “remain coy about openly embracing sex for pleasure”. (Has she read Song of Songs?)
• Rich people like emperors and kings got married, and then took mistresses for sex; now that we have the internet, we should all do something similar. (There is just no logic at all here. Many rich people also used leeches to “purify” their blood, but I don’t think I’ll use the internet to buy some leeches.)
• “Puritan morality downplays or rejects all forms of pleasure as sinful.” (Ah, the old “Puritans never had any fun and hated anyone who did” falsehood. The only people who say this are people who have never read any Puritan literature, and who think that as soon as you say anything is sinful, you say everything is sinful.)

Here’s her conclusion: “we can no longer assume that our own perspective is the only one going, and that it is inevitable and natural”.

Ms Hakim, if you’re reading this, just three quick points about this:

• first, this is your own perspective, that marriage should include affairs if one partner wishes it to. You do seem to suggest that your perspective is the only one going…
• second, do you want to say that there is no perspective of sex at all which is wrong, or unnatural, and should be ruled out? I imagine you don’t think that all sex is OK sex—but where are you going to draw the line, and what will you say to someone who turns round and says “Ah, that’s just your perspective”?
• third, I don’t assume that my own perspective is the only one going, that it is inevitable, or that it is natural. In fact, I tend to assume that it may well be none of those things. That’s why Christians listen to what God says in the Bible, and allow Him to tell them that they are wrong and that there is a better, more fulfilling way to live. Often His way is not the way humans would go, but then I suppose you have to ask: whose world are we living in, Catherine, yours or His? Who’s going to know best about our lives, given that we haven’t actually lived them yet, us or Him?

“The lips of an adulteress drip honey; and her speech is smoother than oil; but in the end she is bitter as gall, sharp as a double-edged sword. Her feet go down to death” (Proverbs 5 v 3-5).