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Fairy Tales: The Future of Love and Relationships in the 21st Century
by Sharon Moore
302 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #08-0090; ISBN 1-4251-6933-3; US$28.09, C$28.09, EUR19.19, £14.50
Love and relationships in the twenty-first century as seen through a divorce lawyer's eyes. Are long-term couplings a thing of our past? Can true intimacy be achieved through honesty?
About the Book
This is an insight into our twenty-first century relationships in the U.K. reflected by a 'family law' solicitor. After years in practice divorcing people, arguing about our possessions and our children, she asks us to ask difficult questions.
Who are we? How well do we know ourselves and our sexuality? What do we really want from our relationships?
The book is peppered with illustrations from her professional and personal life. It discusses how our modern life of internet, mobiles, contraceptives, travel and media freedom has changed the partnerships we make, our expectations of them and the transparency under which they are conducted. Without the past's religious and moral restrictions and with our massive strides towards an Egalitarian society, both genders are struggling to maintain the 'Fairy Tale' of a life-long union filled with love and children.
She examines why we take more sexual partners and increasingly 'cheat' and why total honesty may be the only route to true intimacy and preservation of the family unit.
She deals with many of the relevant legal issues and procedures and includes interesting government statistics.
Not a book for the morally conservative – as the cover suggests – it is brutally honest on occasion and challenging throughout. It does not seek to provide answers but to stir us into thought; to fire us into disagreement; to provoke us to grasp the inevitable nettles within our modern land-scaped relationships and find our own individual ways to make them long, happy and truly intimate.
These are some of the subjects that Fairy Tales explores:
Is Prevention better than Cure? Are we feted to ever shorter couplings, decreasing commitment and lack of real intimacy?
It is not as easy as it sounds to be Honest with yourself.
'To thine own self be true' – if we can find ourselves in the sea of an emotional and social tug-of-war which pulls at us throughout our lives and then recognise our own image and our own nature.
We can take the girl out of the city but we can never take the city out of the girl. We can remove ourselves from a certain experience but we can never take the experience out of ourselves. It is what we do with the knowledge that experience affords us which can help us change and grow, if we allow it to.
If we have not been placed in a particular place of opportunity it may be difficult to predict with certainty what we would do.
Porn has become so stereotyped within its own media to promote lens access rather than genuine enjoyment and so widespread in its availability, that it is in danger of encouraging sexual Fairy Tales which only serve to extend ignorance.
Applying our Reason we curb our sexual behaviour generally, consigning our daily physical attraction to others to the realms of our fantasy lands. Our Superegos manage our Ids under the tireless supervision of our Egos.
The other side of 'when in Rome…' is 'wherever you are, be yourself'. Both hold admirable sentiment and it is rare for either doctrine to be pursued exclusively. We dissemble with our faces which we keep in a jar by the door. Our Ids make it impossible to resist ripping the mask off on occasion. With whichever end of the scale we feel more comfortable, we are still pulled towards the centre of our meridian line by the strength of the other's irresistibility. Etiquette vs Id. Nurture vs Nature. Nature will out or we wither through its suppression. Truth is its unavoidable bedfellow.
Honesty's price may be greater friction, the avoidance of which is the purpose of our lies, but this will be as a small storm next to the tornado which erupts from a failure to acknowledge Her necessity.
If we are able to psychologically cast the idea of the Fairy Tale aside, or at least accept that it will be harder to achieve now than ever before, but we still aspire to a 'till death do us part' coupling, how might we still endeavour to realise that goal? Time breeds Communication breeds Honesty breeds Trust – if you let it. True Intimacy is the potential offspring.
After the flush of the outset and all the insecurities that it can highlight, Security nurtures Complacency. We forget or ignore the fact that good relationships have to be worked at, that Honesty is just as important to maintain what we sought to create as it was for its creation in the first place.
Successful mediation by definition requires a preparedness on the part of both participants to compromise, to take their gloves off and come out of their corners.
Is it unrealistic to suggest that, in the same way that we are increasingly looking for help in locating a partner in our hectic twenty-first century lives, we could become socially accustomed to actually being proactive in terms of preserving our relationships and nurturing them?
If we have a nicotine or alcohol addiction we will always find the time and money to purchase our props. If we have a good sexual relationship with our partner, we will always find the time and energy to make love however jumping-off-the-top-of-the-wardrobe it is not.
Mankind has always needed a sexual outlet, a pressure valve – we need only look at the most inhibited rule-run societies to find the greatest sexual deviancy. We no longer even treat as revolutionary the reply to 'What news from Rome?'!
We have seen the end result of infidelity and the consequential legal process. So how does this whole adultery business start and why are many people increasingly secretly sexually unfaithful? What is the effect? Do we want it to stop? Can it be stopped?
Beware the blistering fires bred of blissful ignorance. If and when, when and if. We deceive ourselves in the answers to those submerged questions. At the peak of the 'moment' the 'If' they find out is an unthinkable impossibility and so the 'When' need not concern ourselves. But in the initial aftermath for a novice player, when guilt is at its greatest, the 'if' becomes a certainty and the 'when' becomes the brain's sole topic of recreation.
Money is of different significance and means different things to different people and what any of us would do if we had 'a lot' of it varies hugely between ages, culture, geography… Most of us earn our money through working and our ability to earn 'good money' is often directly related to our access to education. Within the context of our relationship, managing finances during it and dividing finances at the end of it can present a seemingly insurmountable problem for many.
How many times have we gone over a disgruntlement or disagreement in our heads, totally persuading ourselves that the other person meant this or planned that only to find, when the red mist has cleared and we're able to talk about it, that we had totally sent ourselves barking up the wrong tree?
From the day we are born our gender dictates how we will behave in all aspects of our life. Not only are we differently genetically programmed but, from the moment we take our first breath till our last, all of those around us reinforce and perpetuate our differences.
The fall-out which broken relationships scatter upon our children is both obvious and obscured, often by those children themselves.
Does the Civil Partnership Act herald a sea-change in the way we are to view our relationships in the future and the manner in which Big Brother will regulate them?
It seems somewhat poetic that, as a result of the tremendous advances in technology, life has become much more transparent. That transparency is forcing us into greater honesty in all our relationships and greater intimacy in our couplings in particular. The twenty-first century must accept that unless it becomes far more open and candid in its 'life-long' relationships the only alternative is that such things will become as common as a field of four leaved clovers.
About the Author
Raised in Stourbridge, Sharon attended King Edward VI Sixth Form College. She gained her Honours Degree in Law at Liverpool University and her Solicitors' Finals at Lancaster Gate Law College, London. After two years training, she qualified as a solicitor and joined a busy medium-sized practice in Birmingham in 1991 following two years of extensive travel abroad. During her last ten years in practice she was a partner heading the Matrimonial Department, a regular advocate in the County Court and throughout her career family law predominated.
Over that time she assisted the local Citizens Advice Bureaus and staunchly supported the provision of Legal Aid (now Public Funding). She held specialist qualifications with both The Law Society and The Solicitors Family Law Association and was responsible for training several of her colleagues.
'The Unconventional Sharon Moore' was how the editor of a magazine profile described her. Perhaps this was not a hard reputation to earn within the legal world's confines. The accompanying photo showed a besuited woman standing against her motorbike (as the senior partner felt it inappropriate for her to be sitting astride it!)
She has lectured, spoken on local and national radio and written for relevant publications about family law. This is her first book and one which she has increasingly felt compelled to write.
For the last two years Sharon has relinquished her career to write this book and travel again. She is currently working on her second book 'My Fairy Tale'.
