My brain is burning since I saw the movie Babygirl, partly because it depicts an extramarital affair in a very different way than I’ve seen in films before, and also because I could relate to Romy, played by Nicole Kidman, in about 20 ways (not for her wealth or high-powered job as a CEO, unfortunately.)

Most films about adultery, especially when the married woman is the one who has the affair, include some sort of punishment at the end. In fact, a number of classic novels end in death for the adulteress (Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary). For many centuries, and in many countries, a woman’s infidelity weighed much more heavily, socially and legally, than did a man’s, just as a woman’s virginity was seen as necessary to marriage, while men got a pass. In modern films, women who have sex with anyone but their husband usually end up pretty miserable. They deserve it, after all, for ruining lives with their reckless wish for the love and sexual pleasure they don’t get at home.

We’re not talking about the rise of polyamory here, what’s sometimes called Ethical Monogamy, because the open relationship is by the consent of both spouses or partners. The movie Babygirl is about what I call (jokingly) Non-Ethical Monogamy, where morality jumps in, and the stakes are scarily high because of the risk of getting caught.

What makes Babygirl different is that no moral judgement is assumed on the part of the filmmaker or expected from the audience. This may be because the director and screenwriter is a woman, for once. The central character, Romy, is “happily married” to a man she loves, and has a fulfilling, if stressful, high-powered career, but her sex life has always been unpleasant. She has never told her husband what turns her on, and she has never had an orgasm with him, as a result.

The kind of affair she has as a consequence of this unfulfilled longing is unusual in film, though possibly not in real life. It’s also risky, which is part of what excites her lust for the young man. The sexual tension plays out alongside the drama of the affair, in which her lover crosses boundaries that imperil their secret both at work and her home. Romy has to weigh this danger against the new experience of her sexual desires out in the open and joyously fulfilled with her lover. This is not romantic, necessarily, or at least that’s not the important part. What’s important is the end of her decades of secrecy and repression in the name of pleasing her husband. The New York Times’ conservative opinion writer Ross Douthat thinks that’s outrageous…she imperils what “makes people happy,” he says, namely monogamous domestic bliss.

I strongly disagree that monogamy makes everyone happy, and that putting one’s deepest desires first is contemptible. In my book LOVELAND, I explored the many features and dilemmas of my life that I saw in the movie Babygirl. For one thing, I too lied to my husband about my orgasms for the first five or so years of our marriage, and even after that, I was shamed for wanting what I wanted (to be clear, what I wanted wasn’t what Romy desires – for better or worse, kink in general doesn’t do it for me at all). When I fell into an affair that expressed those desires and fulfilled them, much as Romy did, I saw for the first time what it would be like to be free from my frustrations with my married life, free of suppressing them. In my case, this frustration was not only about our sexual relations, as in the movie; there was more to it than that.

Much later, long after the marriage imploded (supposedly over my confession of adultery, but really because of long-ignored unhappiness), I had an affair with another man I still love, who was married and younger than I am, another parallel with Babygirl. I don’t regret either of these two affairs for a moment, and both men are still important to me. I can’t regret the first one because it forced me to face up to buried truths about myself and therefore change my life for the better (and my husband’s too, for that matter). As for the later lover, I no longer see him, but I treasure the year I had with him as one of the most meaningful experiences I’ve ever had, or probably will have, since I’m now old.

[Spoiler alert from here.***]

I appreciate that Babygirl addresses these questions with compassion rather than moral righteousness, but the ending disappoints me. I saw it coming a mile away, which is never a good thing in a movie or book. Confession works for Romy as it did not for me, and we’re supposed to believe that as a result, her husband, though at first angry, does a 180 and eventually responds beautifully to her secret desire for domination. Their sex life in future will be fulfilling to both, well done! But the premise of the movie is that risk-taking and romantic excitement is what arouses her, not repetitive sex in her marital bed. This happy ending is something like a manual on  “How to spice up your dull sex life and stay married.” Ugh.

In real life, Romy’s marriage would founder, her husband would find another wife, and she would pursue her desires alone and see what happens (she’s gorgeous, and under age 60, which would help). That’s what happened to me, except for being gorgeous. That doesn’t mean I was always “happy,” Ross Douthat’s catch-all word for the reward of being righteous. Rather, I was happy and unhappy by turns, as I struggled hard to be an authentic self. But if I’d stayed married, I would’ve been only more unhappy, since my husband was not about to change, which neither Ross Douthat nor the movie Babygirl grapples with. For me, Romy’s perfect domestic contentment is simply too easy. The filmmaker’s urge to pin a pretty bow of Happily Ever After on her movie was just too strong, I suppose. What a pity, but still a movie worth seeing.

Image by Freepik