Is this a bad thing? (all happy marriages are different, Leo)

[oursin]

Today's ODNB Life of the Day is Dorothy Hodgkin, awww, blesss!!

I posted at some length about Hodgkin way back when I read the Ferry biography, but can't find it (may be pre-tagging).

But I was a bit 'huh?' about this in the ODNB account:
With his frequent absences (and several acknowledged infidelities), [Thomas Hodgkin] could not be classed as a

Comments

[londonkds]

Sounds like current disputes in Doctor Who fandom as to whether River Song in Silence of the Library/Forest of the Dead was a self-reliant feminist role model or a male fantasy of an emotionally undemanding woman.

[tree_and_leaf]

It does, rather. I suppose the references to 'frequent infidelities' makes one more dubious about his qualities as a husband, but as far as the being around vs giving space goes, you can't generalise about whether it's good or bad in the abstract; all you can say is, does it work for that couple and that situation? Which is seems to have here.

[redbird]

I'm fairly sure the person who wrote that biography would describe my own life in terms of "frequent infidelities" (or some similar disapproving term), but I'm breaking no promises, explicit or implicit, and my partners are all quite happy with the situation. (My loyalty is to my actual beloveds, not to some stranger's idea of what marriage is supposed to mean.) I have no evidence that Hodgkin and her husband had a relationship like mine, but also none that they didn't.

[tree_and_leaf]

If you're not breaking a promise, then whatever it s, it's not infidelity, surely?

[redbird]

That's how I feel, but a lot of people define infidelity to include (and sometimes be limited to) sex by a married person with someone they aren't married to, regardless of whether anyone inside the situation objects.

[oursin]

Given that before her marriage she had an affair with J D Bernal, she was certainly acquainted with the theories and practices of free love as around in interwar intellectual circles. How she felt about it is a bit more obscure.

[amaliedageek]

I was mulling the notion of a fic in which the Doctor comes back to the library with a way to get River out; her first act is to clock him and shout "I was working, you ass! Did the concept of asking me if I were busy ever flit across the wastes of your alleged mind?"