PART-TIME LOVERS

The pressure of work has changed young people's attitudes to love. Sex is governed by 'sensibleness' and

HERE is a modern tableau: six friends in their late twenties having dinner at Alastair Little's matt-black restaurant in Frith Street. The numbers are balanced: three men, three girls. So is the food: three escalopes of salmon in a chive beurre blanc, three tiny starters in lieu of main courses. There are theatre programmes on the table, so we know they have come on from a play. Laugh and the restaurant laughs with you. The party is animated with fun and merriment and Muscadet sur Lie 1984.

The door opens and four girls come in from the cold and are shown to their reserved table. One of them, her name is Miranda, notices someone she knows in the theatre party. 'How was the play, Simon?', she calls across the res- taurant as she draws her chair. 'So-so,' replies Simon. 'A bit overlong.'

Unless you happen to know that Simon and Miranda have been step- ping out for five years, are universally regarded as a couple, take holi- days together, are con- stant and monogamous in thought and word and deed, you might easily suppose they are acquaintances. They do not cross the room to greet one another, nor is any suggestion floated that the two parties should join up. This is not one of the,evenings that Simon and Miran- da spend together. The timetable of their romance is precise and meticulously adhered to: four evenings a week to see their own friends independently, two nights plus alternate weekends to pursue their romance.

There was an annoying pop record by Elton John called 'Part-time lover'. Annoying but prescient. Part-time love is becoming the predominant sexual suit of our times. Statistics show that, anyway among the Spectator-reading, restaurant- going classes, people are marrying later; approximately six years later for both sexes than was usual in 1956. This does not mean that they are being especially promiscuous. The notion that the older young of Britain lead the life of Riley is a false one. On the contrary, five different factors, some mor- al, some to do with work, have relegated the importance of sex several rungs down the ladder of desirable pastimes. By 1986, sex has become a leisure activity, enjoyed once or twice a week with a consenting partner at a prearranged time, just as two currency brokers might meet after work at the Lansdowne Club for a vigorous game of squash.

An important reason for the change, like so much else at the moment, is that people are working harder and longer. The pro- tagonists of every modern love affair are yawning out their spare time against a backdrop of terminal exhaustion. Miranda, at 27 a Eurobond girl, is tired. Simon, at 29 a foreign exchange broker, is tired. It is never otherwise. Their love affair began, four years earlier, when they sleepwalked into each other's lives in a City winebar, collapsed onto the same bed and, hours later in the middle of the night, aroused by their mutual body heat, somehow sum- moned up the energy to make love. By the next morning they discovered they were in love. They have many interests in com- mon, such as blue French cheeses and the minimum bank lending rate, and they talk once a day on the telephone or by fax. As time has gone by, however, they have seen each other less. After the hurly-burly of the first six months, they have become jealous of their spare time: not be- cause they consciously wish to avoid one another, rather there is not enough time. This is not an excuse, there actually is no time.

The itinerary of mod- ern romance does not allow for more than three and a half of these five options: i, deman- ding job with long hours including some evenings spent entertaining cli- ents; ii, separate houses or flats with bills to pay; iii, both circles of old friends each partner wants to keep up with; iv, time-consuming girl- friend/boyfriend who likes to go out to dinner and talk to you from time to time; v, spending the odd evening at home with same, possibly with a view to sexual activity. The modern solu- tion has been to split the week, officially or unofficially, into a series of fudged contin- gencies.

Miranda rolls up at her office behind Cannon Street Station at 8.15, Simon has arrived at London Wall 45 minutes earlier. There is no time to see each other over lunch. They leave their respective offices again in the evening at about seven o'clock. Usually one of them has a business drink on the way home. Both eventually head for their own flats, to read the post (which had not yet arrived when they set off for the office), turn the washing machine onto the drying cycle, and have a bath. By now it is already nine o'clock. They are shattered. Miranda cannot be bothered to iron and pack the clothes she'll need for the next day at the office, and cross London to Simon's flat in Ennismore Gardens. Instead she joins a couple of friends having dinner in a Thai restaurant. Before she sets off she rings Ennismore Gardens but Simon's answering machine is on. She has no idea, and certainly no concern, about where he is. (In fact he is kicicing his heels in the American bar of the Savoy Hotel, listening to some highly speculative backchat about the deutsche- mark from two Swiss bankers). Miranda knows there is no prospect of Simon deceiving her. She has learnt, to her occasional disappointment, that after a long day at the flickering electronic screens Simon's fund of passion is barely adequate for one Eurobond girl, let alone two.

That is not quite fair. If it were, then the host of two-day-a-week love affairs stag- gering on all over London could not continue. There is a theory, posed by my colleague Nicola Shulman, that girls who see their boyfriends only occasionally are more passionately involved with them, since the double bed, which in a fOrmal live-in relationship would eventually be- come associated with sleep, is still corre- lated first and foremost with sex. As a secondary bonus, the girl is excused the emotional burden of actually living with a man. Women, runs the theory, worry more than men about the prevailing mood of their partners: whether he is happy, even whether he is enjoying a film. To see your boyfriend less is to worry about him less. Thus you have whole days free from anxiety.

Whole days to see other people. A consequence of marrying later is having more friends, each of whom needs regular servicing. It is impossible to generalise about how many friends other people have, but even if there were only eight people you wished to see, say, twice a month, then you are already tight on free evenings, not counting colleagues from work or satellite acquaintances. A girl involved in a part-time love affair ex- plained the pressures on her diary. 'Once or twice a week I'm invited, quite a long time in advance, to a dinner party. Harry isn't generally asked too, since he doesn't usually know the people.' (It is now consi- dered bad form, unless you are actually engaged to be married, to expect your lover to come along too.) 'Two evenings I go out to supper with old university or work friends who Harry doesn't know, and anyway finds rather boring. One evening I go to the cinema with a girlfriend. Which leaves two nights to see Harry. Either I stay with him or he comes over to my flat. This has been the routine for about three years. Harry did ask whether I'd like to move into his house, but I'm locked into a mortgage with a loan from my firm and it would be a waste to break it. I've no idea whether we'll get married, I hope so, I think so, but Harry might get sent to Hong Kong for a stint by the bank.'

In some respects the modern lover's dilemma resembles that of a lateral- thinking film critic: would the punter pre- fer to spend his £3 on this film or on a pizza? Would he prefer to devote Tuesday evening to having dinner with a longstand- ing friend, or to an overseas client win) happens to be in town, which might lead to a commission, or to one quiet evening alone at home to ward off paranoia, or sleeping with girlfriend Annabel, which involves being on top forte (If you only see each other twice a week there is a certain social onus to amuse. Only the married can afford to be dull.) ignificant, too, is the rise of peer pressure. With later marriage; and the extended period of independence between leaving home and the altar, friends have usurped the traditional influence (and power of veto) of the family. A 27-year-old person may have 20 friends of both sexes who define the parameters of their social life. They have probably all known each other intimately for eight years. A new face in their midst is an intrusion, even a challenge, that must be assimilated into a sub-culture of private jokes, assumptions and nuances. This is tedious. It is more amusing to tell an anecdote about George's latest lunge at Mary than to subtitle the full sweep of their relationship. Thus the peer pressure to continue a flagging love affair, on a two-day-a-week basis, is considerable. Meeting the friends is the modern equiva- lent of meeting the mother-in-law.

Opportunities for breaking the part-time cycle become successively fewer. Even when you are out alone it is understood, anyway by your peers, that you are already spoken for. Nobody will 'muscle in': in a busy world, concern not to cause offence outweighs the sexual prize. The only pros- pect of change is the y factor; a stranger sweeps you off your feet on one of your free nights, and before you have time to stand up again, marries you. This is unlike- ly to happen. Unless the y factor is very decisiVe, there is a relapse into the com- fortable pace of the truncated love affair, shored up by inertia and the security of the devil you know.

In a curious way, it is now considered less socially acceptable to end a well- established affair than it would once have been thought immoral to start such an affair in the first place. Morality has been supplanted by the Great God Sensibleness. `Being sensible' is the unspoken rationale behind sex as a leisure activity. It is transparently sensible to get to know your potential spouse before marrying theM. Similarly, it would not be sensible to marry until you have made a career and enjoyed life as a single person. In order to make your career, it is sensible to work hard, which involves putting ybur love life sens- ibly on the back burner. However, if you have found a compatible companion, but are not yet ready to marry, then what could be more sensible than to see them twice a week?

An interesting, and perhaps disturbing, phenomenon at the moment is the high proportion of men in their late twenties and early thirties who, having baled out of a long-running affair, have decided not to bother to embark upon another. Work, money, food and friends salve the need for companionship. They are not lonely. If they feel a desire for sex, they buy it. The former deputy chairman of the Conserva- tive Party is not the only workaholic in Britain accused of having a taste for emotion-free encounters. The proliferation of escort agencies advertising in the classi- fied section of business magazines is symp- tomatic, In the Sixties, the fact that sex is `free' was regarded as an advantage. Now, if anything, it counts slightly against it. With so much money swashing about in the City, 'only a skinflint', they say; 'would prefer a concerted bout of nookie to dinner in a decent restaurant'.

London is full of quite successful unwed 30-year-old girls. Because I am not a woman, I cannot say with any degree of certainty whether they are satisfied with the state of their affairs. If you feel happier seeing your boyfriend twice a week than seeing him every day, then the desirability of regularising your relationship is clearly not there. Nevertheless, most modern achieving women still expect one day to get married. The fact that, in a recent News- week survey, American women unmarried by the age of 25 were shown to have a 50-50 prospect of ever doing so, is only an unnerving spectre. A busy publisher tells me that when she was 16 she visualised herself wed at 24; now she is 28 and the target has shifted to 34. Her boyfriend, whom she adores, is so distracted by work that sometimes they don't speak for ten days at a stretch. If she could marry him just by snapping her fingers, she would; the hooha of a wedding appals her. It would be the last straw that breaks the camel's back. There is no time.

Nicholas Coleridge has recently been appointed editor of Harper's and Queen.