This is a reblog of an earlier posting from 2011. A lot has changed in eight or nine years, including my experience of a sense of broken trust with my wife of somn years.
The truth is that I was fooling myself, in believing that my wife was okay with my photo shoots with nude models. The only thing she was okay with was not talking about it, or expressing her feelings on the subject. This is now over, and she is quite vocal about her point of view, which is negative in general, and frustrated in particular.
She honestly believes that she never agreed to the terms of our marriage as I understood them, almost forty years ago. The whole idea of “open marriage” or a “poly” relationship is fundamentally offensive to her sense of what is necessary for a marriage to work, ultimately. Today, while we continue to cohabitate, she no longer considers our marriage valid, and considers herself to be unmarried, or perhaps, never really married at all.
In some ways things are actually better between us, in that she is now open to express her honestly held beliefs and her emotions. Now we’re both somewhat bitter about the whole thing, and yet still are trying to find a way to function as a couple.
Life is funny. Despite everything we love each other. Can’t always stand each other, but still have deep affection and respect. We just don’t agree on marital fidelity and a lot of other things. At the heart of it, I’m the one incapable of cleaving to one and only one woman. She’s convinced that it is a function of my inability to really trust anyone completely. She might be right. But just saying it doesn’t change it for me, and it doesn’t resolve it for her.
So. Limbo.
A close friend of mine, a photographer in Vancouver, with well-developed skills and a wonderful eye, is struggling with a major conflict between his intimate relationship with a long-term woman partner and his even longer term artistic exploration of the female form through nude photography.
I think it’s important to define both – what I mean by an intimate relationship with his partner, and what I mean by nude photography. They may both seem pretty self-evident, but trust me when I tell you that neither is as simple as it seems.
My friend is struggling because his wife of about a year is absolutely mortified that her husband wants to take pictures of naked women, and spend time in intimate situations with naked women who are not her. This is despite the fact that her husband, before marriage, was one of the best known local boudoir photographers in…
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Rain Coast Review 
You Stated — “She honestly believes that she never agreed to the terms of our marriage as I understood them, almost forty years ago.”
My Response — I’ve been studying human amnesia and find it very interesting that as people mature in their understandings of the world the brain literally erases the ability to recall certain data as though it never happened.
In couples, it’s fascinating to watch because you can see people change and then forget who they were. The other member who has not changed continues to remember moments in the past that relate to certain behavior but the other truthfully does not remember and feels a bit put off in the relationship.
It’s one of the main reasons I don’t argue with people that often anymore, since now that I understand this strange human condition of memory loss it doesn’t seem worth it to debate with individuals knowing for a fact that they won’t actually remember the argument in as little as 3 months down the line.
The best way to think of it now is that your wife is a new person. You yourself may be a new person without even knowing it. The brain is a strange duck, to say the least.
Just a thought
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The fact that this is from a true story makes me really sad. It’s a tough kind of love.
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I’ll never understand why partners object to a Photographer’s choice of subject matter ‘later down the line’. If the man (or woman) photographed nudes BEFORE he (she) married, why would that photographer cease that major photography subject AFTER he/she married?
I like Lander7’s comment about Memory.
Marriages vows don’t change who you are as a person. They just form a private and public expression of your love and commitment to that particular partner (male or female).
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She ought to have been a part of your photography… perhaps an assistant from the very beginning.
I’m a nudist. My wife is not. I have tried to get her to go with me to as many clothing optional events as possible so she can see what’s really happening. If she were unwilling, I doubt we’d have married. 32 years later she is more comfortable now than when we first married.
Forty years is a long time. I think there’s something else going on.
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