Love and Lovers

Charles Bronson's second wife was an actress named Jill Ireland. Wikipedia says: After they married, she often played his leading lady, and they starred in fifteen films together.

The last time I tried to look up information on this, I didn't really find what I wanted. My recollection is Bronson was unwilling to make out with a woman on screen who wasn't his wife.

This was rather unusual for Hollywood even back then and never mind that there is a long history of leading men and their leading ladies having affairs because they are lovers on screen even though they aren't really lovers because it's not that explicit of a movie.

Wikipedia says the etymology of the term drag (as in drag queen) is uncertain. I've read it was an abbreviation -- probably (dr.a.g) -- in Shakespearean plays and even older works for "dressed as a girl" because historically all actors were male. 

Presumably, when male actors routinely played women there wasn't much in the way of making kissy face on stage to show that this was a romantic relationship. By the time Bronson was choosing to only do that with his actual wife, it was fairly normal for movies to contain such scenes and Pretty Baby, about a child prostitute, came out in 1878 while Jill Ireland's last movie was in 1987, so there were films being made during the same era that were considered shockingly explicit at the time.

I've long been fascinated with things like open relationships. I find the psychology and emotional aspects fascinating far more than the sex per se.

Men have long had two or more lovers, typically a wife and mistress or other forms of side dishes. Genetically speaking, my understanding is that about eighty percent of women pass on their genes but only about half of all men.

This means women tend to only have children by one man but if a man reproduces at all, he's likely to have children by two different women.

It's been said men hope to be her first lover and women hope to be his last. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence that men and women relate differently to this whole thing and those differences help make life work for humanity in the face of often harsh lives in frequently subsistence cultures and wartorn places etc.

The actual attitudes of women tend to not really be recorded. I took a History of Women class in college as a teenager and my primary takeaway was that history books are full of men because men live public lives, women live private lives and little is typically written about the actual private side of life.

Whatever women may have thought, felt or even discussed with other people they probably took it to their grave as a secret even if during their life they were open about things with people who knew them. Odds are rather poor there's a diary telling you about their relationship to their husband or what they thought or felt about his affairs.

For upper class European nobles and royals, there sometimes are records of his infidelities because those infidelities sometimes produced children and this sometimes mattered a great deal politically. Catherine de Medici had no children for about the first decade of her marriage to a French prince and people were encouraging him to ditch her in part because he had a child by another woman, so it was clear the fertility issue was with her.

Heirs to the throne or other lesser positions of leadership played a public role, so you get some record of such things among the upper classes. I'm not personally aware of significant records about such details for commoners and history books seem unlikely to have significant detail about the private feelings or private discussions even for the known infidelities of the European upper classes.

Last I checked, the Wikipedia page for Catherine de Medici completely left out the critical detail that she was the last survivor of her infamously cutthroat family because she was snuggled out of Italy shortly before their massacre. 

I did a college paper on this French royal of Italian origin and I was taking French in school at the time. I used both English and French sources for my paper.

I strongly suspect English language pieces about her life typically leave much to be desired and are probably filled with errors and inaccuracies due to things being lost in translation.

If you don't know she was married off to a French prince to save her life at the last minute from a planned massacre of her family, her choices may make little sense. Perhaps you imagine she had low self esteem or no self respect when in reality she had a gun to her head to make this marriage work or else.

A happier and more current story I was fascinated with for years was the artist Andrew Wyeth and his neighbor and model Helga which resulted in The Helga Pictures sometimes called The Helga Collection. Many of them are nudes and supposedly neither of their spouses knew about this fifteen-years long work relationship until after he went public with the collection.

At the time, there was much speculation that they must have been lovers but neither of them was admitting to an affair. When reporters shoved microphones in Mrs. Wyeth's face and asked her questions, she denied them the drama they were seeking.

Last I checked, in his old age while unwell, Helga helped take care of him.

I can equally imagine they were lovers or not. Like many people, I'm inclined to think they probably were but I was intrigued by the fact that they weren't answering that question and the degree to which that decision sucked the life out of the drama the paparazzi were seeking.

I've been celibate a long time and also had long distance relationships with men I never met. I don't believe intimate relationships necessarily conform to the parameters outsiders assume exist.