From the archive: Love, marriage and extramarital affairs in the 60s

‘Where has the love gone?’ asked Kylie Minogue, 52 times to be precise, in her 1994 single of the same name. Well, she needn’t have worried – the 5 May 1968 Observer Magazine wrote a piece attempting to get to the bottom of this exact mystery.

The conclusion? It’s quite complicated, but the answer is not perhaps what you would expect from a 1960s publication and a journalist who became one of the foremost religious writers of her generation. Marriage, the Observer journalist Monica Furlong writes, is the succubus of love and spontaneity.

‘People in love seem to capture some childish freshness of vision, to see, smell, touch, caress, kiss as if they never have before,’ Monica muses. Marriage on the other hand ‘is the gradual death of curiosity and uncertainty which make the early stages of a love affair so exciting.

‘There is a collapse of the projections which each has placed upon the other. Husband and wife, if they are in love, had invested each other with all kinds of fantasies… Gradually within a year or two of marriage, a couple become able to distinguish their fantasies from the reality of the situation, and each partner may feel that they have married a stranger.’

So much for wedded bliss, eh? Monica, incidentally, did go on to marry and have two children. Although she did also become a keen proponent of the benefits of LSD in her late 30s, so perhaps a lack of projections is one pitfall of marriage she didn’t encounter in the 60s and 70s. She actually wrote a book on the subject entitled Travelling In, which had the distinction of being banned from Church of Scotland bookshops.

The piece ends on a more optimistic note. How does one navigate the rough sea between the joie de vivre of newfound love and the stale marriage bed? Well the answer is simple – sex! In particular, extramarital.