Matching apps for the already married latest trend in 'furin'

The pursuit of happiness, guaranteed by the Constitution whose 80th anniversary Japan celebrated earlier this month, takes many forms, causing endless complications. On whether complications outweigh fulfillment or fulfillment complications the Constitution is silent. It guarantees the pursuit, not the outcome.

What is happiness? Sex, wealth and power to some; peace, quiet and leisure to others, some elusive combination of these and other things to most. “That which I haven’t got” – that may be the best, starkest definition of all.

Facile cynicism? Or unblinking realism? Few of us are satisfied with our lot. If we’re rich, we would be richer (or poorer; poverty has its romantic appeal, seen from a distance); if single, married; if married, single. We’re a restless species. Maybe it’s not happiness we pursue after all but pursuit for its own sake. Our past as hunters haunts us; we’re hunters still.

Marriage is as old as humanity and the extramarital affair as old as marriage. The English language trips over itself groping for a name worthy of it: adultery, fornication, infidelity, cheating, two-timing, hanky-panky – more positively, romance. Japanese, less rich in this case in synonyms but richer maybe in euphony, calls it furin, the disapproval implicit in its literal meaning of “unethical” smoothed down by repeated use to indifference and beyond – to approval, even encouragement. “Go for it,” we seem to hear in those two mellifluous syllables. 

To furin Spa (May 20) adds “neo.” Whatever name it goes by, it is as forever new as forever old.

It’s changing, like everything else. In times gone by, it was quite the thing for a man to have a mistress or two or three, often courtesans of the licensed pleasure quarters or their geisha successors, artists whose art was eros and whose eros was art. A fixture of early modern literature, business and politics was the wife helping her husband dress for his adultery or fornication or whatever – not furin back then, the word had yet to be coined – seething with inner rage perhaps but keeping it to herself and taking pride in her self-control. Those were the days, there are men even today who might say. Women presumably are less nostalgic.

Change begot change begot change, as change generally does. Spa’s timeline highlights the milestones. The 1960s saw the rise of the nuclear family – 59 percent of households were two- rather than multi-generational. In 1965 for the first time romantic love-marriages outnumbered the traditional miai – marriages arranged by families, the bride and groom mere pawns. In 1997 for the first time wives working outside the home outnumbered full-time housewives.

A new phenomenon quietly taking shape off-stage was soon to join the drama: the growing appeal of single life. Why marry at all? The traditional notion that a man without a woman or a woman without a man was incomplete were outgrown, overcome, transcended. Women in particular reveled in what might be called neo-freedom. New career opportunities gave them financial independence, new views on gender equality opened paths long closed. Why saddle yourself with a husband who’ll make a slave of you and children who’ll eat up the best years of your life? There’s so much else to do.

Another circumstance too deserves mention. In the half-century since the 1970s, the male sperm count has decreased by half, the sex glands weakened by by-products of plastics and agro-chemicals and suchlike synthetics – all the environmental challenges wrought by mass production, mass consumption and mass waste.

What, then, is neo-furin? The turning point Spa identifies is the appearance in 2018 of the first “matching app” for the already-married; “furin matching apps” one might call them, adaptations of apps that for two decades previously had helped singles meet. A persistent drain on Japan’s social scene has been the difficulty of meeting people – we’re too busy, too shy, too isolated, too poor. The COVID-19 epidemic raised the barriers higher still – much higher – and then abruptly lowered them by spawning, indirectly, a profusion of furin apps. Suddenly what had so long been so difficult was easy; anyone could meet anyone anytime for any purpose. Neo-furin blossomed.

Thus did “Tatsuya Takeda” (the pseudonyms are Spa’s) meet “A-san” and “Shota Murase” “B-san.” Takeda is 38 and in marketing; Murase, 43, works for a manufacturer. Both were stuck in hollow marriages, emotionally dead and sexless to boot after the birth of the children. (One wonders parenthetically: Must the birth of children be fatal to those tender feelings which make the birth of children possible?)

Takeda’s story is unusual. He and his wife, though tired of each other, bore each other no rancor and in fact hoped (and hope still) to preserve their marriage, partly for the sake of their 9-year-old child but also for other reasons; what they once felt for each other they may someday feel again. Meanwhile they agreed: Let each be free to pursue other relationships. It may even help them rediscover each other.

A-san, having no such agreement with her husband, must be careful. Psychologically battered by his harassment just this side of violence, she has her own need for extramarital solace. Two needs meeting fuse and yield their own kind of affection irrespective of marital status. Affection is its own justification – or is it? Guilt feelings don’t only haunt the guilty. Takeda’s is a divided soul. In giving himself his due, is he not failing in what he owes others, his child if not his wife? Isn’t a child entitled to parents committed wholeheartedly to home and family? But, he tells himself, home and family would both fall apart if left to rot; is he not in fact saving them, his current desertion, if that’s what it is, a safeguard against inevitable and irrevocable decay and break-up? 

So one tells oneself and so it may be in fact – one can tell oneself anything and anything may turn out to be true – but can he really believe it? He tries.

Murase’s story is unusual too. That’s characteristic of furin: its stories are unusual, no two quite alike, so much have our horizons broadened. His furin is platonic. “I needed to relate to someone soul-to-soul,” he says. “Not body-to-body.”

His is yet another marriage gone sexless. Seeking “second partners,” he posed as single, but lying is distasteful, its rewards tainted. Hence “soul-to-soul.” “We’ve never so much as kissed,” he says of his relationship with “B-san,” “though we do hold hands. We meet face to face once or twice a month for lunch or coffee, and online every day. To her I can speak freely of things I would never mention to anyone else. We’re like college lovers,” each enchanted to discover the other’s soul – on which note let this story end, that it may echo suggestively in the reader’s own soul.

© Japan Today