Myths of Infedelity
 Myths of Infidelity
THE PEOPLE WHO ARE running from bed to bed creating disasters for themselves and everyone else don't seem to know what they are
doing. They just don't get it. But why should they? There is a mythology about infidelity that shows up in the popular press and even in
the mental health literature that is guaranteed to mislead people and make dangerous situations even worse. Some of these myths
are:
1. Everybody is unfaithful; it is normal, expectable behavior. Mozart, in his comic opera Cosi Fan
Tutti, insisted that women all do it, but a far more common belief is that men all do it: "Higgamous, hoggamous, woman's monogamous;
hoggamous, higgamous, man is polygamous.' In Nora Ephron's movie, Heartburn Meryl Streep's husband has left her for another woman. She
turns to her father for solace, but he dismisses her complaint as the way of all male flesh: "if you want monogamy, marry a
swan."
We don't know how many people are un faithful; if people will lie to their own husband or wife, they surely aren't going to be
honest with poll takers. We can guess that one-half of married men and one-third of married women have dropped their drawers away from home
at least once. That's a lot of infidelity.
Still, most people are faithful most of the time. Without the expectation of fidelity, intimacy becomes awkward and marriage
adversarial. People who expect their partner to betray them are likely to beat them to the draw, and to make both of them miserable in the
meantime.
Most species of birds and animals in which the male serves some useful function other than sperm donation are inherently
monogamous. Humans, like other nest builders, are monogamous by nature, but imperfectly so. We can be trained out of it, though even in
polygamous and promiscuous cultures people show their true colors when they fall blindly and crazily in love. And we have an escape clause:
nature mercifully permits us to survive our mates and mate again. But if we slip up and take a new mate while the old mate is still alive,
it is likely to destroy the pair bonding with our previous mate and create great instinctual disorientation--which is part of the tragedy
of infidelity.
2. Affairs am good for you; an affair may even revive a dull marriage. Back at the height of the
sexual revolution, the Playboy philosophy and its Cosmopolitan counterpart urged infidelity as a way to keep men manly, women womanly, and
marriage vital. Lately, in such books as Annette Lawson's Adultery and Dalma Heyn's The Erotic Silence of the American Wife, women have
been encouraged to act out their sexual fantasies as a blow for equal rights.
It is true that if an affair is blatant enough and if all hell breaks loose, the crisis of infidelity can shake up the most
petrified marriage, Of course, any crisis can serve the same detonation function, and burning the house down might be a safer, cheaper, and
more readily forgivable attention-getter.
However utopian the theories, the reality is that infidelity, whether it is furtive or blatant, will blow hell out of a marriage.
In 30 odd years of practice, I have encountered only a handful of established first marriages that ended in divorce without someone being
unfaithful, often with the infidelity kept secret throughout the divorce process and even for years afterwards. Infidelity is the sine qua
non of divorce.
3. People have affairs because they aren't in love with their marriage partner. People tell me this,
and they even remember it this way. But on closer examination it routinely turns out that the marriage was fine before the affair happened,
and the decision that they were not in love with their marriage partner was an effort to explain and justify the affair.
Being in love does not protect people from lust. Screwing around on your loved one is not a very loving thing to do, and it may be
downright hostile. Every marriage is a thick stew of emotions ranging from lust to disgust, desperate love to homicidal rage. It would be
idiotic to reduce such a wonderfully rich emotional diet to a question ("love me?" or "love me not?") so simplistic that it is best asked
of the petals of daisies. Nonetheless, people do ask themselves such questions, and they answer them.
Falling out of love is no reason to betray your mate. If people are experiencing a deficiency in their ability to love their
partner, it is not clear how something so hateful as betraying him or her would restore it.
4. People have affairs because they are oversexed. Affairs are about secrets. The infidelity is not
necessarily in the sex, but in the dishonesty.
Swingers have sex openly, without dishonesty and therefore without betrayal (though with a lot of scary bugs.) More cautious
infidels might have chaste but furtive lunches and secret telephone calls with ex-spouses or former affair partners-nothing to sate the
sexual tension, but just enough to prevent a marital reconciliation or intimacy in the marriage.
Affairs generally involve sex, at least enough sex to create a secret that seals the conspiratorial alliance of the affair, and
makes the relationship tense, dangerous, and thus exciting. Most affairs consist of a little bad sex and hours on the telephone. I once saw
a case in which the couple had attempted sex once 30 years before and had limited the intimacy in their respective marriages while they
maintained their sad, secret love with quiet lunches, pondering the crucial question of whether or not he had gotten it all the way in on
that immortal autumn evening in 1958.
In general, monogamous couples have a lot more sex than the people who are screwing around.
Myths of Infidelity
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