In America, a lapse in monogamy ruins marriages, bankrupts couples, and condemns families to divorce-court hell. In Europe and elsewhere, infidelity is considered a bump in the road, if it's considered at all. Here's why.[Editor, it's a long article, and I've trimmed some parts. Do click the link above to read the whole thing.]
Jane and Thomas were high school sweethearts, and now their own kids are in high school. About a year ago, Thomas, 47, a financial officer at a large corporation, suddenly started volunteering to take his son to soccer practice on Sunday mornings and began using his laptop at home. Jane noticed he seemed to hide the computer from her, and he never used it in front of her. He sought excuses to be alone; she became uneasy. One night, he made a hushed phone call downstairs while she was in bed. When he came upstairs, she asked who it was. He said it was no one, told her she was "hearing things," and said it must have been the TV. His denial was all she needed. She asked right then if he was having an affair, and soon enough he admitted he was. Their world came crashing down.
The other woman is a fellow employee who reports to him. She is 14 years Jane's junior and possesses, in Jane's words, "a Victoria's Secret body." Thomas agreed that he must end the affair, but for the past four months the evidence says otherwise. Jane has discovered cryptic text messages on her husband's cell phone and there are regular hang-up calls from a blocked number. Jane considered telling the other woman's husband about his wife's affair, but then the woman—out of revenge—could sue Thomas for sexual harassment. This has the potential to bankrupt the family. So would divorce. Every time Thomas stays late at work, Jane can't help but accuse him—even if it's silently, just with a look—of having been unfaithful again. In their own home, Jane and Thomas are now deadlocked in marital misery, fighting tearfully and viciously.
Does it have to be this way? Must an affair lead a couple inexorably to divorce court or bankruptcy? Do other cultures handle the circumstances of infidelity with different protocol and ethics? I asked these questions of Anna, 30, an American with a European background and a 1960s Italian art-film look: a decadent face, a slim, curvy body in a tweed pencil skirt. One night exactly a year ago, Henri, a Parisian client of Anna's company, came to town for a professional event. They flirted unapologetically throughout the evening. When she invited people to her place for late-night drinks, Henri stayed. Before they even kissed, he held up his finger. "You see I'm wearing this ring," he said. Anna said she did. "You know nothing will change," he continued. She answered that she did know that.
"It was adult," Anna says. "It was respectful to me, in a way, and to his wife, to ask that, and to make that statement. The next morning, he was sweet and open. We hung out for hours. He didn't run in shame."
Henri is the fairy-tale adulterer: European, sensual, guiltless. He is a figure we Americans look upon with wonder and terror, wanting to believe and desperately not wanting to believe that he (or she) exists. Because when we go too far at that bachelor party in Vegas, or at the office holiday party, or with the milkman or the butcher or the baker, we go into hysterics. We drink a bottle of Wild Turkey and drive onto our own lawn and confess, bawling, to our spouse. We cut our thighs with an X-Acto knife. We quit our job and work full-time for free at a soup kitchen. We enroll in specialized infidelity therapy. We hate ourselves. We fall apart.
We end up at Jane and Thomas's address. According to writer Pamela Druckerman, whose new book on infidelity, Lust in Translation, comes out next month, "Americans are the worst, both at having affairs and dealing with the aftermath. Adultery crises in America last longer, cost more, and seem to inflict more emotional torture than they do anyplace I visited."
For several years Druckerman, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, surveyed married or committed couples all over the world, and she not only charted the international styles and frequency of cheating, but also looked at each country's capacity for guilt and shame (or anger and vengeance, depending on the party's role) regarding infidelity. It seems no other population suffers the same magnificent anguish that we do. The Russians regard affairs as benign vices, like cigars and scotch. The Japanese have institutionalized extramarital sex through clubs and salaryman lifestyles. The French, who don't cheat as much as we thought they did, prize discretion above the occasional lie. In sub–Saharan Africa, even the threat of death by HIV hasn't created a strong taboo on cheating. And God, well, he's tried. Like a father gently lecturing his adolescent, using the monogamy-is-cool approach, and then resorting to "You're grounded for life if you disobey me." But to no avail: Even God-fearing and devout Muslims, Christians, and Jews are still cheating and having affairs, still double-parking on their spouses.
Why are Americans destroyed by affairs, I wanted to know. Over half the marriages in this country end in divorce, with infidelity blamed for 17 percent or more. In 1970, the United States claimed about 3,000 marriage and family therapists. In 2005, we had more than 18,000. And yet in the grand scale of infidelity around the world, the United States remains junior varsity. We have affairs at about the same numerical rate as the French. According to the General Social Survey, the most recent statistical examination of marital infidelity, about 4 percent of married men polled claimed at least one sexual partner outside his marriage in the year prior; around 3 percent for married women. Compare this with Africa's Ivory Coast, where 36 percent of married men strayed, according to Druckerman.
Why is the fallout here so brutal? In most other countries, an occasional affair is tolerated and even sanctioned (at least for men). Why do we Americans want to get caught, confess, cry? Compared with fellow mammals, only 3 percent of which are monogamous, we're doing great. And as research in the wild becomes more and more forensic, even animals we counted in our small alliance for fidelity have recently been proved fallible. Swans, that elegant emblem of faithfulness, glided away from the hallowed statistical minority; it has come to light that they cheat and divorce too. Red-winged blackbird couples thought to be devoted surprised scientists that had given vasectomies to the males for population control; the females kept laying eggs that hatched. Somewhere, there's a blackbird Holiday Inn with a discreet parking lot.
I try to imagine allowing space in my ideology for both love and infidelity. Tariq, 29, has Middle Eastern parents and grew up in the United States, but he has lived an international life—in Lebanon, the Caribbean, and South America. Throughout, he has maintained a relationship for eight years with a strong, professional woman he loves and respects—and he cheats on her all the time. "It bears no reflection on her," he assures me, and when I search his face, he looks guileless, earnest.
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It is important, too, to pay attention to why infidelity can be thrilling. Lily, a single 31-year-old with a powerful job in the media, has a history with infidelity and an open mind about cheating. She has been the other woman, and she has strayed in her own relationships. She has also engaged in something she calls "emotional cheating," relationships with men that are not physical but can feel "more intense than sex." Occasionally, those platonic but heated affairs can open her up to the man she's actually seeing. Emotional cheating makes her feel alive, and she brings that home, where it translates to amazing sex.
Cheating broke up one of her longest and most important relationships, but the power of taking something that doesn't belong to her still enthralls. "Both people feel that, and they're desperate and animalistic and somehow strangely honest," she says. Lily compares infidelity to drugs, where there's a thrilling ride but an emptiness at the end. "If you win that man you're cheating with, and you both make each other the primary person, you've lost the sense of danger, you've lost everything that fueled the experience."
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So how did Americans come to be so rigid and demanding, not just of our partners and ourselves, but of the marital relationship itself? The typical American—if there is one—has "lofty ideals" about marriage, according to Joshua Coleman, Ph.D., a family and relationships expert. These lofty ideals have grown from simple seeds, in his opinion. He points to the colonial beginning of this country, to the genesis of the New World. As part of the desire to reduce the power of the throne and religious institutions, our forefathers emphasized that marriage and divorce should be governed by legal institutions rather than religious ones. In the 18th century, people began to adopt the radical new idea that love should be the most fundamental reason for marriage and that young people should be free to choose their marriage partners independently. Prior to that time, marital partners were chosen by the families for economic and political reasons, the same reasons that people had been getting married for centuries throughout the world.
In the ideal American marriage today, we are told to look to one person for everything—sexual, spiritual, financial, intellectual, emotional—we need. Stephanie Coontz, director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, wrote recently that more married Americans have begun "to cocoon in the nuclear family." We have dangerously few friends, she warns, and the "atomization" of society means losing touch with others. Coleman points out that as recently as the 1960s, Americans held different, lower expectations for marriage, requiring the marital partner to play fewer roles than at present, and studies show that—logically—marriages with more moderate expectations are more resilient.
It might be that the way our perception of marriage has evolved leaves little room for marriage to thrive. Adam Phillips, a London-based psychotherapist and author of Monogamy, said in an interview with Salon.com that to bear jealousy is important in a relationship. He claims it's essential to understand that "other people are independent of our desires for them." This statement celebrates autonomy as a virtue, a key factor in seductiveness. Why do most Americans think of a heightened sense of autonomy as a threat or an abnormality?
Karen could have used more autonomy at the beginning of her married life. She and Tony started out as high school sweethearts. She caught him cheating during their engagement, but she forgave him and hoped things would change once they said their vows. Three kids later, with a newborn in the crib, Karen found out—at a party when Tony got drunk and slipped up in front of friends and family—that he had been "hanging out" and doing drugs with Karen's 27-year-old niece. The way his face froze after he slipped let everyone in the room know he was guilty. Without any resources, Karen stayed with him for five more years.
She started cheating on him too, and she hasn't broken that cycle. She's now with another man she doesn't trust, and for leverage, she taunts him with the idea that she might also be straying. She went into his AOL account a few weeks ago and found correspondence with dozens of women. He meets them through the business he owns, puts them on his "joke list," and then heightens the e-mail exchange to invitations for drinks and dinner. So Karen is pulling away from this one too. But with children to take care of, she's tempted to put up with it and stay. When I asked if she could have done things differently, she says, "I recommend people get their own life. Be financially independent. If good things come to you or pass through your life, good. But you don't need it."
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Progress can be unglamorous. Anna heard from Henri six months ago, when he e-mailed that he was coming to town. And then he e-mailed again. And again. His ardor crossed the line from spontaneous to premeditated. When he arrived, he kissed her in front of someone they both knew; this triggered a buzz-kill of liability. His body language betrayed an agenda and a twinge of guilt.
She took him home, but it wasn't the same. Neither party admitted it, and they were still affectionate and open afterward, but the affair was over. According to Druckerman, if he's the prototype of a Frenchman, he'll walk away from this without a need to confess, without a burning conscience, without a need to turn to therapy for absolution—and most important, free of any subconscious desire to be caught. As Tariq said to me: "No one is caught if he doesn't want to be caught." Henri will know that what he did wasn't entirely right, but he won't thrash his soul, believing that what he did was entirely wrong. He won't see it as a reflection on his wife and how much he loves her, and perhaps then it will never become a reflection on his wife and how much he loves her.
And thus, for Anna, Henri faded, glimmering away like a mirage that disappears when the heat finally lets up.
[Editor: no doubt, some will question why I posted this. I'm not telling people to cheat on their spouses. However, we should consider whether the family norms we know are unnecessarily restrictive - and they may not be; my parents have been married 30 years and have been faithful to each other.
However, if it is OK for men to be nonmonogamous, then it is equally OK for women to do the same. It cannot be that only men can cheat - because at least 90% of the time, they will cheat with women. If only one gender's cheating is tolerated, then that creates a climate of secrecy that inhibits the propogation of safe sex practices. In an age of AIDS and STDs, that can be fatal.]
