Myths of Infidelity
Everybody is unfaithful. It's normal, expectable behavior. But the truth is most people are faithful most of the time.
By PT Staff published May 1, 1993 - last reviewed on June 9, 2016
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:
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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 unfaithful; 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. -
Affairs are 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. -
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. -
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. -
Affairs are ultimately the fault of the cuckold. Patriarchal
custom assumes that when a man screws around it must be because of his
wife's aesthetic, sexual, or emotional deficiencies. She failed him in
some way. And feminist theory has assured us that if a wife screws around
it must be because men are such assholes. Many people believe that
screwing around is a normal response to an imperfect marriage and is, by
definition, the marriage partner's fault. Friends and relatives,
bartenders, therapists, and hairdressers, often reveal their own gender
prejudices and distrust of marriage, monogamy, intimacy, and honesty,
when they encourage the infidel to put the blame on the cuckold rather
than on him or herself.One trick for avoiding personal blame and responsibility is to
blame the marriage itself (too early, too late, too soon after some
event) or some unchangeable characteristic of the partner (too old, too
tall, too ethnic, too smart, too experienced, too inexperienced). This is
both a cop-out and a dead end.One marriage partner can make the other miserable, but can't make
the other unfaithful. (The cuckold is usually not even there when the
affair is taking place.) Civilization and marriage require that people
behave appropriately however they feel, and that they take full
responsibility for their actions. "My wife drove me to it with her
nagging"; "I can't help what I do because of what my father did to me";
"She came on to me and her skirt was very short"; "I must be a sex
addict"; et cetera. Baloney! If people really can't control their sexual
behavior, they should not be permitted to run around loose.There is no point in holding the cuckold responsible for the
infidel's sexual behavior unless the cuckold has total control over the
sexual equipment that has run off the road. Only the driver is
responsible. -
It is best to pretend not to know. There are people who avoid
unpleasantness and would rather watch the house burn down than bother
anyone by yelling "Fire!" Silence fuels the affair, which can thrive only
in secrecy. Adulterous marriages begin their repair only when the secret
is out in the open, and the infidel does not need to hide any longer. Of
course, it also helps to end the affair.A corollary is the belief that infidels must deny their affairs
interminably and do all that is possible to drive cuckolds to such
disorientation that they will doubt their own sanity rather than doubt
their partner's fidelity. In actuality, the continued lying and denial is
usually the most unforgivable aspect of the infidelity.One man was in the habit of jogging each evening, but his wife
noticed that his running clothes had stopped stinking. Suspicious, she
followed him to his secretary's apartment. She burst in and confronted
her husband who was standing naked in the secretary's closet. She
demanded: "What are you doing here?" He responded: "You do not see me
here. You have gone crazy and are imagining this." She almost believed
him, and remains to this day angrier about that than about the affair
itself. Once an affair is known or even suspected, there is no safety in
denial, but there is hope in admission.I recently treated a woman whose physician husband divorced her 20
years ago after a few years of marriage, telling her that she had an odor
that was making him sick, and he had developed an allergy to her. She
felt so bad about herself she never remarried.I suspected there was more to the story, and sent her back to ask
him whether he had been unfaithful to her. He confessed that he had been,
but had tried to shield her from hurt by convincing her that he had been
faithful and true but that she was repulsive. She feels much worse about
him now, but much better about herself. She now feels free to
date. -
After an affair, divorce is inevitable. Essentially all
first-time divorces occur in the wake of an affair. With therapy though,
most adulterous marriages can be saved, and may even be stronger and more
intimate than they were before the crisis. I have rarely seen a cuckold
go all the way through with a divorce after a first affair that is now
over. Of course, each subsequent affair lowers the odds
drastically.It doesn't happen the way it does in the movies. The indignant
cuckold does scream and yell and carry on and threaten all manner of
awful things—which should not be surprising since his or her life has
just been torn asunder. But he or she quickly calms down and begins the
effort to salvage the marriage, to pull the errant infidel from the arms
of the dreaded affaire.When a divorce occurs, it is because the infidel can not escape the
affair in time or cannot face going back into a marriage in which he or
she is now known and understood and can no longer pose as the chaste
virgin or white knight spotless and beyond criticism. A New Yorker
cartoon once showed a forlorn man at a bar complaining: "My wife understands
me."Appropriate guilt is always helpful, though it must come from
inside rather than from a raging, nasty spouse; anger is a lousy
seduction technique for anyone except terminal weirdos. Guilt is good for
you. Shame, however, makes people run away and hide.The prognosis after an affair is not grim, and those who have
strayed have not lost all their value. The sadder but wiser infidel may
be both more careful and more grateful in the future.