For Sonia and Violet Keppel, their mother had ''a brilliant, goddesslike quality.'' Sonia, who grew up to be the grandmother of Camilla Parker Bowles, deliriously recalled ''the flowers sent as oblations to this goddess, the orchids, the malmaisons, the lilies. Great beribboned baskets of them, delivered in horse-drawn vans by a coachman and attendant in livery. They would have been banked in tall, cut-glass vases about her bed.'' To the over-vivid Violet, who developed a scandalous, lifelong passion for Vita Sackville-West before she was 14, her mother ''resembled a Christmas tree laden with presents for everyone.''
But to Bertie, a great warthog of a man, beringed, cigar-puffing and enormously fat, who happened to be King Edward VII, their mother was his ''favorita,'' his ''Little Mrs. George,'' whose ''alabaster skin, blue eyes, chestnut hair, large breasts, kindness and charm'' drove him to such flights of admiration that he secured a high-paying job for her husband, magicked her an investment portfolio worth tens of thousands of pounds, dressed her in gowns by Worth, diamond collars and ropes of pearls and invited her to Ascot, Sandringham and Biarritz. Throughout their very public affair, which lasted until Bertie's death, Mrs. Keppel preserved her marriage, her respectability in society and her charms. Her unluckier daughter and great-granddaughter have been tarred by amour's sloppy brush; but Mrs. Keppel, as her biographer Diana Souhami has written, ''turned adultery into an art.''
Women like Mrs. Keppel, who suck up all the Technicolor in a room and leave other women stranded in Kansas, used to lope freely across plains, hills and ballrooms like magnificent birds. They were contemplated with awe not so much for what they did -- although they did much -- but because of what they managed to have done for them. They had the knack of bending men to their will with the gentlest of pressure. They had wars fought over them, houses and villas bought, jewels, furs and silk gowns bestowed, luxurious foreign journeys bankrolled by an ever-changing band of irrepressible, lovesick swains. They were envied and criticized by women, hunted unto extinction by men who sought them as trophies.
Can they be brought back? This has been a consuming question for decades; their numbers have thinned, anthropologists suggest, as the tradition of arranged incompatible early marriages has been phased out, replaced by a haphazard system of love matches contracted by the parties themselves, which result in ever smaller numbers of dewy-complexioned, recklessly bored young women. Another theory is that the knack of stirring up the admiration that these women depended on for their sustenance was lost sometime after the death of Clare Boothe Luce, one of the last known representatives of the species -- a woman who vowed while still a schoolgirl that she would marry only a man who would worship her ''better than God'' and found so many eager to apply for the job that she couldn't marry them all. Luckily, a book has just appeared that lays bare the recipe of these women's powerful secrets. If enough women read it, there may yet be time for the Irresistible Woman to avoid going the way of the dodo.
The book, ''The Technique of the Love Affair'' (Pantheon), is a virtual cocktail shaker on paper, written by a young woman who styles herself ''A Gentlewoman,'' and it could very possibly undo the years of damage that earnest flocks of pastel volumes have worked on formerly swashbuckling female psyches.
In book after bleating book -- ''Women Who Love Too Much,'' ''Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them,'' ''101 Lies Men Tell Women,'' ''101 Reasons Why He Didn't Call You Back'' and, worst of all, that cyanide pill for female self-esteem, ''The Rules'' (Books I and II) -- gullible womanhood has been persuaded that her only hope for a life beyond house cats is to keep her eyes peeled for a good catch, avoid returning his calls, smile mysteriously and refrain from speaking when he takes her out for a burger and, in general, woo her way into his heart and his suburban condo by playing at being a ventriloquist's dummy. If she keeps mum long enough, she'll win the big lug and a gold ring to boot -- and have the satisfaction of knowing that because she is a Rules girl there'll be ''No physical abuse. . . . You don't have to worry about being battered.''
In ''The Technique of the Love Affair,'' the tactics are similar but the project is contemplated with dignity and ironic detachment instead of desperation. Marriage is not assumed to be foremost in the single woman's mind; what her soul requires is to be ''frequently, or at any rate constantly, pursued.'' Where the Rules girl seeks a clothesline of her own, the Technique woman wants frolic, Champagne, banter and devotion, although she knows that ''it is generally only in the course of a light affair that the serious one springs up.'' Still, she is a sensualist who courts experience to perfect her craft, as well as a realist who knows that ''it is useless to tell men we are independent, and then beg them to come and dance with us,'' so one might as well admit the need to scheme all along.
Blithe and bold, she proclaims the love affair desirable as an end in itself: ''Skillfully handled, it constitutes an art, a delicate and genial art, and one that inspires other arts. It is capable of yielding nothing but delight.'' But when it ends, she would prefer that practicers of the Technique be merciless and brutal, rather than understanding and communicative: ''Let your relations with men leave memories of seething fury and hatred rather than embarrassment.'' Tell that to the Rules girls who drag their boyfriends to couples therapy after five dates.The Gentlewoman teaches through the device of a Platonic dialogue, in which a sophisticate named Cypria explains modern mores to an old-fashioned girl named Saccharissa. Saccharissa recoils from Cypria's jaded advice, longing, for instance, to encourage men she likes rather than ignore them. In the end, however, she is persuaded, and blurts gratefully: ''I am eager to become guileful. Am I completely furnished for a career of wiliness?'' At last -- a self-help book for women who don't need help, not for women who are past it.
Why has such a cure been so long in coming? Well, actually, it was simply out of print. ''The Technique'' was published in 1928 by a ravishing 26-year-old newlywed named Doris Langley Moore, who was a novelist, a costume designer, a Byron scholar and a friend of George Bernard Shaw. Her book made its debut the same year as Theodore Hendrik Van de Velde's frank, helpful sex guide, ''The Perfect Marriage,'' and doubtless caused similar alarm among mothers.
Moore's task was to show how love affairs in the unchaperoned, zestful climate of the post-World War I era could be most advantageously conducted. It was ''The Technique,'' albeit a personalized version of it, that got Nora her Nick, Wallis her Edward, Zelda her Scott. (Then again, maybe it was just the gin.) The reissue has been enhanced with short, curiously satisfying end-of-chapter annotations by Norrie Epstein (also the author of ''The Friendly Shakespeare''), and delectable margin notes spice some of the choicest bits. (Moore: The wise wife will keep her husband ''dimly conscious of a sense of insecurity,'' and make him ''fear the machinations of other men'' so as to keep him ''flatteringly vigilant.'' Epstein notes at the side that Proust believed that ''a subtle threat of infidelity hovers over every successful marriage.'')
Dorothy Parker might have observed that a threat of infidelity was not entirely absent from unsuccessful marriages, either, but bitter thoughts like that one tend to haunt people who didn't read ''The Technique'' until it was too late. Reviewing Moore's book soon after publication, she ruefully concluded that if she had read it earlier she ''could have been successful instead of just successive.''
Today's American women still have time. All they have to do to seize an egret's plume of Mrs. Keppel's prerogative is to follow this simple Technique rule: ''Be sophisticated and wonderfully feminine. Be elegant and a little spoiled, but not bored. Be light, amiable, quite dissociated from care and all the common things of life.'' This is the job description of a woman who knows that the world will never run out of men who long to please demanding women, even if it briefly runs short of women who remember to make their demands known.
Is Monogamy Feasible?
Should married people deny themselves illicit trysts? A new book asks whether long-term monogamy is an impossible ideal.
We are unlikely to be able to get a grip on the notorious subject of adultery if we don’t first allow ourselves to acknowledge just how tempting and exhilarating it can be, especially after a few years of marriage and a couple of children. Before we can begin to call it “wrong”, we have to concede that it is also very often — for a time, at least — profoundly thrilling.
So let us imagine a scenario. Jim is in his office, interviewing candidates for a freelance graphic design job. He has already spent a few hours meeting a succession of young, goatee-bearded men when the final prospect arrives. Named Rachel, she’s 25 (Jim is almost 40) and is wearing a pair of jeans, trainers and a dark-green V-neck jumper over nothing much else, calling attention to her androgynous upper body. They talk of printing costs and fonts — but, of course, Jim’s thoughts are elsewhere. We would have to fear for the state of mind of the man who did not respond to this picture of youth, health and energy.
To describe what Jim wants as “sex” is severely to foreshorten the roots of his excitement. The old English synonym for the noun is unusually apt in this case for, in essence, Rachel is provoking in Jim a longing to know her; know her thighs and ankles and neck, naturally, but also her wardrobe, the titles of the books she has on her shelf, the smell of her hair after a shower, the nature of her character when she was a girl and the confidences she exchanges with her friends. Several months after Rachel’s project with his firm is finished, he is asked to go on an overnight trip to Bristol with one of his clients, staying at a Holiday Inn off the M4. Rachel, he discovers, happens to be there too. Like a first-time murderer who intuitively knows how to distribute stones in a body bag, Jim sends an e-mail to his wife, wishing her and their two children good night and warning that he may not have a chance to call her later because the evening threatens to drag on.
Rachel and Jim have a glass of wine together in the otherwise-deserted bar around midnight. Jim’s flirtation is precise and to the point. The boldness displayed by middle-aged married men when they are trying to seduce other women should never be confused with confidence; it is just the fear of death, which breeds an awareness of just how infrequently they are ever going to have the opportunity to sample such moments again. It is this that gives Jim the energy to press on in ways he never would have dared when he was young and single, when life seemed like a limitless expanse stretching out before him and he could still afford the luxury of feeling shy and self-conscious.
Their first kiss takes place in the corridor leading to the lifts. He presses her up against the wall, next to a poster advertising a discounted rate for a family stay with a free brunch for the kids on Sunday. Her tongue greets his eagerly; her body pushes rhythmically against his. This quickly enters the pantheon of the greatest moments of Jim’s life.
After he returns home from Bristol, everything continues as it was. Of course, Jim lies about the whole thing. We live in moralistic times. Our age allows most things to happen before marriage but accepts nothing much thereafter. The newspapers publish a rolling succession of stories about the sexual indiscretions of footballers and politicians, and readers’ comments on these reflect the kind of response Jim’s activity could be expected to provoke from most fellow citizens. He would be branded a cheat, a scumbag, a dog and a rat.
Let’s take the view, for a moment, that what happened between Jim and Rachel was not especially wrong. For that matter, let’s go even farther and venture that, contrary to all public verdicts on adultery, the real fault might consist in the obverse — that is, in the lack of any wish whatsoever to stray. This might be considered not only weird but wrong in the deepest sense of the word, because it is against nature. A blanket refusal to entertain adulterous possibilities would seem to represent a colossal failure of the imagination, a heedless disregard for the glorious fleshy reality of our bodies, a denial of the power that should rightly be wielded over our more rational selves by such erotic triggers as the surreptitious pressing-together of knees at the end of a restaurant meal, by high-heeled shoes and crisp blue shirts, by grey cotton underwear and Lycra shorts, by smooth thighs and muscular calves — each a sensory high point as worthy of reverence as the tiles of the Alhambra or Bach’s Mass in B minor. Wouldn’t the rejection of these temptations be itself tantamount to a sort of betrayal? Would it really be possible to trust anyone who never showed any interest at all in being unfaithful?
Society holds that married people who discover that their spouses are having affairs have every right to be furious with them and throw them out of the house, cut up their clothes and massacre their reputations in front of their friends. Adultery is seen as providing ample grounds for the cheated-upon party to feel incensed and outraged, as well as abundant cause for the cheating party to apologise in extreme ways for his or her horrid actions.
But here again, might we not suggest that, however hurt the betrayed party may feel, fury at the news of the other’s infidelity is not entirely warranted. The fact that the straying spouse has had the temerity to imagine, let alone act on, the idea that it might be of interest to push a hand inside an unfamiliar skirt or pair of trousers should not truly come as such a surprise after a decade or more of marriage. Should there really be a need to apologise for a desire that could hardly be more understandable or ordinary?
If we flip the coin, seeing marriage as the perfect answer to all our hopes for love, sex and family is naive and misguided, as is believing adultery can be an effective antidote to the disappointments of marriage. What is ultimately “wrong” with the idea of adultery, as with a certain idea of marriage, is its idealism. While it may look at first sight like a cynical and unhopeful activity to engage in, adultery in fact suggests a conviction that we might somehow magically rearrange the shortcomings of our marriage through an adventure on the side. Yet it is impossible to sleep with someone outside of marriage and not spoil the things that we care about inside it — just as it is impossible to remain faithful in a marriage and not miss out on some of life’s greatest and most important sensory pleasures.
There is no answer to the tensions of marriage, if what we mean by an “answer” is a settlement in which no party suffers a loss. Each of the three things we want in this sphere — love, sex and family — affects and harms the others in devilish ways. Loving a person may inhibit our ability to have sex with him or her. Having a secret tryst with someone we don’t love but do find attractive can endanger our relationship with the spouse we love but are no longer turned on by. Having children can imperil both love and sex, and yet neglecting the kids to focus on our marriage or our sexual thrills may threaten the health and mental stability of the next generation. Periodically, frustration breeds an impulse to seek a utopian solution to this mess. Perhaps an open marriage would work, we think.
Or a policy of secrets. Or a renegotiation of our contract on a yearly basis. Or more childcare. All such strategies are fated to fail, however, for the simple reason that loss is written into the rules of the situation. If we sleep around, we will put at risk our spouse’s love and the psychological health of our children. If we don’t sleep around, we will go stale and miss out on the excitement of new relationships.
If we keep an affair secret, it will corrode us inside and stunt our capacity to receive another’s love. If we confess to infidelity, our partner will panic and never get over our sexual adventures (even if they meant nothing to us). If we focus all our energies on our children, they will eventually abandon us to pursue their own lives, leaving us wretched and lonely. But if we ignore our children in favour of our own romantic pursuits, we will scar them and earn their unending resentment. Marriage is thus like a bed sheet that can never be straightened: when we seek to perfect or ameliorate one side of it, we may succeed only in wrinkling and disturbing the others.
What more realistic mindset, then, might we take with us into a marriage? What kinds of vows might we need? Certainly something far more cautionary and downbeat than the usual platitudes would be in order, such as: “I promise to be disappointed by you and you alone. I promise to make you the sole repository of my regrets, rather than to distribute them widely through multiple affairs and a life of sexual Don Juanism. I have surveyed the different options for unhappiness, and it is you I have chosen to commit myself to.” These are the sorts of generously pessimistic and kindly unromantic promises that couples should make to each other at the altar. Thereafter, an affair would be a betrayal only of a reciprocal pledge to be disappointed in a particular way, not of an unrealistic hope.
When the idea of a love-based marriage took hold in the 18th century, it replaced an older and more prosaic rationale for betrothal, whereby couples got married because they had both reached the proper age, found they could stand the sight of each other, were keen not to offend both sets of parents and their neighbours, had a few assets to protect and wished to raise a family. The bourgeoisie’s new philosophy, by contrast, legitimated only one reason for marriage: deep love. This condition was understood to comprise a variety of hazy but totemic sensations and sentiments, including the lovers’ being unable to bear being out of each other’s sight, their each being physically aroused by the other’s appearance, their being certain that their minds were in perfect tune with each other, their wanting to read poetry to each other by moonlight and their desiring to fuse their souls together into one. In other words, marriage shifted from being an institution to being the consecration of a feeling, from being an externally sanctioned rite of passage to being an internally motivated response to an emotional state.
Justifying the shift in the eyes of its modern defenders was a newly intense dread of “inauthenticity”, a psychological phenomenon whereby a person’s inner feelings differed from those expected of him or her by the outer world. What the old school would have respectfully called “putting on a show” was now recategorised as “lying”, while “faking things to be polite” was more melodramatically recast as “betraying oneself”. This emphasis on achieving congruence between inner and outer selves required strict new qualifications about what a decent marriage would have to entail. To feel only intermittent affection for a spouse, to have mediocre sex six times a year, to keep a marriage going for the wellbeing of the children — such compromises were considered abdications of any claim to be fully human.
As young adults, most of us start out by feeling an intuitive respect for the idea of a love-based marriage. Yet as we get older, we will usually begin to wonder whether the whole thing might not be just a fantasy dreamt up by a group of adolescent-minded authors and poets a few hundred years ago. Such a re-evaluation may be prompted by an awareness of how chaotic and misleading our feelings can be. There are times when we feel sufficiently angry with our spouse that we would be happy to see him or her knocked down by a car; but ten minutes later, we may be reminded that we would die rather than go on alone. The defenders of feeling-based marriage venerate emotions for their sincerity and authenticity, but they are able to do so only because they avoid looking too closely at what actually floats through most people’s emotional kaleidoscopes in any given period: all the contradictory, sentimental and hormonal forces that pull us in a hundred often crazed and inconclusive directions. To honour every one of our emotions would be to annul any chance of leading a coherent life. We are chaotic chemical propositions, in dire need of basic principles that we can adhere to during our brief rational spells. We should feel grateful for, and protected by, the knowledge that our external circumstances are often out of line with what we feel; it is a sign that we are probably on the right course.
In a well-judged marriage, spouses should not blame each other for occasional infidelities; instead they should feel proud that, for the most part, they have managed to remain committed to their union. Too many people start off in relationships by putting the moral emphasis in the wrong place, smugly mocking the urge to stray as if it were something disgusting and unthinkable. But in truth, it is the ability to stay that is both wondrous and worthy of honour, though it is too often simply taken for granted and deemed the normal state of affairs. That a couple should be willing to watch their lives go by from within the cage of marriage, without acting on outside sexual impulses, is a miracle of civilisation and kindness for which both ought to feel grateful every day. Spouses who remain faithful to each other should recognise the scale of the sacrifice they are making for their love and for their children, and should feel proud of their valour. There is nothing normal or particularly pleasant about sexual enunciation. Fidelity deserves to be considered an achievement and constantly praised — ideally with some medals and the sounding of a public gong — rather than discounted as an unremarkable norm whose undermining by an affair should provoke spousal rage. A loyal marriage ought to retain within it an awareness of the immense forbearance and generosity that the two parties are mutually showing in managing not to sleep around (and, for that matter, in refraining from killing each other). If one partner should happen to slip, the other might forgo fury in favour of a certain bemused amazement at the stretches of fidelity and calm that the two of them have otherwise succeeded in maintaining against such great odds.
As devastating experiences go, few events can match the emotional havoc following the discovery that one's partner is having an affair. Atop a suddenly shattered world hover pain and rejection, doubts about one's worth, and, most searingly, the rupture of trust. For Deanna Stahling, discovery struck in a hallucinatory moment that forever fractured time into Before and After. She had just stepped off a plane from the Caribbean after a week's vacation with a family friend and picked up a copy of the city's leading newspaper. There, in the lifestyles section, was a profile of a top woman executive whose name Deanna had heard a lot lately—her husband worked with the woman. Deanna had even met her—introduced by her husband a few weeks earlier at a corporate function. The exec, it was reported, was leaving the company so that she could ethically pursue a relationship with a colleague.
Deanna doesn't remember the trip home from the airport, but the house was empty and her husband's belongings were gone. A denuded bookshelf highlighted now-missing Giants memorabilia. A note on the kitchen table advised her - after 25 years, two newly fledged kids, and the recent purchase of a joint cemetery plot - to refer any questions to his attorney.
The next morning found Deanna sobbing in a therapist's office. Together they began the search for the source of the sudden defection. Like most therapists (and indeed, most everyone else), they subscribed implicitly to a deficit model of affairs: the presumption that there were fatal problems in the relationship.
Over the past several years, however, leading thinkers have begun to abandon such a pathologizing approach. No one doubts that a straying partner is alone responsible for the often disastrous decision to engage in infidelity. But a new, more nuanced perspective that puts far more emphasis on contextual and situational factors has sparked a revolution in understanding and handling affairs. The new approach encourages as a matter of course what happens now only by chance—complete recovery without any feelings being swept under the rug and even fortification of the couple bond.
The Shifting Landscape of Illicit Love
No one knows for sure just how common affairs are. Social desirability and fear of disclosure skew survey responses significantly. In 1994, 77 percent of 3,432 people constituting a representative sample of Americans declared that extramarital sex is always wrong (although the vast majority of people also have fantasies of engaging in an affair). And the number is actually growing. Today, over 90 percent of respondents deem sexual straying unacceptable - and expect sexual monogamy.
Still, decades of studies show that affairs are common, and, at least historically, more so among men than women: Among American couples, 20 to 40 percent of heterosexual married men and 10 to 25 percent of heterosexual married women will have an affair during their lifetime. In any given year, 1.5 to 4 percent of married individuals engage in an affair.
The newest surveys also reveal a very notable shift in the demographics of deception. Among younger cohorts—those under 45—the rates of infidelity among men and women are converging. Psychologists and sociologists attribute the development to huge changes in sheer opportunity, particularly the massive movement of women out of the home and into the workplace; studies show that the majority of individuals engaged in an affair met their lover at work. The rising financial power of women renders them less risk-averse, because they are less dependent on a spouse for support. As for a longstanding belief that men are more instinctually inclined to sexual infidelity than women are? Well, it's now far more of an open question.
That doesn't mean there are no gender differences in affairs. For women, infidelity is thought to be driven more by emotional needs and is most likely when they are not satisfied in their marital relationship, especially when it is not a partnership of equals. For men, infidelity has long been more independent of the state of the marital relationship. The pioneering psychologist Shirley Glass first reported in 1985 that among individuals engaging in infidelity, 56 percent of men and 34 percent of women rate their marriage as "happy" or "very happy." However, some of these differences may be disappearing, too. In 2003, just before she died, Glass reported that 74 percent of men were emotionally (as well as sexually) involved with their affair partner.
While the landscape of illicit love has been shifting, the therapeutic world has remained fairly fixed in the belief that affairs occur because something is radically wrong with the marriage. Make no mistake—most couples stay and want to stay together after a partner has strayed, despite the enormous psychic trauma to the uninvolved spouse. And indeed, 70 percent of couples choose to rebuild the relationship after infidelity, although they may not know how. Even couples for whom the violation is so painful or incomprehensible that divorce seems the only alternative often later regret a decision made in the highly disorienting days after discovery.
Studies indeed show that relationship dissatisfaction is associated with engaging in extramarital sex. But there's evidence that in almost two-thirds of cases, marital problems are the effect, not the cause, of extramarital involvements. Further, affairs themselves skew perceptions of the marriage. Once infidelity has occurred, partners tend to look back on their primary relationship and see it as having been flawed all along—an attempt to reduce cognitive dissonance.
Focusing attention exclusively on relationship flaws, say the field's leading thinkers, encourages couples to get psychologically stuck, brooding on the emotional betrayal and assigning blame. There is no statute of limitations on the hurt and anger that follow a partner's affair. But for the sake of dampening emotional volatility, injured partners are often rushed into "moving on," burying distrust and resentments that fester underground, sometimes for decades, forever precluding restoration of closeness.
Context, Context, Context
Affairs, says Washington, D.C., psychologist Barry McCarthy, are "the absolutely best example of behavior being multicausal, multidimensional. There are many contributing factors. Sometimes they have nothing to do with the marriage. The most common reason for an affair is high opportunity. People fall into affairs rather than plan them." Another very common cause of affairs, he observes, is that "people do not feel desired and desirable in their marriage, and they want to see if they can be desired and desirable outside it." For others, he notes, the affair is a symptom of a mental health problem like alcohol abuse or bipolar disorder.
But unless all contributing elements are openly discussed and their meaning evaluated by both partners together, injured partners cannot regain the sense of security that allows them to forgive a straying spouse and rebuild trust in their mate. "The reality is that it takes two people to continue a marriage but only one to terminate a marriage," says McCarthy.
By far the biggest predictor of affairs, experts agree, is sheer opportunity—how people vary in access and desirability to others. And the workplace is the great benefactor, providing large numbers of people with constant contact, common interests, an income to camouflage the costs of socializing outside the office, and an ironclad excuse.
In a study of more than 4,000 adults, reported in the Journal of Family Psychology, Donald Baucom and colleagues found that both income and employment status are indices of opportunity for affairs. "Income may not be the critical variable in itself," they offer. "Individuals with higher incomes might be considered to have higher status, to travel more, or to interact professionally with more appealing individuals." In their study, those who worked but whose spouses did not were the most likely to report being unfaithful. Opportunity at the office is most ominous when it mixes with a disparity in relationship power at home.
Travel is way up there, researchers find, especially work-related travel. "Lots of elements go into that," says Kristina Coop Gordon, professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee. "You're away from your partner, maybe even missing your mate, and you're in situations where you're encountering plenty of people," Gordon explains. "It certainly facilitates one-night stands." Companies that employ large cohorts of young people, especially those who socialize together after work, create an environment for affairs.
No one profession has a lock on infidelity, Gordon maintains. Most relevant is the culture within a company. "Really macho cultures, which often exist in drug enforcement and police work, can involve a 'player' phenomenon where you need to show how virile you are. They are the clearest examples of work environments that foster infidelity that I've seen."
Duplicity also has a downtown address. Living in the midst of a city abets infidelity. Not only is there exposure to large numbers of potential partners, there's more opportunity to escape detection. The larger the city one lives in, researchers have found, the greater the likelihood of an affair.
Attending religious services is generally a deterrent to infidelity, perhaps because it embeds people in a social network that promotes accountability. But it helps only those who are already happy in their relationship. If the primary relationship is less than ideal, then dissatisfaction overrides religious values. Rates of infidelity do not differ by denomination.
Education increases the propensity to infidelity. It may be a marker for more liberal attitudes toward sexuality and permissive attitudes toward adultery. Ditto a history of divorce, or having parents who divorced, especially if either one had an extramarital involvement. Women with more education than their husbands have more affairs, perhaps because they are less dependent on a spouse.
Friendships are a factor in infidelity. Peer groups may sanction or even encourage it, researchers have found. Those who engage in extramarital involvements estimate a higher prevalence of affairs in their community than those who don't and believe their friends would be relatively approving. Separate his and her friendship networks are especially risky. One way of avoiding infidelity is to share a spouse's social network. Befriending a partner's family proves particularly protective. In one study it was linked to a 26 percent decrease in the odds of sexual infidelity.
Personality differences between partners play a role as well. Spouses who are comfortable with conflict and more or less matched on that trait are less likely to have affairs, perhaps because they are most open to airing marital concerns and dissatisfactions with each other.
In general, openness is protective and a characteristic of noncheaters. Associated with intelligence, creativity, curiosity, and insightfulness, openness makes partners more satisfied with the relationship and better able to express feelings, including love. Some researchers believe that openness is essential to commitment to and enduring satisfaction in a relationship.
Low levels of agreeableness (the tendency to be compassionate and cooperative) bode poorly for monogamy. More important, however, is whether couples are matched on that trait. Spouses who see themselves as more agreeable than their mate believe themselves to be more giving, feel exploited by their partner, and seek reciprocity through outside relationships. Many studies show that a high level of neuroticism also inclines individuals to infidelity, independent of a partner's personality.
Psychological problems factor in, too. Affairs, associated with insecurity and having low self-esteem, can be a way of seeking reassurance of desirability or of combating depression. An affair certainly provides an arousing stimulus that is an antidote, however temporary, to feeling down. Then, too, affairs are also linked to high self-regard, a sense of one's own attractiveness or entitlement, or may be the accompaniment to narcissism.
Situations that deplete self-control—exposure to alcohol, an exhausting day of travel, doing highly challenging work—raise the risk of infidelity. They disable sexual restraint, psychologists Roy Baumeister and Matthew Gailliot have found. The two manipulated self-control by giving subjects cognitively demanding or simple word puzzles before presenting them with purely hypothetical scenarios testing their willingness to engage in infidelity. The more demanding the tasks, the more depleted self-control, the more subjects were unable to inhibit their inclination to infidelity or to stifle sexual thoughts. Of course, hypothetical infidelity is a long way from landing in bed with someone.
Hypocrisy or Hormones?
The very make-up of the human brain contributes to affairs, too, observes anthropologist Helen Fisher. She has shown in brain-imaging studies that there are separate neural systems for sex drive, romantic love, and attachment, and they can operate independently. "Everyone starts out in marriage believing they will not have an affair. Why do data from around the world consistently show that infidelity occurs even among people who are happy in their marriage? You can feel deep attachment to a partner but also feel intense romantic love for someone else while also feeling a desire for sex with other partners," she observes.
The attachment system, fueled by the neurohormones oxytocin in females and vasopressin in males, drives animals, including humans, to pair-bond to rear their offspring as a team. Both hormones are triggered by orgasm, and both trigger dopamine release in reward regions of the brain. But all animals cheat, even when they form pair bonds. In most mammals, the bond lasts only as long as it takes to rear the young. Among prairie voles, science's favorite model of monogamy, knocking out the gene that codes for vasopressin receptors abolishes their penchant for pair-bonding. And implanting it in their notoriously promiscuous cousins, the mountain voles, leads the males to fixate on a specific female partner even when alluring others are abundantly available.
More recently, in a study of over 500 men, Swedish researchers found that variations in a gene that codes for vasopressin receptors in humans influences the very ability to form monogamous relationships. Men with two copies of a specific gene variant scored significantly lower on a questionnaire known as the Partner Bonding Scale and reported twice as many marital crises in the past year. Those with two copies of the variant were also twice as likely to be involved in outside relationships and far less likely to have ever been married than those not carrying the allele.
"Monogamy does not mean sexual fidelity. That is a separate issue," says Fisher. In fact, scientists increasingly speak of "social monogamy" to distinguish promise from promiscuity. If we are monogamous, we are also just as predictably adulterous. What's more, people jeopardize their family, their health, their safety, their social standing, their financial well-being for affairs—and violate their own strong beliefs.
Monogamy may be the norm in human culture, but it is only part of the human reproductive repertoire, contends Fisher. "We humans have a dual reproductive strategy," she argues. "We regularly appear to express a combination of lifelong (or serial) social monogamy and, in many cases, clandestine adultery."
Despite its many risks, and sometimes because of them, there are big payoffs for infidelity, Fisher argues. For men especially, genetic variation is the most obvious. But she believes that women benefit, too. Infidelity may provide a "back-up mate" to offer protection and resources when the regular guy is not around. And women may use affairs as a way of "trading up" to find a more desirable partner. It's possible, too, that infidelity can serve a positive role in relationships—as a way to gain attention from one's primary partner or to signal that there are problems in the relationship that need attending to.
In a study reported in 2010 in PLoS One, Justin Garcia, a postdoctoral fellow at Binghamton University, outlined another payoff—pure, passionate thrill. He found that individuals with a variant of a dopamine receptor gene were more likely than those without it to have a history of "uncommitted sex, one-night stands, and adultery." The motivation, he says, "stems from a system of pleasure and reward." Fisher suspects that's just the tip of the infidelity iceberg, and more biological contributors are likely to be identified in future studies.
From Angry Victim to Proud Survivor
One of the great facts of infidelity is that it has such a wildly different emotional impact on the marital partners. The uninvolved partner is deeply traumatized and emotionally distraught over the betrayal, and desperately trying to piece together what happened. The straying partner, often because of deep shame, may get defensive and shut down or blame the spouse for not moving on, only compounding the hurt. One needs to talk about what happened; the other can't bear to. "It's as if one of them is speaking German, the other is speaking Greek, and they're not speaking English to each other," McCarthy says.
Getting them on the same track of understanding is the key to recovery from affairs, says Gordon, who along with Baucom and Douglas Snyder, professor of psychology at Texas A&M, has sparked the revolution in treating infidelity not only by focusing on the many contributing factors but by developing the first empirically validated model of recovery. As detailed in their book, Getting Past the Affair, the first step is for both spouses to recognize the huge emotional impact on the uninvolved partner. Gordon and company have found a powerful device: After encouraging the partners to make no decisions about the future in the immediate aftermath of discovery or disclosure, they ask that the cheated-on partner write a letter to the spouse describing what the hurt feels like.
"The cheating partner must hear, no matter how discomfiting it is," says Gordon. "The experience is very intense and usually a turning point. Partners begin to soften towards each other. It's a demonstration to the injured partner that he or she really matters."
Then together the spouses search for the meaning of the affair by exploring how the choice was made and what contributed to it. Everything is fair game—attitudes and expectations about marriage that each partner has, conflicts and anything else going on in the relationship, hidden desires, personal anxieties and insecurities, needs for excitement, the closeness and distance they feel, job demands, work ambience, flirtations, opportunities, the people and pressures around them at home and outside it. The approach short-circuits the often misguided inclination to focus on The Other Person.
From understanding flows forgiveness, which allows partners to become close again. Wild as the reaction to discovery of a partner's affair can be in the beginning, Gordon welcomes it. "At least it provides the opportunity to interact around the pain. What often happens with the 'nice' couples," she says, "is they stay together but lead parallel lives marked by great distance. There's no bond anymore."
Renewing Romance
Barry McCarthy gives the revolution in recovery from affairs another twist all his own—re-eroticizing the marriage. "A couple has to develop a new sexual style" that facilitates sexual desire both in and out of the bedroom, he says. The point is to abolish the inclination to compare marital sex with affair sex—a hopeless cause as affair partners don't have to contend with sick kids and other realities of life, and the illicitness of the liaison intensifies excitement—but to compare marital sex before the affair and after it.
For the vast majority of American couples today, sexual satisfaction plummets at the birth of the first child and reemerges, if at all, after the last child leaves home. Of course, it doesn't have to be that way. Admittedly, McCarthy says, "it's a balancing act for partners to maintain their sense of who they are as individuals, their sense of being a couple, and being parents and sexual people." But in the long run, it's in everyone's best interest. Most contemporary couples, he laments, treat sexuality with benign neglect—until an affair sets off a crisis.
In healthy marriages, sex plays what he deems "a relatively small part, a 15 to 20 percent part"—but it energizes the whole bond and allows each partner to feel desired and desirable. When couples abandon sex, they wind up draining the entire relationship of its vitality. "You not only lose the marriage connection but your sense of self," McCarthy finds. "An affair can be an attempt to regain a sense of self."
So McCarthy puts great effort into reconnecting partners both emotionally and physically. He focuses on "nondemand pleasure." "We try to reintroduce the idea of touching inside and outside the bedroom, clothed and not clothed, valuing sensual and playful touch. It can be a bridge to intercourse, but there's no demand that it has to go to intercourse." He encourages couples to find a mutually acceptable level of intimacy and come up with their own erotic scenarios.
Pacts of Prevention
Because good intentions do not prove good enough, McCarthy takes postaffair repair one step further—asking couples to create an explicit pact to prevent future infidelity by either of them. Together, they lay out the terms for disclosing when their interest is straying. Having painfully reached an understanding of the complex personal, marital, and situational vulnerabilities that led to an affair, couples draft a relapse prevention agreement.
The purpose is to rob any future affair of its spontaneity and its emotional and sexual secrecy. Both partners are encouraged to articulate the types of situation, mood, and person that could draw them into an affair—and to share that information with each other.
Then they commit to alert the spouse if they are in a high-risk situation and to discuss it rather than act on it. As an incentive, the agreement, drawing on recent experience, spells out the emotional costs to both parties of an affair. Because the secrecy and cover-up of infidelity are often more damaging than the defection itself, partners agree that, if there is a sexual incident, they will disclose it within 72 hours. And it works, McCarthy finds.
The pact of prevention embodies a principle Helen Fisher enunciates most succinctly: "Predisposition isn't predestination." Six years after her disorienting discovery, Deanna is remarried; her new husband shares her taste for travel and adventure. She can talk dispassionately (with close friends) about the thin spots that likely existed all along in her first marriage. She understands how her frequent travels as a consultant, although they never tempted her to stray, carried intimations of abandonment for her more anxious ex. And how, under the circumstances, his conversations with an attentive female coworker could have evolved from the collegial to the confidential almost imperceptibly over the course of a year. But there's one question that still nags at her: Why, when their marriage was about to blow apart, did her husband insist that they share eternity by purchasing a joint burial plot? She'll probably never know.
The Other Woman
She might be history's most reviled female. Or most misunderstood. She isn't all she's cracked up to be. Sex with her is generally no better than sex in the marriage. And she's not likely to be a bombshell. The most you can say for sure is that she's different from the wife, and that may be all some cheaters need. Most male affairs, which is to say most affairs, are excursions of opportunity with little emotional investment. Worth crying over, yes. But not necessarily worth bringing the house down. Fewer than 25 percent of cheaters leave a marriage for an affair partner, and those relationships are statistically extremely unlikely to endure.
However much the mystery woman incites rage and envy and dreams of malevolence, she falls short of the self-destructive comparisons made against her.
Usually, says University of Tennessee psychologist Kristina Coop Gordon, fixation on the other woman and desire for details about her are not what they seem. "It's really a test of the straying spouse by the wounded one: 'Will you be open with me about the affair?' They really don't want to know the gory details; either it will spark a fight or make them feel bad. The wounded spouse just wants proof that she's important enough."
Sometimes, however, the other woman won't let go. She may threaten retaliation or self-harm. On the other hand, the involved spouse may do a miserable job of setting firm boundaries and not make a clean break of it. "Some men are not quite letting go themselves," Gordon finds. "And they're sending mixed messages to the other woman, which both she and the wife pick up on. That may be one reason a wounded wife can become obsessed with the other woman; there's a continuing threat."
Power and Infidelity
There’s certainly been no shortage of news headlines proclaiming that we can now add former CIA director General David Petraeus to the list of powerful men who have been brought down by very well-publicized sex scandals. It’s particularly dismaying to see how many of these headlines are broadly asserting, as news outlet headlines often do in these situations, that there must be some sort of inextricable link between power, masculinity, and infidelity. These claims imply (or sometimes even explicitly state) that there’s something inherent about masculinity that leads powerful men to behave unethically, whereas powerful women would never fall victim to such an effect. Fact is, that kind of generalization is simply not fair at all – nor is it even really accurate.
What’s Wrong With All The Men?
Based on the cultural lexicon, it certainly seems like men are the only ones messing up. However, blaming infidelity on Masculinity Gone Wild is incredibly short-sighted, for one glaring reason: Many of the societies in which these men are cheating also happen to be awful when it comes to gender equality, which makes it next to impossible to tease biological or evolutionary influences apart from cultural ones.
There have been many studies looking at the effects of power or status on risky, unethical, or selfish behavior, and these studies don’t show any moderated differences in the link between power and unethical behavior based on gender. Increases in power or status usually lead to action, risk-taking, cheating, and decreased prosociality across the board, whether you’re male or female. In fact, one recent study in Psychological Science specifically looked at infidelity as a dependent variable, and revealed that higher levels of power are linked to higher levels of reported & intended infidelity…in both men and women. Once you control for power, gender makes no difference in infidelity rates. The more power a man or woman possesses, the more likely he/she is to report cheating in the past or intending to cheat in the future.
Herein lies the main flaw with many people’s “women + power = totally moral, men + power = inevitable infidelity” arguments: Men and women have basic biological differences that might influence behavioral patterns, but they have basic cultural differences as well. Evolutionary theorists have proposed plenty of biologically based explanations for higher rates of male infidelity, most of which revolve around the Darwinian logic of differential reproductive strategies (e.g. men are motivated to mate with as many women as possible to spread their seed, whereas women are motivated to bond with a single partner to increase the likelihood that he will invest his resources in their children).
The problem with this explanation, though it feels intuitively appealing, is that we don’t live in a world where our behavior would be singularly determined by biology. In cultures where women don’t have as many opportunities to obtain the same jobs or salaries as men, they have historically had to rely on husbands (or fathers) for economic survival – a situational complication that most men throughout history have simply not had to face.
When your marital partner is your financial lifeline, there’s a lot more to lose if you get caught between the sheets with someone else; the risks don’t really outweigh the benefits as well as they might for the partner making more money, who would hardly suffer as much economically if the marriage were to be dissolved. When people claim that “men are more likely to cheat than women,” they should really just be claiming that “powerful people are more likely to cheat than less-powerful people.” It’s impossible to disentangle gender and power when you live in a culture that conflates the two so profoundly.
This idea was supported by yet another Psychological Science paper published earlier this year on gender differences in mate preference throughout different cultures around the world. In countries like Iran, Japan, and Nigeria, where there is significant societal gender inequality (as measured by the Gender Gap Index, which measures a nation’s gender-based differences in access to important opportunities and resources2), you see the evolutionarily expected differences in mate preference, with men preferring more stereotypical qualities in women (e.g. attractiveness and chastity) and women preferring more stereotypical qualities in men (e.g. money and status).
In countries like Sweden, Norway, and Finland, on the other hand, gender disparities are far less common – and the “evolutionary” gender differences in mate preferences (which, remember, are often proposed as the root of the reason why power and increased status/resources would lead men, but not women, to cheat) shrink down to a level where they almost disappear entirely. It’s not that people don’t value attractiveness, money, or status when looking for romantic partners. Rather, it’s that you don’t see sex differences emerging systematically in their choices.
In countries that come closer to approximating true gender equality, women are just as likely as men to prioritize physical attractiveness, and men are just as likely as women to want a partner who’s intelligent and/or wealthy. When we do observe gender differences in mate preferences, it’s not a function of biology – it’s a function of culture. If there were truly a biological, hormonal, or evolutionary reason why powerful men should be more likely to exhibit “reproductive strategies” that revolve around having sex with a ton of people and powerful women should not, you should see these types of gender-based mate preferences reliably emerging across cultures. Or, at the very least, you should not see them emerging only in the cultures that would also be predicted to create them.
What does Barack Obama have in common with asthma?
The conflation of power and masculinity is not the only way in which we may have been tricked into seeing a correlation that doesn’t truly exist. Some common mental shortcuts (or heuristics) that help us act efficiently in our everyday lives can also end up backfiring in somewhat predictable ways, leading us to draw erroneous conclusions about our social worlds that don’t accurately represent reality. For example, our perceptions of reality often fail to account for the fact that when powerful men aren’t messing up, no one really cares about their personal lives. After all, had you read anything in the news prior to this week about the well being of General Petraeus’s marriage?
This uneven media coverage creates a false sense of frequency, which contributes to an effect that Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman termed the availability heuristic in their classic Science paper on cognitive biases. A great example of the availability heuristic is the fact that people are typically far more worried about dying in a plane crash than a car accident. It’s not because the plane crashes happen more often; on the contrary, car accidents are much more common, and kill far more people than plane crashes per year. But because people see plane crashes more often in the news, it’s easier to recall salient examples of fatal plane crashes than fatal car accidents, which makes you overestimate how often they actually happen. This effect was empirically demonstrated in 1978, when a team of researchers asked participants to guess how many people died each year from various different causes.
As it turns out, people far overestimated the frequency of rare, newsworthy events that stood out and merited extensive news coverage, and underestimated the fatality of media-unfriendly causes. For example, homicide, despite being 23% less frequent than suicide, was reported in the news 9.6 times as often; sure enough, participants were far more likely to think that more people died per year from murder than from suicide. And, in one of the most drastic examples, participants typically assumed that people were more likely to die from tornadoes than from asthma, and rated asthma as only slightly more probable of a killer than botulism; in reality, asthma was 20 times more likely to kill someone than a tornado, and over 900 times more likely than botulism.
In much the same way that the news won’t report many asthma-related fatalities, newscasters also won’t typically waste their airtime talking about all of the powerful men who aren’t doing anything particularly scandalous. Most of the time (aside from election season, when every aspect of a politician’s personal life becomes news fodder, no matter how dull) we don’t really see headlines proclaiming, “Barack and Michelle: Still Happily Married.” It’s simply not that interesting. This bias may make for more intriguing nightly news reports, but it also creates a world where we overestimate just how often power and scandal are correlated; we then fail to correct these perceptions by factoring in all of the times when a) powerful people do not engage in scandalous acts (no one cares about those acts), and b) powerless people do engage in scandalous acts (no one cares about those people).
So next time you see a pundit crying out about the sins and scandals of powerful men, just remember: This association is a stronger demonstration of misunderstanding than maleness.
Xmas Texts
Ayesha Vardag, who has acted in a string of multi-million pound separations, said she has noticed a marked rise in the number of break-ups stemming from text messages and calls on Christmas Day.
She said that Christmas Day “text message bustings” had become an increasingly common feature in divorce cases as mobile phones have ceased to be a novelty and using them increasingly second nature.
Where once the task of proving suspicions might have involved hotel bills and checking for telltale perfumes on clothing, now a quick check of mobile phone histories and email accounts have become the norm.
Some law firms have previously claimed that they see an annual surge in the number of inquiries about divorces when their offices reopen for the New Year.
The theory is that spending days in each other’s company, often accompanied by alcohol, leads to more arguments.
But Miss Vardag, who acted for the German heiress Katrin Radmacher in her £100 million divorce case, said that she usually sees more inquiries in September, after couples return from acrimonious holidays in each other’s company.
“There is a psychological sense of Christmas being the barometer of how a family is doing.
“But the other thing we find a lot is that there are a lot of text message ‘bustings’ on Christmas Day, usually because the husband leaves the phone around and the mistress is sending messages.
“We see that a lot … it is amazing how many times that is what catches people out.”
She added: “It has just become very obvious and transparent.
“Husbands will go off and call the mistress and then the wife will wonder where they were or who they were calling, they will either find the number on there or the text message.
“I do wonder whether there is an element of people wanting to get caught because it is an easier way of dealing with it than saying that they want to leave.
“When people are discovered in adultery, rather than coming clean and saying that they are in a relationship, it tends to be through mobile phones and emails.”
Cuckoldry
In Father Ted the babies all resemble Craggy Island’s hairy milkman, while in South Park male inhabitants suspect the delivery man is having his wicked way with their wives.
The fear of cuckoldry is not new, but now scientists have examined 400 years of data to test how often men bring up another man’s child .
The study in Belgium found a “cuckoldry rate” of 1-2 per cent — much lower than the frequently cited figure of 10 per cent.
Maarten Larmuseau, a geneticist at the University of Leuven, who led the study, said that claims of high paternity mismatches did not make sense from an evolutionary point of view. “Males invest a lot in children so they have to be sure that they are the biological father,” he said.
Previously, much higher figures have been suspected, based on the rates of non-paternity among husbands and partners taking paternity tests. However, such studies have been criticised for providing biased samples, given that the chances of a mismatch are greater among those who feel they have reason for suspicion.
“People who are suspicious, that’s a whole other story,” Dr Larmuseau said. “The rates are definitely higher for people who already have problems to be sure whether they are the father or not.” Previous research has shown that men who commission a DNA paternity test have roughly a one-third chance of the child not being their own.
The latest study, published in the journal Biological Sciences, compared birth records and genetic profiles of 1,500 people in Flanders. All the participants had a paternal ancestor born in Flanders before 1800.
Scientists identified 60 pairs of men who shared a common ancestor on the paternal line dating back between six and 31 generations, according to official birth records.
Everyone inherits two sets of genetic material — one from each parent — but in men, the Y-chromosome comes only from the father. This means that if the birth records were correct, the pairs of men ought to carry the same genetic sequence on their Y-chromosome.
The study found that 52 of the 60 pairs did have common Y-chromosomes, translating to a 1 per cent cuckoldry rate once the total number of generations was taken into account.
In a second part of the study, researchers studied the Y-chromosomes of men whose ancestors moved to Flanders from two regions of France. Again, the data showed that 1-2 per cent of children had been born to men different from those on their birth record.
“Apart from being relevant to fathers, some people worry about whether genealogy is biologically meaningful and this shows that for most people, it is,” Dr Larmuseau said.
Even Happily-Marrieds have Affairs
We would all like to believe that affairs are the refuge of the discontented, that only people in unhappy marriages cheat. But “happy,” it turns out, is not a sufficient antidote to affair.
We may be in a golden age of marriage, when elites at least are more likely to report that their marriages are “very happy” than ever before. But the tight, companionable, totally merged nature of the modern marriage is one of the factors pushing people in happy marriages to have affairs, according to therapist Esther Perel. In a recent New York Times profile, Perel is described as the nation’s “sexual healer,” an updated Dr. Ruth. She is the author of Mating in Captivity, which argues that in seeking total comfort, the modern marriage might be squashing novelty and adventure, which are so critical for a sexual charge. She is now working on a new book, provisionally called Affairs in the Age of Transparency, which she considers a sequel, a picture of what the stifling marriage might lead to.
I recently met with Perel in the downtown New York apartment she shares with her husband and two sons. In person, the only thing she has in common with Dr. Ruth is a strong accent, which in Perel’s case is a combination of French and Israeli. She was raised in Antwerp, Belgium, and has lived all over the world, which leads her to regard many American assumptions about affairs to be priggish and provincial. These days, Perel accepts only patients who are involved in affairs, and the vast majority of them, she says, are “content” in their marriages. In fact in surveys that ask adulterers whether they want to leave their marriages, the majority say no. Her book, still very much a work in progress, will be about “people who love each other and are having affairs,” she says, and what that paradox says about the rest of our marriages.
Slate: What do you mean by the age of transparency?
Perel: Transparency is the whole culture. The way a regular person tells everything about themselves on television. The way technology allows us to find out anything—99 percent of the people I see, their affairs are discovered through email or phones. But transparency is also our organizing principle of closeness these days. I will tell you everything, and if I don’t tell you it means I don’t trust you or I have a secret. It doesn’t mean I choose to keep certain things to myself because they are private. Privacy is the endangered species in between two extremes of secrecy and transparency.
Slate: Isn’t the closeness between partners good? Wouldn’t it lead to fewer affairs?
Perel: We have this idea that our partner is our best friend, that there is one person who will fulfill all our needs, which is really an extraordinary idea! So by definition, people must transgress because something is missing at home. We think, if you had what you needed at home, you wouldn’t want to go anywhere else, instead of thinking that marriage is at best an imperfect arrangement.
“It isn’t so much that we want to leave the person we are with as we want to leave the person we have become.”
Slate: It isn’t true that people transgress because something is actually missing?
Perel: We don’t know the exact numbers because people lie about sex and 10 times more about adultery. But the vast majority of people we come into contact with in our offices are content in their marriages. They are longtime monogamists who one day cross a line into a place they never thought they would go. They remain monogamous in their beliefs, but they experience a chasm between their behavior and their beliefs. And what I am going to really investigate in depth is why people are sometimes willing to lose everything, for a glimmer of what?
Slate: And what’s your best guess from your research so far?
Perel: I can tell you right away the most important sentence in the book, because I’ve lectured all over the world and this is the thing I say that turns heads most often: Very often we don’t go elsewhere because we are looking for another person. We go elsewhere because we are looking for another self. It isn’t so much that we want to leave the person we are with as we want to leave the person we have become.
Slate: Is this motivation for an affair particular to our age?
Perel: What’s changed is, monogamy used to be one person for life. If I needed to marry you to have sex for the first time and I knew this is it for the rest of my life, then infidelity becomes one of the ways to deal with those limited choices. But now we come to our marriages with a profoundly different set of experiences and expectations. So the interesting question is, why did infidelity continue to rise even when divorce became available and accepted and nonstigmatized? You would think an unhappy person would leave. So by definition they must not be that unhappy. They are in that wonderful ambivalent state, too good to leave, too bad to stay.
Slate: So what are people looking for?
Perel: What’s changed is, we expect a lot more from our relationships. We expect to be happy. We brought happiness down from the afterlife, first to be an option and then a mandate. So we don’t divorce—or have affairs—because we are unhappy but because we could be happier. And all that is part of the feminist deliberation. I deserve this, I am entitled to this, I can have this! It allows people to finally pursue a desire to feel alive.
Slate: Alive?
Perel: That’s the one word I hear, worldwide - alive! That’s why an affair is such an erotic experience. It’s not about sex, it’s about desire, about attention, about reconnecting with parts of oneself you lost or you never knew existed. It’s about longing and loss. But the American discourse is framed entirely around betrayal and trauma.
Slate: What prevents people from feeling alive in a marriage?
Perel: Marriages are so much more merged, and affairs become a venue for differentiation, a pathway to autonomy. Women will often say: This is the one thing I know I am not doing for anyone else. I am not taking care of anyone, this is for me. And I have a harder time doing that in the context of marriage because I have become the mother who needs to protect the child 24/7 from every little boo-boo and scratch, and I am constantly other-directed so much so that I am utterly disconnected from my erotic self and my partner is longing for sex and I can’t even think about it anymore. And then suddenly I meet somebody and discover something in my body I haven’t experienced for the last eight years, or I didn’t even know existed inside of me.
Slate: So why is the reality of affairs, and the way we talk about affairs, so different?
Perel: In America, the primary discussion of affairs is about the impact of affairs, rarely about the meaning and motives of the affair. If you read 90 articles about affairs, they are all about what’s wrong with you or your marriage—early trauma, narcissism, addictive personality - injuries of all sorts. But there is very little in the general culture that probes the story of the affair—the plot. Just, did you sleep with anyone else? And you can’t glean anything from that. And then the other discussion is about the victim perpetrator model. We need to give the victim ample compassion and the perpetrator needs to feel remorse and repair.
Slate: Do most therapists understand this about affairs?
Perel: Therapists are the worst! They too think something must be wrong for a person to have an affair. Also most therapists in America will not work with secrets. Their attitude is, don’t tell me anything I can’t speak about with your partner. Either you end it or you tell your partner. So half of the time, people lie to the therapist and to the partner. And is it always the best thing to tell? Or can we examine that, rather than live with a blanket policy of which the therapist doesn’t have to live with the consequences.
Slate: So the cheating partner shouldn’t tell?
Perel: In America, lying can never be an act of caring. We find it hard to accept that lying would be protective, this is an unexamined idea. In some countries, not telling, or a certain opaqueness, is an act of respect. Also, maybe the opposite of transparency isn’t intimacy, it’s aggression. People sometimes tell for their own good, as an act of aggression.
Slate: Is it different for women?
Perel: Because it was so fraught, women used to need a really good reason to take that risk. But today, female infidelity is the biggest challenge to the male-dominated status quo.
Slate: Do people see you as condoning cheating?
Perel: I make a distinction between cheating and non-monogamy. Cheating is about a violation of a contract. People misunderstand me because they think I’m saying affairs are OK. No! But I do think examining monogamy is our next frontier.
Slate: You mean as in Dan Savage’s idea that marriages should be non-monogamous? I can’t really see it working for heterosexual couples.
Perel: Not yet, but we couldn’t see premarital sex once either. We are a generation that believes in self-fulfillment, but also in commitment, and in their negotiations between these two ideas they will come up with new negotiations around monogamy.
Slate: Your really believe that?
Perel: Yes. It doesn’t mean it will fit everybody. But I do believe it’s the next frontier.
Slate: Will future arrangements look something like the Underwood marriage on House of Cards, where their non-monogamous arrangement is understood between them without being explicitly discussed?
Perel: The Underwoods are totally seen as a power couple. People do not see that they have a profound sense of intimacy. But their intimacy is about how each one supports the other in their own pursuits. So it’s an intimacy based on nurturing differentiation. We are there for each other, to help each of us be who we want to be. And one of the important axes in any relationship is how the couple negotiate togetherness and separateness. The ability to be myself in your presence versus having to let go of parts of myself to be together.
Slate: Do young people enter marriages with different assumptions now?
Perel: When I entered marriage I bought into the whole romantic package. I want my husband to take care of everything. I want to never feel anxious again, never feel a fear of abandonment. It’s the complete merge model. But that’s very different than the millennials I work with. Their fear is that they will lose themselves, because they’ve worked so hard to develop their own identities.
Slate: So it’s a good thing that we are moving away from the merge model?
Perel: But they have the opposite challenge, which is not to be immediately in the zone of fear when they need to get close, when they need to build something together with someone. That’s the price they pay for the highly individualistic culture in which they live.
Slate: What would you say to people who want to preserve a marriage?
Perel: Most people today, for the sheer length we live together, have two or three marriages in their adult life, and some of us do it with the same person. For me, this is my fourth marriage with my husband and we have completely reorganized the structure of the relationship, the flavor, the complementarity.
Slate: Explicitly, or it just happened organically?
Perel: Both. It became clear that we could either go into crisis mode and end it or go into crisis mode and renew. And that is one of the most hopeful sentences a betrayed partner can hear when they come into my office the day after they find out and they are in a state of utter shock and collapse: I say, your first marriage may be over, and in fact I believe that affairs are often a powerful alarm system for a structure that needs change. And then people say: But did it have to happen like that? And I say: I have rarely seen anything as powerful lead to a regenerative experience. This is a controversial idea, but betrayal is sometimes a regenerative act. It’s a way of saying no to a rotten system in need of change.
Slate: Would you ever recommend an affair?
Perel: No more than I would recommend cancer and yet a lot of people finally understand the value of life when they get sick.
Backup Plan
Ah, the age-old question of who cheats more, men or women? Is it ladies with well-endowed men? Men in general because our hormones rage with more fire inside us? What exactly is cheating, anyway? Doing the deed? Illicit kissing? Can simply flirting with a hottie barista bury you? What if you send her some naughty texts later in the day? So many gray areas. Here’s another one: a new study shows that half of all married women have a back up man, a spare in case the first one blows out on the highway.
Yep, whether it’s an old flame lacking in closure, a colleague, or even “someone who they have met at the gym,” half of the 1,000 ladies polled persist in (im)proper prior planning. That’s taking “be prepared” to a new level, eh? And it gets worse. Not only do they have a plan B, one in four of that 50% claim to feel as strongly about their alternate as they do current conquest, and, because absence makes the heart grow fonder, 12% lust even more intensely for their backup.
Statistically, this fellow-in-reserve is likely someone who’s been around more than seven years, and one in ten women are “confident he would drop everything for her” if asked. Since we all know the grass is greener on the other side it’s no wonder that, despite reports to the contrary, a recent paper finds the domestic divorce rate has been steadily increasing for the last 30 years.
But just what is a man to do? Should we really be worried about every blast-from-the-past Facebook flame our ladies linger on? Does this justify a man’s increased likelihood of snooping? Little crushes and fantasies are normal, even healthy, right? We’re only human, after all.
We don’t know what this latest revelation means in the long run. And let’s be blunt, is questioning 1,000 gals really a good enough cross section to apply the “all women” generalization? We’re leaning towards “nope.” But maybe you should remember to surprise your sweetie with some flowers after work tonight, just the same. And for heaven's sake, pick up your dishes.
Italy's National Sport
Nursing an espresso in a smart Milan café, Guia Soncini is laying down the law on marriage, Italian style. “Anyone who has been married for 20 years and is not flirting,” she says, “is flatlining.” Soncini has never been married, but the 41-year-old broadcaster and columnist, who boasts a reputation in Italy for her wickedly sharp observations of modern manners, should know a thing or two about Italian husbands — she has dated a few. And, crucially, she claims that the last thing Italian mistresses want is that their married lovers leave their wives. “The worst disrespect you can pay an Italian mistress is showing up on her doorstep with your suitcases,” she says.
Such secrets are packed into the book I Mariti delle Altre (“Other Women’s Husbands”), Soncini’s exposé of Italian adultery from the days of La Dolce Vita to the texting etiquette of today mixed with memories of her own two-timing father. “I read an article in an English magazine about the French cinq à sept — the classic after-work appointment between French adulterers — and I thought: ‘Do the English really believe it’s only the French who know how to do this?’ ” she says, adding: “In Italy it’s our national sport.”
In the book, which has gone through three reprints since it was published last year and earned her the title of Italy’s “cynical goddess of uncomfortable truths” from reviewers, Soncini takes Italy’s greatest actor, Marcello Mastroianni, as her starting point. She points out that when he was busy having a child with the French actress Catherine Deneuve he was still married to his Italian wife Flora.
“And he remained married to Flora through his later affairs with Faye Dunaway and the Italian director Anna Maria Tatò, even though he stayed with Tatò for the last 22 years of his life.” That, she adds, takes adultery into another league. “After 20 years with one mistress it becomes polygamy, a second marriage.”
Vittorio de Sica, another Italian screen legend, was also at it, she says. “He would regularly put his children to bed in one house, go to bed, get up in the middle of the night, leave, and wake up the next day in bed with another woman.”
For a more recent example look no further than the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who had a child with the Italian actress Veronica Lario — later his second wife — while he was still married to his first, Carla. Soncini says that one possible reason why Lario protested so publicly over Berlusconi’s alleged later dalliances was because he was being too obvious and the women in question were far too young.
“Actually, I think half of Berlusconi’s supposed affairs were invented to win votes,” Soncini says. “An adultery party would do pretty well in elections here.” As she states in the book: “We pair off for no reason. It’s biology, the instinct to perpetuate the species and all that nonsense,” adding: “We are a republic founded on adultery.”
So are husbands and wives betraying each other more in Italy than in Britain? Not at all, she says. “Humans are the same everywhere. The difference is that Anglo Saxons see it as a problem and don’t understand that being faithful for 20 years is like brain death. When Princess Diana said her marriage felt crowded because there were three people in it, she should have said that four would have been the perfect number.”
Italians know that marriage is rarely based on romantic love, Soncini tells me. “It’s the biggest social contract ever invented. It determines who you have children with and who you share your life with, and you stick with it. Romeo and Juliet bet everything on romantic love and ended up dead at 15. In Italy I see couples handling betrayal, understanding it’s not the end of the world.”
Could that be a result of the years it takes to get a divorce in Catholic Italy? Soncini disagrees. “There is talk of bringing in a law here to speed up divorce , but I don’t think it will lead to a boom in divorces, while in England couples divorce in two minutes.”
Soncini’s belief that the Italian attitude to affairs is the key to a successful marriage is backed up by figures from the European Commission. Unlike in Britain and France, divorce in Italy has dropped in recent years. In 1970, the country’s divorce rate was 1.2 divorces per 1,000 inhabitants, compared with 0.8 in France and 1 in Britain. In 2012 that figure had dropped to 0.9 in Italy, while it had more than doubled to 2.1 in the UK, and 2 in France.
As Soncini speaks, smart Milanese ladies at nearby tables are falling silent and subtly listening in, while a waitress approaches to compliment her on her book. Full-figured, with a good-humoured, flirtatious manner, Soncini has a talent for delivering choice epithets about sex with a rapid-fire delivery. This becomes evident as she drains her espresso. She has a wicked laugh that rings around the café as she reveals that the inspiration for her book was her own childhood in Bologna where her father, a doctor, would often announce he was “going for a long walk” and once a year would disappear on holiday with “a friend”.
“As a child I had no idea he was having a long-term affair with a nurse, but after 15 years my mother demanded he choose between them.” Soncini’s father chose the nurse, left home, rented a flat and went to tell her he was finally all hers. “The nurse said: ‘I don’t want you. It was just sex. I have a boyfriend,’ and left him a shattered man.”
Soncini refuses to discuss her own love life in detail — even if some of her tales of “friends’ ’’ affairs sound suspiciously first-person — but she does admit that her role model since her father’s betrayal has been the nurse, not her mother. “I agree with the Italian actor Alberto Sordi who said, when asked why he never married, ‘Why would I want a stranger in the house?’ ”
In the book Soncini writes that her mother took her father back but liked to remind him that he was not only a cheater but a bad husband. “She would complain that her friends’ husbands had lovers but made up for it by being wonderful husbands.”
She also remembers that while her mother’s friends had wayward husbands, many of them were themselves having flings. “If anything, women have always had more affairs, but are better at not getting caught,” she says. Today, she adds, Italian women are just as wily and have fully exploited the extramarital possibilities afforded by text and the digital apps WhatsApp and Tinder. When modern Italian men do manage to get online they turn out to be hopelessly old-fashioned. “Instead of using apps to find sex, they use it to try to locate a partner,” she says.
The biggest problem that Italian women have to contend with in their quest for the extramarital dolce vita is, it turns out, romantic Italian men. “Italian men are still mamma’s boys and want the lasagna instead of acrobatic sex,” she laughs. “The most terrifying man I ever knew was the one who said he wanted to hold hands while we slept. Women today fear nothing more than affectionate sexting. You want him to say ‘I’ll rip your knickers off,’ and he texts: ‘I want to hug you.’”
Technology
Jay’s wife, Ann, was supposed to be out of town on business. It was a Tuesday evening in August 2013, and Jay, a 36-year-old IT manager, was at home in Indiana with their 5-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son when he made a jarring discovery. Their daughter had misplaced her iPad, so Jay used the app Find My iPhone to search for it. The app found the missing tablet right away, but it also located all the other devices on the family’s plan. What was Ann’s phone doing at a hotel five miles from their home?
His suspicions raised, Jay, who knew Ann’s passwords, read through her e-mails and Facebook messages. (Like others in this story, Jay asked that his and Ann’s names be changed.) He didn’t find anything incriminating, but neither could he imagine a good reason for Ann to be at that hotel. So Jay started using Find My iPhone for an altogether different purpose: to monitor his wife’s whereabouts.
Two nights later, when Ann said she was working late, Jay tracked her phone to the same spot. This time, he drove to the hotel, called her down to the parking lot, and demanded to know what was going on. Ann told him she was there posing for boudoir photos, with which she planned to surprise him for his upcoming birthday. She said the photographer was up in the room waiting for her.
Jay wanted to believe Ann. They’d been married for 12 years, and she had never given him cause to distrust her. So instead of demanding to meet the photographer or storming up to the room, Jay got in his car and drove home.
Still, something gnawed at him. According to Ann’s e-mails, the boudoir photo shoot had indeed taken place—but on the previous day, Wednesday. So her being at the hotel on Tuesday and again on Thursday didn’t make sense. Unless …
In an earlier era, a suspicious husband like Jay might have rifled through Ann’s pockets or hired a private investigator. But having stumbled upon Find My iPhone’s utility as a surveillance tool, Jay wondered what other apps might help him keep tabs on his wife. He didn’t have to look far. Spouses now have easy access to an array of sophisticated spy software that would give Edward Snowden night sweats: programs that record every keystroke; that compile detailed logs of our calls, texts, and video chats; that track a phone’s location in real time; that recover deleted messages from all manner of devices (without having to touch said devices); that turn phones into wiretapping equipment; and on and on.
Jay spent a few days researching surveillance tools before buying a program called Dr. Fone, which enabled him to remotely recover text messages from Ann’s phone. Late one night, he downloaded her texts onto his work laptop. He spent the next day reading through them at the office. Turns out, his wife had become involved with a co-worker. There were thousands of text messages between them, many X‑rated—an excruciatingly detailed record of Ann’s betrayal laid out on Jay’s computer screen. “I could literally watch her affair progress,” Jay told me, “and that in itself was painful.”
One might assume that the proliferation of such spyware would have a chilling effect on extramarital activities. Aspiring cheaters, however, need not despair: software developers are also rolling out ever stealthier technology to help people conceal their affairs. Married folk who enjoy a little side action can choose from such specialized tools as Vaulty Stocks, which hides photos and videos inside a virtual vault within one’s phone that’s disguised to look like a stock-market app, and Nosy Trap, which displays a fake iPhone home screen and takes a picture of anyone who tries to snoop on the phone. CATE (the Call and Text Eraser) hides texts and calls from certain contacts and boasts tricky features such as the ability to “quick clean” incriminating evidence by shaking your smartphone. CoverMe does much of the above, plus offers “military-grade encrypted phone calls.” And in the event of an emergency, there’s the nuclear option: apps that let users remotely wipe a phone completely clean, removing all traces of infidelity.
But every new app that promises to make playing around safer and easier just increases the appetite for a cleverer way to expose such deception. Some products even court both sides: a partner at CATE walked me through how a wife could install the app on her husband’s phone to create a secret record of calls and texts to be perused at her leisure. Which may be great from a market-demand standpoint, but is probably not so healthy for the broader culture, as an accelerating spiral of paranoia drives an arms race of infidelity-themed weapons aimed straight at the consumer’s heart.
Every tech trend has its early adopters. Justin, a 30-year-old computer programmer from Ohio, is at the vanguard of this one.
Justin first discovered CATE on the September 21, 2012, episode of Shark Tank, ABC’s venture-capital reality show. The Call and Text Eraser, pitched specifically as a “cheating app,” won $70,000 in seed money on the program. Justin knew he had to have it.
His girlfriend at the time—we’ll call her Scarlett—was “the jealous type,” forever poking through his smartphone and computer. Not that he could blame her, given that she’d already busted him once for having sex with another woman. “It took a lot of talking and a lot of promising that it wouldn’t happen again,” he told me over e-mail. (I found Justin through a user review of CATE.) “So her wanting to check up on me was understandable,” he allowed. “But at the same time, it was my business and if I wanted to share I would have.”
Even a not-so-jealous girlfriend might have taken exception to many of the messages on Justin’s phone: “casual texting” (that is, flirting) with other women, “hard core” (explicitly sexual) texting, texts arranging “hookups.” In the past, he’d been busted repeatedly for such communiqués. (Scarlett is not the only girlfriend with whom Justin has found monogamy to be a challenge.) With CATE, all Justin had to do was create a list of contacts he didn’t want Scarlett to know about, and any incriminating texts and phone calls with those contacts got channeled directly into a pass-code-protected vault.
CATE is just one of many tools Justin uses to, as he puts it, “stay one step ahead.” His go-to method for exchanging explicit photos is Snapchat, the popular app that causes pics and videos to self-destruct seconds after they are received. (Of course, as savvy users know, expired “snaps” aren’t really deleted, but merely hidden in the bowels of the recipient’s phone, so Justin periodically goes in and permanently scrubs them.) And for visuals so appealing that he cannot bear to see them vanish into the ether, he has Gallery Lock, which secretes pics and videos inside a private “gallery” within his phone.
Justin wound up cheating on Scarlett “several more times” before they finally broke up—a pattern he’s repeated with other girlfriends. Oh, sure, he enjoys the social and domestic comforts of a relationship (“It’s always nice to have someone to call your girl”). He understands the suffering that infidelity can cause (“I have been cheated on so I know how much it hurts”). He even feels guilty about playing around. But for him, the adrenaline kick is irresistible. “Not to mention,” he adds, “no woman is the same [and] there is always going to be someone out there who can do something sexually that you have never tried.” Then, of course, there’s “the thrill of never knowing if you are going to get caught.”
All of which makes it more than a little troubling that, while laboring to keep one semiserious girlfriend after another in the dark with privacy-enhancing apps, Justin has been equally aggressive about using spy apps to keep a virtual eye on said girlfriends.
Justin has tried it all: keystroke loggers, phone trackers, software enabling him to “see text messages, pictures, and all the juicy stuff … even the folder to where your deleted stuff would go.” He figures he’s tried nearly every spy and cheater app on the market, and estimates that since 2007, he has “kept tabs,” serially, on at least half a dozen girlfriends. “The monitoring is really just for my peace of mind,” he says. Plus, if he catches a girlfriend straying, “it kind of balances it out and makes it fair.” That way, he explains, if she ever busts him, “I have proof she was cheating so therefore she would have no reason to be mad.”
Not that Justin is immune to the occasional flash of jealousy. More than once, he has gone out to confront a girlfriend whose phone revealed her to be somewhere other than where she’d claimed to be. One relationship ended with particularly dramatic flair: “The phone went to the location off of a country road in the middle of nowhere and there she was having sex in the backseat of the car with another man.” A fistfight ensued (with the guy, not the girlfriend), followed later by “breakup sex” (vice versa). One year on, Justin says, “I still don’t believe that she has figured out how I found out.”
Justin knows that many folks may find his playing both sides of the cheating-apps divide “twisted.” But, he reasons, “I am doing it for my safety to make sure I don’t get hurt. So doesn’t that make it right??”
Right or wrong, cheating apps tap into a potentially lucrative market: While the national infidelity rate is hard to pin down (because, well, people lie), reputable research puts the proportion of unfaithful spouses at about 15 percent of women and 20 percent of men—with the gender gap closing fast. And while the roots of infidelity remain more or less constant (the desire for novelty, attention, affirmation, a lover with tighter glutes … ), technology is radically altering how we enter into, conduct, and even define it. (The affairs in this piece all involved old-school, off-line sex, but there is a growing body of research on the devastation wrought by the proliferation of online-only betrayal.) Researchers regard the Internet as fertile ground for female infidelity in particular. “Men tend to cheat for physical reasons and women for emotional reasons,” says Katherine Hertlein, who studies the impact of technology on relationships as the director of the Marriage and Therapy Program at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. “The Internet facilitates a lot of emotional disclosure and connections with someone else.”
At the same time, privacy has become a rare commodity. Forget the National Security Agency and Russian mobsters: in a recent survey conducted in the United Kingdom, 62 percent of men in relationships admitted to poking around in a current or ex-partner’s mobile phone. (Interestingly, among women, the proportion was only 34 percent. So much for the stereotype of straying guys versus prying gals.) On the flip side, according to the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, 14 percent of adults have taken steps to hide their online activity from a family member or romantic partner. Therapists say they’re seeing more spouses casually tracking each other as well as more clashes over online spying, and lawyers are starting to recommend digital-privacy clauses for prenup and postnup agreements. Such clauses aim to prevent spouses from using personal texts, e‑mails, or photos against each other should they wind up in divorce court.
Tech developers by and large didn’t set out looking to get involved. As is so often the case with infidelity, it just sort of happened. Take Find My iPhone. Apple did not create the app with suspicious lovers in mind, but users pretty quickly realized its potential. Dr. Fone is marketed primarily as a way to recover lost data. Likewise, messaging apps such as Snapchat have many more uses than concealing naughty talk or naked photos, but the apps are a hit with cheaters.
The multipurpose nature and off-label use of many tools make it difficult to gauge the size of this vast and varied market. The company mSpy offers one of the top-rated programs for monitoring smartphones and computers; 2 million subscribers pay between $20 and $70 a month for the ability to do everything from review browsing history to listen in on phone calls to track a device’s whereabouts. Some 40 percent of customers are parents looking to monitor their kids, according to Andrew Lobanoff, the head of sales at mSpy, who says the company does basic consumer research to see who its customers are and what features they want added. Another 10 to 15 percent are small businesses monitoring employees’ use of company devices (another growing trend). The remaining 45 to 50 percent? They could be up to anything.
Apps marketed specifically as tools for privacy and secret-keeping* for the most part aren’t seeing the download numbers of a heavy hitter like, say, Grindr, the hookup app for gay men (10 million downloads and more than 5 million monthly users). But plenty have piqued consumer interest: The private-texting-and-calling app CoverMe has more than 2 million users. TigerText, which (among other features) causes messages to self-destruct after a set amount of time, has been downloaded 3.5 million times since its introduction in February 2010. (It hit the market a couple of months after the Tiger Woods sexting scandal, though the company maintains that the app is not named for Woods.)
Once the marketplace identifies a revenue stream, of course, the water has been chummed and everyone rushes in for a taste. By now, new offerings are constantly popping up from purveyors large and small. Ashley Madison, the online-dating giant for married people (company slogan: “Life is short. Have an affair.”), has a mobile app that provides some 30 million members “on the go” access to its services. Last year, the company introduced an add-on app called BlackBook, which allows users to purchase disposable phone numbers with which to conduct their illicit business. Calls and texts are placed through the app much as they are through Skype, explains the company’s chief operating officer, Rizwan Jiwan. “One of the leading ways people get caught in affairs is by their cellphone bill,” he observes. But with the disposable numbers, all calls are routed through a user’s Ashley Madison account, which appears on his or her credit-card statements under a series of business aliases. “The phone number isn’t tied to you in any way.”
Both sides of the arms race have ego invested in not getting outgunned. Stressing Ashley Madison’s obsession with customer privacy, Jiwan boasts that the shift from computers to mobile devices makes it harder for members to get busted. “It’s much more difficult to get spyware on phones,” he told me. But mSpy’s Lobanoff pushed back: “All applications can be monitored. Let me make it clear for you. If you provide us what application you would like to track, within two weeks we can develop a feature to do that.” It all boils down to demand. For instance, he notes, after receiving some 300 calls from customers looking to monitor Snapchat, the company rolled out just such a feature.
Lobanoff admits that iPhones are tougher to monitor than phones from other brands, because Apple is strict about what runs on its operating system (although many Apple users “jailbreak” their devices, removing such limits). Which raises the question: Is an iPhone a good investment for cheaters worried about being monitored—or would it too tightly restrict their access to cheating apps? Such are the complexities of modern infidelity.
Of course, no app can remove all risk of getting caught. Technology can, in fact, generate a false sense of security that leads people to push limits or get sloppy. Justin has had several close calls, using CATE to conceal indiscreet texts and voicemails but forgetting to hide explicit photos. When a girlfriend found a naked picture of him that he’d failed to delete after sexting another woman, Justin had to think fast. “The way I talk my way out of it is that I say I was going to send it to her.” Then, of course, there is the peril of creeping obsolescence: after several months, regular upgrades to the operating system on Justin’s phone outpaced CATE’s, and more and more private messages began to slip through the cracks. (A scan of user reviews suggests this is a common problem.)
Virtual surveillance has its risks as well. Stumbling across an incriminating e‑mail your partner left open is one thing; premeditated spying can land you in court—or worse. Sometime in 2008 or 2009, a Minnesota man named Danny Lee Hormann, suspecting his wife of infidelity, installed a GPS tracker on her car and allegedly downloaded spyware onto her phone and the family computer. His now-ex-wife, Michele Mathias (who denied having an affair), began wondering how her husband always knew what she was up to. In March 2010, Mathias had a mechanic search her car. The tracker was found. Mathias called the police, and Hormann spent a month in jail on stalking charges. (It’s worth noting that a second conviction, specifically for illegally tracking her car, was overturned on appeal when the judge ruled that joint ownership gave Hormann the right to install the GPS tracker.)
Staying on the right side of the law is trickier than one might imagine. There are a few absolute no-nos. At the top of the list: never install software on a device that you do not own without first obtaining the user’s consent. Software sellers are careful to shift the legal burden onto consumers. On its site, mSpy warns that misuse of the software “may result in severe monetary and criminal penalties.” Similarly, SpyBubble, which offers cellphone-tracking software, reminds its customers of their duty to “notify users of the device that they are being monitored.” Even so, questions of ownership and privacy get messy between married partners, and the landscape remains in flux as courts struggle to apply old laws to new technology.
In 2010, a Texas man named Larry Bagley was acquitted of charges that he violated federal wiretapping laws by installing audio-recording devices around his house and keystroke-monitoring software on his then-wife’s computer. In his ruling, the district judge pointed to a split opinion among U.S. circuit courts as to whether the federal law applies to “interspousal wiretaps.” (The Fourth, Sixth, Eighth, Tenth, and Eleventh Circuit Courts said it does, he noted; the Second and Fifth said it doesn’t.) Similarly, in California, Virginia, Texas, Minnesota, and as of this summer New York, it is a misdemeanor to install a GPS tracker on someone’s vehicle without their consent. But when a vehicle is jointly owned, things get fuzzy.
“I always tell people two things: (1) do it legally, and (2) do it right,” says John Paul Lucich, a computer-forensics expert and the author of Cyber Lies, a do-it-yourself guide for spouses looking to become virtual sleuths. Lucich has worked his share of ugly divorces, and he stresses that even the most damning digital evidence of infidelity will prove worthless in court—and potentially land you in trouble—if improperly gathered. His blanket advice: Get a really good lawyer. Stat.
Such apps clearly have the potential to blow up relationships, but the question now may be whether they can be used to salvage them as well. Many of the betrayed partners I spoke with believe they can.
A couple of years ago, Ginger discovered that her husband, Tim, was having an affair with a woman he’d met through a nonprofit on whose board he sat. (As Ginger tells it, this was a classic case of a middle-aged man having his head turned by a much younger woman.) The affair lasted less than a year, but it took another eight months before Tim’s lover stopped sending him gifts and showing up in awkward places (even church!).
Ginger and Tim decided to tough it out—they’ve been married for 35 years and have two adult children—but that took some doing. For the first year and a half, certain things Tim did or said would trigger Ginger’s anxiety. He would announce that he was going to the store; Ginger would fire up her tracking software to ensure he did just that. Business travel called for even more elaborate reassurances. “When he was away, I would be like, ‘I want you to FaceTime the whole room—the bathroom, the closet; open the hallway door.’ ”
Ginger’s anxiety has dimmed, but not vanished. She still occasionally uses Find My iPhone to make sure Tim is, in fact, staying late at the office. “And we use FaceTime all the time. He knows that if I try to FaceTime him, he’d better answer right then or have a very, very good reason why he didn’t.”
Jay and Ann, of the boudoir photo shoot, also decided to try to repair their marriage. When he first confronted her with a record of her texts, Ann denied that the sex talk was ever more than fantasy. But when Jay scheduled a polygraph, she confessed to a full-blown, physical affair.
As hard as it has been for Jay, one year later he reports that tech tools are helping. Ann’s affair grew out of her sense of neglect, Jay told me: “She wasn’t getting the attention she wanted from me, so she found someone else to give it to her.” To strengthen their bond, Jay and Ann have started using Couple, a relationship app geared toward promoting intimacy by setting up a private line of communication for texts, pics, video clips, and, of course, updates on each person’s whereabouts. Every now and again, Jay sneaks a peek at Find My iPhone. He also has set his iPad to receive copies of Ann’s texts. “I don’t know if she realizes I’m doing that,” he told me. But in general, she understands his desire for extra oversight. “She’s like, ‘Whatever you want.’ ”
In fact, post-affair surveillance seems to be an increasingly popular counseling prescription. Even as marriage and family therapists take a dim view of unprovoked snooping, once the scent of infidelity is in the air, many become enthusiastically pro-snooping—initially to help uncover the truth about a partner’s behavior but then to help couples reconcile by reestablishing accountability and trust. The psychotherapist and syndicated columnist Barton Goldsmith says he often advocates virtual monitoring in the aftermath of an affair. Even if a spouse never exercises the option of checking up, having it makes him or her feel more secure. “It’s like a digital leash.”
And that can be a powerful deterrent, says Frank, whose wife of 37 years learned of his fondness for hookers last February, after he forgot to close an e‑mail exchange with an escort. “He had set up a Gmail account I had no idea he had,” Carol, his wife, told me. Frank tried to convince her that the e-mails were just spam, even after she pointed out that the exchange included his cell number and photos of him.
Frank agreed to marriage counseling and enrolled in a 12-step program for sexual addiction. Carol now tracks his phone and regularly checks messages on both his phone and his computer. Still, she told me sadly, “I don’t think that I’m ever going to get the whole story. I believe he thinks that if I know everything, the marriage will come to an end.”
For his part, Frank—who comes across as a gruff, traditional sort of guy, uneasy sharing his feelings even with his wife—calls Carol’s discovery of his betrayal “excruciating,” but he mostly seems angry at the oversexed culture that he feels landed him in this mess. He grumbles about how “the ease and the accessibility and the anonymity of the Internet” made it “entirely too easy” for him to feed his addiction.
Frank has clearly absorbed some of the language and lessons of therapy. “As well as it is a learned behavior to act out, it is a learned behavior not to,” he told me. He doesn’t much like his wife’s having total access to his phone, but he claims that his sole concern is for the privacy of others in his 12-step group, who text one another for support. Frank himself clearly feels the tug of his digital leash. “Now that she checks my phone and computer, I have a deterrent.”
Even as he calls virtual surveillance “a powerful tool,” though, Frank also declares it a limited one. No matter how clever the technology becomes, there will always be work-arounds. For someone looking to stray, “absolutely nothing is going to stop it,” says Frank, emphatically. “Nothing.”
Ashley Madison
'Ashley Madison'. It sounds like the name of an innocuous family friend: pleasant, breezy, quite the baker. It doesn't sound like the name of the most successful adultery website of all time, attracting more followers than the Pope has on Twitter; a controversial network that connects married men and women, enabling them to stray discretely; or a hugely profitable company with a notorious slogan – "Life is short. Have an affair" – and 28 million members worldwide.
The founder and owner of this well-oiled infidelity machine is 43-year-old Noel Biderman. He has, at various times, called himself "the most hated man on the Internet" and the "Emperor of infidelity".
So it may surprise you to learn that Mr Biderman – who designed Ashley Madison for women because he knew men would then "gravitate" toward it – has a wife. And that despite his very specific line of work, infidelity is not an ingredient in their marriage.
Speaking from the couple's family home in Toronto, Noel says, "I believe monogamy is worth pursuing and that it's a worthwhile endeavour. However, I'm aware we're not engineered for monogamy and it's actually a minority of us that will be successful with it."
It all begs the question: who married this man?
Amanda Biderman, 38, is "the insane woman who did". Originally from South Africa, she has a background in marketing and plays a pivotal role in the promotion of her husband's business. "For females, sex is more of an intimate, emotional thing," she says, trotting out the stale old Mars/Venus dictum. "It's connectivity with somebody, whereas with men it's a biological need and a drive."
That drive, as every brothel in the universe has discovered, is quite lucrative.
So is Ashley Madison, reportedly worth US$125 million. The Bidermans, who have two children together, want for nothing.
It all began in 2001, when Noel, a successful sports attorney with an entrepreneurial spirit, read that a quarter of online daters were not actually single. "That was an eye opener," says Amanda. "Once I understood there was a marketplace that needed to be serviced, I thought, oh god, this is going to be big."
The reactions to Noel have been widespread, heartfelt, ardent, and include death threats. Has Noel really received letters to cease and desist from the Pope? "Unfortunately, yes." (Interestingly, Catholics are the second largest religious group on Ashley Madison in the US.)
"Listen," says Amanda. "This strikes a deep chord with many people... It breaks apart a very traditional, conservative approach to how we see our relationships and conduct our lives. People definitely want to attack.
"[But] most people don't recognise that infidelity has been there for centuries. We see it in the presidency in the United States and the upper echelon of Hollywood. People think Bill Clinton was an anomaly – or Tiger Woods? Of all the people that come out in a year, think of all the minions nobody knows about. That's why it's so successful. It's not a new phenomenon; it's just that nobody ever documents it or wants to understand it."
"Noel," says Amanda, is simply an entrepreneur who identified "an opportunity to understand the psychology around relationships and dig deeper [to] unearth the things people don't want to discuss. And he's up for the challenge."
Amanda does not believe that the site is facilitating deception. It simply provides a platform, she argues, "for like-minded adults to communicate with one another. There's likely less deception happening on Ashley Madison – where everyone is looking for the same thing – compared to other dating sites which are often fraught with married people masquerading as single."
Granted, people using the site are clear about their relationship status, however it's the unsuspecting partners of members who are mostly likely to feel deceived.
"People pursue affairs because they don't want to leave their marriage," says Noel. "They want to have their cake and eat it too, I acknowledge that. I'm not suggesting it helps the dynamic between those two individuals, but it might help them stay within the institution of marriage."
Any marriage, according to Noel, has a number of important foundation elements: "It has economics, raising children together, extended family, and a home. For many people those foundations are all steady – it's just the monogamy that's not – so that's why they choose deception."
People frequent his website, says Noel, "because they're not having sex".
The couple, who married 11 years ago, met pre-Ashley Madison. "He was not a savvy dater, no smooth womaniser," recalls Amanda. "He had forgotten even the small change for the parking meter – I liked that."
He tends to take over dinner party conversations, she says. "He was always the magnet of any discussion, even before stepping into this role. He has a charisma that spoke to me from the moment I not only laid eyes on him, but heard him articulate his vision for a happy life." (For the record, that vision includes: "finding time to do what I love", "being a leader and role model for my kids", and "making sure to communicate my needs and expectations with those around me".)
He certainly doesn't look like an emperor of infidelity. "People are often shocked that I'm the guy behind it," says Noel. "That my shirt isn't open and I'm not wearing a bunch of gold chains and there isn't a bevy of blondes behind me. Maybe they're really disappointed that I seem like a family guy and I'm a little dull in that regard."
They do not practice what they promote, they say. Amanda: "I'm sure most people assume that because of what Noel does, we must be in an open relationship, but this is absolutely untrue." Noel: "I don't know if you can hypothesise something like that. It's like a certain level of pain – you can't imagine it."
Amanda says she would be "heartbroken" if she discovered Noel had been unfaithful. "We have such a great relationship, and are open about our needs, that it really would come as a big surprise."
Noel says, "The failing of our monogamy endeavour would be between the two of us. We obviously [wouldn't have given] each other what we needed. That's where all the responsibility would lie."
Despite her feelings toward infidelity, Amanda has loaned her face to an Ashley Madison billboard campaign. The slogan reads: 'Your wife is hot, but so are ours!' She is also the brains behind the feminine design of the site, which was reportedly named by combining two of America's favourite baby names.
Did she get any grief for the billboard? "Absolutely!"
She's used to the grief, though. "People say to me, 'How could you be married to him? Don't you feel embarrassed?' And: 'How could you live with yourself?' [But] I find it exhilarating waking up beside someone each day who is doing something no other person before him has ever done."
Explaining to their two children what Noel does doesn't faze her, either. "They will think about it the way I do. They will know and accept that it is a profession and not the way we live our lives."
For Noel, the point strikes a deeper chord. "I am prepared for fully-fledged honesty," he says, "and I hope that they judge me for the father they see me being. But if you want to know the one thing that keeps me up at night? What is the legacy effect of creating this business, potentially, on my kids?"
He says there is no way he can "bullet proof" either of his children from "ever experiencing cheating" and says it's probably "a rite of passage most of us go through on one side of the equation or the other". But equally, he says he doesn't want to add fuel to that fire by "somehow being viewed as complicit in the whole thing. Those are the anxieties that I have if there's any about this business. It's not that I think I am doing any wrong. In the grand scheme [of things], I think I'm making millions of people who are otherwise very unhappy find moments of happiness."
A daughter of divorce, Amanda will admit she hasn't always been entirely comfortable with the concept. "Personally, it was hard at first to understand this environment," she concedes. "I'm not condoning it. There's definitely a brokenness around these relationships – people are trying to find themselves, and find happiness. But I [also] understood this was a business and not our personal philosophy. And who are we to judge others?"
Curious about those others, I joined up – for research, I reassured my husband – and was stunned at how quickly my profile, which had no photo and only four words of description*, was winked and messaged at. You can search within a 20- or 50-mile radius, but requests also came from Australia, Canada, the United States – and Hamilton.
There were entertaining member names like 'big-n-thick', and taglines like 'Let me climb your mountain and search the valleys between'. Their messages were often surprisingly businesslike: "I do not want to jeopardise my relationship. I'm looking for somebody interested in a discreet liaison. Wine or coffee or food."
Like some nightclub door policies, the site is free for women only. It's open to both straight and gay persuasions, though predominately aimed at heterosexuals.
Dr Eric Anderson, a professor of sociology at Canada's Winchester University, is employed by the Bidermans to interpret its data and debunk various infidelity myths. The most popular times of the year to sign up, he tells me, are the days after Mother's Day, Father's Day, Valentine's Day and New Year's Day, because "people's expectations weren't met by partners". (Breakfast in bed might need a revamp: more married women sign up the day after Mother's Day than any other time.)
The busiest day of the week for affairs is not Friday – when one might assume people let loose – but Monday morning. According to Anderson, "it's likely due to thwarted expectations from the weekend".
The stats also reveal that the seven-year itch is largely a myth: "The first instance of infidelity is most likely to occur within the first three to five years of marriage – coincidentally the same time a pregnancy is most likely to occur." Anderson calls this phenomenon, rather crudely, "the first bump effect".
Men outnumber women, particularly in the over-60 age group, but women aged 30-45 represent the largest growing group on the website. "We are virtually at 1:1 ratio between male to female for this group," says Anderson.
Among New Zealand's 127,000 members, women slightly outnumber men in the below-50 age bracket. That statistic is so interesting it's worth repeating: between the ages 18 and 49, Kiwi women on Ashley Madison outnumber men.
"Women display much of the same characteristics that men do when it comes to infidelity," concurs Anderson.
"That's the one area people don't want to agree on: that a woman would instigate such activity," says Amanda Biderman. "It's assumed men are having affairs; there's less of an eye on women. [But] women are empowered and independent and making money and choices."
Operating across 42 countries, Ashley Madison has become one of the largest studies on adultery the world has ever seen and offers its findings to universities and the media. Media is something Noel Biderman is – by now – very used to. He knows the controversy drives memberships sky-high, and his views never fail to incite.
"You can point fingers at me all you want but, let's be honest, this is massive," he says. "It's like a tidal wave and I couldn't possibly be responsible for all that sociology. There is nothing I can do or say to persuade anyone to have an affair. People who are going to have affairs are going to do it, whether it's at the work place, with their best friend's partner, or on Ashley Madison. Those are inevitabilities."
Amanda knows her husband's sound bites are controversial. "He looks like the villain trying to tear apart relationships, that he's okay with infidelity, but in reality, all he's doing is bringing light to something people turn a blind eye to."
She believes Noel is opening those blind eyes: "He's not afraid to ask the really tough questions."
He's also not afraid to admit his raison d'être: "We're in the business to make money." He does not view the site as online bordello, though. "If you want to pay for sex, there are a million places to go and do that. There really is."
"Even if people are against a site like Ashley Madison," says Amanda, "and don't agree with affairs, you can't deny the fact the site has opened up dialogue about modern relationships and the role of monogamy in society. It's helping shape our understanding of what it means to be in a marriage today."
The dialogue and wealth of data their site enables serves as a sober warning for couples, says Amanda, who claims it has made her own marriage even stronger and more communicative.
Sure, she says, she wasn't "jumping up for joy" over the site's concept at first. And she's not thrilled "there's this reality in our society". Yet, "In my mind, if people were smart, they would learn from it. Take those findings into their own relationship to make it successful, and make my husband less money."
Ashley Madison 2
WITH less than a week until the Fifty Shades of Grey film opens, illicit romance appears to be booming in Britain. An American dating website that specialises in setting up extramarital affairs says it has signed up more than 1m Britons.
Hannah Fry with an equation for life after marriage from her book The Mathematics of Love. The left-hand side of the top line is how positive or negative a wife will be in the next thing she says. This combines her mood in general, her mood when with her husband, and the effect her husband’s last action has on her. The equation for the husband follows the same pattern. Fry says successful couples air grudges early on and work together to put them right
Ashley Madison, which has become one of the world’s largest internet dating sites, said it had pulled in 1,048,342 customers in Britain since launching here in 2010.
The popularity of the site — which signs on with the tag “Life is short. Have an affair” — comes despite British television refusing to air the company’s adverts.
Noel Biderman, founder and chief executive of Ashley Madison, said British adults were among the most likely to indulge in adultery, along with people in Australia and Canada. “Western cultures, and the UK is one them, are leading the charge on this, more so than in the United States or Latin America,” he said.
Biderman suggested infidelities among more prominent members of British society, including the royal family, might have helped foster a culture where adultery was more acceptable.
“Is it any wonder friends and neighbours are doing it? We do learn by example,” he said.
According to the site, women are more likely than men to be looking for illicit affairs between the ages of 18 and 39. It reverses for the over-40s, when men are more likely to be adulterous.
The strength of Ashley Madison, which operates in 45 countries and has 32m members, comes despite the rise of free dating apps such as Tinder, which allow mobile phone users to meet people easily and without having to pay. Tinder has more than 30m registered users.
Biderman, who is happily married and says he has not made use of his site’s services, said many users probably signed up out of curiosity but quickly move from checking out the site to trying actively to meet other people.
“One of the questions we ask [new customers] is what they are looking for. About 10% of them say they are looking just for a cyber [experience]. Within three days, 80% of people change that to ‘open to meeting offline’.”
The disclosure coincides with new research that suggests attached men and women are almost as likely as each other to be as promiscuous. The study, by Rafael Wlodarski of Oxford University, found that 57% of men were more likely to be promiscuous against 43% more likely to remain monogamous. For women it was 47% promiscuous versus 53% monogamous.
Facebook
Incriminating details of extramarital flings posted on Facebook and later discovered by jilted spouses are increasingly being used as evidence in divorce hearings in Italy, lawyers say.
As screenshots from Facebook become the basis of many divorce cases, there is less demand for the private detectives who in the past would surreptitiously follow unfaithful husbands and wives to secret liaisons. “Why have your partner followed when you can do your own investigation of his or her social media postings?” said Claudio Tasin, a lawyer who specialises in divorce cases.
Annamaria Bernardini de Pace, from a Milan-based law firm, said that she was using fewer private detectives in divorce cases, claiming that it was down to Italians becoming increasingly careless about letting details of their affairs leak on to the internet. “One wife who had been away found a photo of her own balcony online, which had been posted by her husband’s lover with the caption, ‘Best holiday of my life’,” she said. “Betrayed spouses now turn into detectives to find clues about their partners’ love lives from postings about restaurants or purchases. Judges like this kind of evidence because it is concrete, documented proof.”
Gian Ettore Gassani, another lawyer, told of a client who claimed he could not collect his son because he had broken his leg — before posting images of himself holidaying in Monte Carlo. “He thought he had kept his ex-wife out of his Facebook group, but she had taken on the identity of a beautiful woman to get befriended and knew all about it.”
Marzio Ferrario, a private detective, argued that betrayed spouses still needed the services of people like himself to amass proof that would stand up in court — but he admitted that he had been forced to move with the times, creating fake Facebook profiles to gain access to postings by suspected adulterers.
Ms Bernardini de Pace said that the growing number of clues left on Facebook by unfaithful spouses was down to a growing lack of caution. “The virtual world has now become the family — you feel protected among your followers.”
Cesare Rimini, another lawyer, agreed. “We have great privacy laws in Italy but at the same time there is a public confession going on on Facebook where everyone is admitting all,” he said.
Mr Tasin suggested that many Italians actually wanted to be caught cheating if their marriage was on the rocks. “It’s amazing the number of people who don’t restrict access to their accounts. It’s as if they wanted to be discovered,” he said.
A survey by an extramarital dating site last year claimed that the most adulterous city in Europe was Milan, the home of Silvio Berlusconi, divorced by his second wife after she complained about his habit of spending time with very young women.
Messages sent using the WhatsApp application are cited in 40 per cent of Italian divorce cases. Another giveaway which is increasingly tripping up cheaters and proving decisive in court is their use of the Find My iPhone app, which allows the tracing of lost phones through their GPS signals. Suspicious partners are accessing the app to keep track of their spouses’ movements at all times.
“Wives have used it to track husbands to motels and husbands have used it to discover that their wives are not at the hairdresser, as they said,” Ms Bernardini de Pace said.
The app has also proved useful to those trying to wring more money from a former partner who is claiming poverty. “One woman tracked her ex-husband as he crossed the Swiss border to make secret withdrawals from his Swiss bank account,” she said.
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Another Look At Cheating
I am a divorce lawyer. My mission, my vocation, is to free people from marriages where the prospect of them being happy again together is low because the relationship has genuinely broken down; to set them up on a solid platform for a new, happier chapter.
But you don’t become a good divorce lawyer unless you care about families and want them to stay together if there’s still something real there. And from everything that I have seen, I can tell you that people can get past infidelity — even repeated infidelity — and accept their partner as they are, if they choose to. And I am talking from my personal experience of relationships too.
This is how it tends to play out. In the early days you make every effort when you’re with the other person. I remember my ex-husband commenting — in the racy, lacy, early stages of our marriage — that the size of women’s underwear increases in direct proportion to the length of the relationship.
It doesn’t take long before those uncomfortable thongs make their way to the back of the drawer. I’d say the amount of oral sex delivered on both sides also decreases as the pressure to display oneself as Mata Hari or Casanova is replaced by a comfortable sense of routine — what buttons to push, how to move swiftly and efficiently towards mutual orgasm (if you’re lucky), then get back on your phone, into your book or indeed fast asleep.
Conversation can also die a slow death. My husband and I, still together after ten years despite my otherwise appalling track record, have agreed that at a certain point you’ve heard all of each other’s stories, and unless you start talking about work or the children you run out of ideas, unless you make a real effort.
Before long you’re not finding each other nearly as attractive, interesting or well intentioned as you used to. It’s the time of “it’s not just what you said, it’s the way you said it” arguments and you become very critical of each other.
I remember my husband saying to me: “When we met, you made me feel so wonderful. You made me feel like the best man in the world. What happened to that?” And that was like a knife in the heart because I knew it was true. What had happened to me? Why didn’t I try any more? (I was a lot nicer after that, at least for a while.)
And that’s when the danger of affairs sets in. Entirely unplanned, you meet someone at work, at drinks, at a children’s birthday party, swimming off the coast of Portugal. And that person finds you fascinating, brilliant, utterly sexy — all the things your wife or husband once felt for you. And your conversations flow. You feel alive. They want you. You want to let yourself fall into their world, whatever the risk.
Then, one of a number of things happens. You might resist. Morally, that’s the obvious choice, although there is the slight risk that this makes you grumpy and resentful. Alternatively, you may have an affair, leave your spouse and go off with your new love.
In my experience as a lawyer, men are only likely to do this under extreme pressure from the new partner, preferring, if they can get away with it, to have their cake and eat it. Women are more likely to use a love affair as a liferaft to sail away to the next adventure.
Intoxicating though your new life is, however, eventually reality starts to bite. It might be the lawyers (never fun), it might be the kids’ unhappiness or resentment, but after a while the new life tarnishes.
All the faults of the perfect new partner, different from those of the previous partner but in time equally insufferable, grind you down and make you think nostalgically about the old days. Until you find someone else and start the whole performance again. Unless you’ve learnt that it always ends up imperfect and stay put.
Or perhaps you have the affair but you don’t leave. Maybe the relationship fades away and no one finds out about it. And, by choosing to stay, you feel you are cementing your commitment. But then your partner does find out, or you can’t resist confessing to them — and they don’t see it that way. Even though you want to stay with them, because of what you’ve built together, because fundamentally you really love them, because nobody else makes such a great shepherd’s pie. Should they now throw you away for your unforgivable sin?
Just as you chose your own freedom to run around, now it’s your partner’s turn to choose whether they want you any more. Now they have all the power. People are quick to say that someone who forgives their partner for affairs is weak, but actually they find themselves in a position of strength.
If they dump you, they too lose the family, the bond, the love that might have meant a great deal to them, and have to confront the idea of you with that other person, perhaps being happy, having the life they were meant to have. If they keep you, they will have to deal with the resentment, the envy, the suspicion of further betrayal. But it’s their choice now. I think that makes it easier to forgive — that sense that at last they’re in control.
Once, long ago, I had to forgive someone for an infidelity. An encounter with a prostitute in a hotel. Initially I found it easy, and then the pain and insecurity overwhelmed me. I went to the hotel, went to the lobby and the lifts where he’d said he met her, went up to one of the corridors and saw all the identical rooms with closed doors. I wanted to feel part of it, not to be shut out any more, to take his experience into me to repair the breach that had arisen between us. I felt compelled to do that. It didn’t help. Time helped.
In my experience people rarely choose to ditch their partners for infidelity alone. That goes for men and women. There’s always something else involved. It might be domestic abuse, it might be the long-term absence of sex, it might be financial instability. Occasionally it might be that a rubicon has been crossed, such as sex with the lover in the matrimonial bed, or introducing them to one of the children.
But without that, is it right to end a marriage, a partnership, that’s otherwise relatively good, because of infidelity? As a divorce lawyer I’ve seen so much brutality, unkindness and deceit (concerning truly fundamental things such as the parentage of a child) that messing around on the side of a marriage looks small by comparison.
I know — I have personally experienced — the excruciating pain of imagining your beloved with someone else. But that passes, you forget, and then, if they make you feel loved, you can start to be happy with them again. Equally, I have experienced the loneliness one can feel without a partner. I have sat in Mass as a single mother and prayed, during a very Catholic phase in my life, for a “normal family” in which to bring up my children. Generally, it all works out in the end, but only by finding happiness in single life, or by moving on to the next imperfect person and accepting their imperfections.
In fact, is adultery a bad thing at all? Could it be what keeps a couple together for a lifetime? It’s controversial perhaps, but is it possible that allowing each other, men and women, to discover new thrills, new loves, to experience the fun and pleasure of holidaying in an alternative life, could be good for your relationship? With the understanding that you keep intact the bond of your loving partnership, your familial structure, the economic and social set-up that holds you secure.
It’s all about expectations, I think. Parameters such as “have sex with whomever you like, but no giving or taking of names or numbers” or “do what you like but we stick together” can be worked out by agreement just like finances or plans for having children.
All this depends on having the attitude that others outside the marriage are irrelevant — the marriage is the one constant. I won’t leave you. I will take care of you even when you’re annoying and grumpy and boring and I have to change your nappies. I will be with you for the rest of your life, and you will do the same for me. In return we will both support each other in having the fullest possible life of love, sex, flirtation, thrilling experiences.
Men have had their side of this bargain for centuries, only lately seriously being taken to task for it. My husband has always said how nice it would be to have four wives, and I have always agreed, assuming I could have four husbands. In this as in all things, equality is all. From my point of view it’s all about the deal you make, about not breaking the bond between you.
But leaving aside the question of whether open marriages and relationships bring happiness or hardship, should we not at least get rid of the idea that adultery really ought to be a deal-breaker? Life is long, we’re all imperfect, pleasure-seeking, impressionable creatures frolicking about briefly on the Earth’s surface.
When we find love, the deep, often boring, annoying, safe, integral love, the love that mounts and grows into you over decades, and we build our lives and our family with the person who loves us, should that not be able to withstand the nonsense of our peccadillos and make them fade into nothing? That might truly be the route to a happy ever after.