Posted on 09/21/2017 9:16:10 PM PDT by nickcarraway
One of the more interesting facts in Esther Perel’s new book, State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity, comes near the beginning. Since 1990, notes the psychoanalyst and writer, the rate of married women who report they’ve been unfaithful has increased by 40 percent, while the rate among men has remained the same. More women than ever are cheating, she tells us, or are willing to admit that they are cheating — and while Perel spends much of her book examining the psychological meaning, motivation, and impact of these affairs, she offers little insight into the significance of the rise itself. So what exactly is happening inside marriages to shift the numbers? What has changed about monogamy or family life in the past 27 years to account for the closing gap? And why have so many women begun to feel entitled to the kind of behavior long accepted (albeit disapprovingly) as a male prerogative?
These questions first occurred to me a few years ago when I began to wonder how many of my friends were actually faithful to their husbands. From a distance, they seemed happy enough, or at least content. Like me, they were doing the family thing. They had cute kids, mortgages, busy social lives, matching sets of dishes. On the surface, their husbands were reasonable, the marriages modern and equitable. If these women friends were angry unfulfilled or resentful, they didn’t show it.
Then one day, one of them confided in me she’d been having two overlapping affairs over the course of five years. Almost before I’d finished processing this, another friend told me she was 100 percent faithful to her husband, except when she was out of town for work each month. Not long after, another told me that while she’d never had sex with another man, she’d had so many emotional affairs and inappropriate email correspondences over the years that she’d had to buy a separate hard drive to store them all.
These women were turning to infidelity not as a way to explode a marriage, but as a way to stay in it. What surprised me most about these conversations was not that my friends were cheating, but that many of them were so nonchalant in the way they described their extramarital adventures. There was deception but little secrecy or shame. Often, they loved their husbands, but felt in some fundamental way that their needs (sexual, emotional, psychological) were not being met inside the marriage. Some even wondered if their husbands knew about their infidelity, choosing to look away. “The fact is,” one of these friends told me, “I’m nicer to my husband when I have something special going on that’s just for me.” She found that she was kinder, more patient, less resentful, “less of a bitch.” It occurred to me as I listened that these women were describing infidelity not as a transgression but a creative or even subversive act, a protest against an institution they’d come to experience as suffocating or oppressive. In an earlier generation, this might have taken the form of separation or divorce, but now, it seemed, more and more women were unwilling to abandon the marriages and families they’d built over years or decades. They were also unwilling to bear the stigma of a publicly open marriage or to go through the effort of negotiating such a complex arrangement. These women were turning to infidelity not as a way to explode a marriage, but as a way to stay in it. Whereas conventional narratives of female infidelity so often posit the unfaithful woman as a passive party, the women I talked to seemed in control of their own transgressions. There seemed to be something new about this approach.
In The Secret Life of the Cheating Wife: Power, Pragmatism, and Pleasure in Women’s Infidelity, another book on infidelity to be published this November, the sociologist Alicia Walker elaborates on the concept of female infidelity as a subversion of traditional gender roles. To do so, she interviews 40 women who sought or participated in extramarital relationships through the Ashley Madison dating site. Like The State of Affairs, Walker’s text offers valuable insight simply by way of approaching its subject from a position of curiosity as opposed to prevention or recovery, and she investigates which factors led the women in her study to go outside their marriages. Surely, one might think, a woman who would do such a thing must be acting out of a desire to escape a miserable marriage. And yet it turns out, this isn’t always the case: Many of the women Walker interviewed were in marriages that were functional. Like the women I knew who cheated, many of the interviewees said they liked their husbands well enough. They had property together. They had friendships together. They had children that they were working together to raise. But at the same time, they found married life incredibly dull and constraining and resented the fact that as women, they felt they consistently did a disproportionate amount of the invisible labor that went into maintaining their lifestyle. One woman in Walker’s book told her, “The inequality of it all is such an annoying factor that I am usually in a bad mood when my spouse is in my presence,” and another said that while her husband was a competent adult in the world, at home he felt like “another child to clean up after.”
Many of the friends I spoke to expressed similar feelings. “I shop and cook, my husband does dishes and empties the trash,” one told me. “We each do our own laundry. But I’ve always been in charge of the ‘calendar,’ and what I didn’t realize until recently is that in some way I’m in charge of managing many of our relationships. My husband is a homebody and I initiate/plan almost all of our social endeavors. My mom got this phrase from her therapist: ‘keeping the pulse of the household’ — this idea that someone has to be managing the emotional heart of your tiny community. I think women do that a lot.” And as Perel repeats frequently in this book, and in her previous one, little does as much to muffle erotic desire as this kind of caretaking and enmeshment.
There is a correlation between equal division of labor and better sex. “I think there’s an incredible amount of deep resentment for women in America about divisions of labor,” said sociologist Lisa Wade when I asked her to comment on this contradiction. “And what social scientists are finding now is that there is a correlation between equal division of labor and better sex.” No matter how much attention is paid to these issues, she told me, “these kind of cultural beliefs hang on a long time after they’re relevant. They hang on in ways that are often invisible. A lot of women have tried to address these problems and have faced a lot of stubbornness from husbands. They feel there’s no way to win this battle. So maybe now what women are deciding is that infidelity is a third way.”
Of course, it’s a “third way” that is not feasible for everyone, even if more women are taking it up, usually women who feel financially secure and independent enough to risk potential fallout. These women seem to be finding that no amount of sensitivity or goodwill on the part of their husbands can save them from the fact that in every arena, from work to marriage to parenthood, they’re always doing more for less. As Wade put it, “It’s such a precarious balance keeping everyone happy, that for many women, to start a long conversation about her own sexual satisfaction seems like a bad idea. We now tell women that they can have it all, that they can work and have a family and deserve to be sexually satisfied. And then when having it all is miserable and overwhelming or they realize marriage isn’t all it’s cracked it up to be, maybe having affairs is the new plan B.”
I tested this idea out on a few of the friends who had confided in me about their affairs, and most of them agreed. Twenty or thirty years ago they might have opted for divorce, because surely there was another man out there who could do better in this role, who could satisfy them completely. But a lot of these women are children of divorce. They lived through the difficulties divorce can create. “Even now,” all these years later, one told me, “Do you know what my most vivid memory of Christmas is? Driving through a blizzard up I-95 in the back of one of their cars, and then they’d pull over on the side of the highway and hand off me and my brother without speaking. That was our Christmas. Why did these people marry in the first place?”
Maybe that’s the essential question, the question preceding those Perel explores in her book. Why do women still marry when, if statistics are to be believed, marriage doesn’t make them very happy?
I confided in a friend once that, after 15 years of marriage, the institution and the relationship itself continued to mystify me. At the time I married, marriage had felt like a panacea; it was a bond that would provide security, love, friendship, stability, and romance — the chance to have children and nice dishes, to be introduced as someone’s wife. It promised to expand my circle of family and improve my credit score, to tether me to something wholesome and give my life meaning.
Could any single relationship not fall short of such expectations? Maybe these women were on to something — valuing their marriages for the things it could offer and outsourcing the rest, accepting the distance between the idealization and the actual thing, seeing marriage clearly for what it is and not what we’re all told and promised it will be.
My friend told me she felt this way of thinking was the only answer, and the way she’d come to reconcile her feelings about the relationship. She said that she used to compare her marriage to her parents’, who always seemed totally in love. “Until the end of my mom’s life they were spooning together every night in a double bed … not even a queen. But,” she added, “they were awful and narcissistic, with very little to give to their children.” My friend felt she and her husband were much better parents, more involved and attuned to their kids. “But often,” she went on, “it can feel like my husband and I are running a family corporation together and that our emotional intimacy consists of gossiping about our friends and watching Game of Thrones. Sometimes I wonder if when the kids leave I should either (a) have a passionate affair or (b) find another husband. I may do neither, but it seems like (a) is more likely than (b). I don’t have any illusions that marrying someone else will make me happy, not anymore.”
You can believe whatever you want. In addition to those statistics, I can give you tons of anecdotal evidence where the man got screwed and zero times when a woman got screwed (to be fair, many times when its at least fairly neutral though). There is a reason men are marrying less and less now and the MGTOW movement is so big. The only times I’ve EVER seen the man get custody was 1) once when the wife had turned into a drug addict and 2) the wife decides she wants to live a party lifestyle and doesn’t want to take care of the kids. I’ve never seen a case where a woman that wanted custody didn’t get it unless there were major issues (drugs, crime, etc). The alimony statistic is ridiculous. You simply cannot justify 33:1 in modern society.
Lot of reasons 1) apps like Tinder, bumble, etc make it VERY, VERY easy if you are a 9 or 10 man to find someone 2) so many forms of birth control/protection 3) stigma is nearly completely gone 4) ability to remove or treat STDs is up a lot from 20-30 years ago etc
“Women today feel entitled to cheat because they do most of the housework. That’s what this and other articles claim.”
Which only makes sense if it is a way of getting back at the husband. But the article does not mention that.
I think these women just have no respect for their husbands. And because of that they really want to tell them off.. but instead of telling them off they just do the most disrespectful thing possible. Then they can be all polite and nice to him knowing they already did something horrible to get back at him.
Have you ever noticed that the STD’s seem to stay ahead of the treatments for them? Make one treatable, there’s another one soon enough. Such behavior is a disease vector. Always has been, always will be. A loving God didn’t forbid promiscuity because he’s just a big meanie who doesn’t want us to have any fun. He forbids it to protect us.
He’s the most aggregious example I know - most guys I know are either 1) married and not cheating 2) doing the MGTOW thing and not sleeping with anyone 3) 0-2 a year but a handful of “hot” bad boys that are still sleeping around like crazy in their 30s with it appears just about anyone they want from my experience.
Couple hundred guys like that in a decent sized city, I’d imagine. Say, they come down with some “new” fatal sexually transmitted virus or incurable sexually transmitted MRSA. 200 guys, 50 women per year apiece, who go home to their husbands and deign to have sex in order to get something, then half of those husbands cheat on their wives. Do the math. Epidemic in very short order.
Depending on the speed to death and the % of transmission, something like that could get very scary indeed (especially if condoms didn’t work).
Part of it is propinquity. So much of the day, today’s husbands and wives are separated and surrounded by possibly more interesting seeming people. When women were home with kids, there weren’t many opportunities to bond with new men. And the new men seem more interested than the busy husband. I can see how it starts. Same way the men’s affairs do.
Back in the early 20th century, it would have been wrong for a salesman enter a woman’s home when she wasn’t home alone. The appearance of impropriety was huge. Now there is zero care about it, cops being stuck in a car together all day, no one ever thinks that might be a problem. And millions of people in offices are yoked together for lunches, late nights. DUH.
I have one friend who is unfaithful to the husband she claims not to like. But she likes the luxury vacations, the good schools her kids are in, because of his salary. And her husband travels a lot so she doesn’t care what he does on his trips, because she has her other guy. Who is as much of a jerk as her husband if not more. It’s not pleasant to see. And the kids would be devastated if they knew.
Condoms have a very unimpressive track record of preventing conception, so their ability to prevent spread of disease is questionable also. They slow it down, would be the best description.
You nailed it. It’s about lying. For your own selfish gimmes.
I sacrificed for many years to try and save my marriage (cheating was not at all involved). Because my kids are worth it.
I would never ever cheat because I am not a liar. And I won’t be a liar. Period. The right thing to do is to tell your spouse it’s over. And that means your family is over too, all for your selfish orgasms. Really? But you cannot have your family be safe and unhurt, and cheat on your spouse. When you cheat on your spouse, you are also cheating on the kids. And passing down the solution to rough times: be selfish and get your jollies at the expense of others.
At the very least, divorce the spouse.
IMHO, most marriages fall apart because people got married for the wrong reasons. One or more of the partners just does not have what it takes to be in a long term relationship.
The most important quality in a partner is: Sanity.
Alimony needs to be outlawed.
It makes no sense for a man to be ordered to pay the bills of a woman who is no longer his wife.
Big guys tear them, they fall off the little guys, and vigorous sex will cause them to roll up and come off even if properly applied regardless. So, a 2% fail rate right out of the box, plus “operator error” equals what? I’m recalling 20%.
Some men are complicit in a poor dynamic with women, because they refuse to require accountability from the women, instead saying “Yes dear” and “You’re right” to the women regardless of the truth of a situation.
Sounds about right
Men should only marry women who merit wearing white.
That’s a one in five chance of getting infected if using them to prevent disease transmission. So, Mr. Popular in your example is either infected himself or spreading the infection after a little over a month on average with his fifty hookups a year.
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