Posted on 09/21/2017 9:16:10 PM PDT by nickcarraway
One of the more interesting facts in Esther Perels 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 theyve 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 didnt show it.
Then one day, one of them confided in me shed been having two overlapping affairs over the course of five years. Almost before Id 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 shed never had sex with another man, shed had so many emotional affairs and inappropriate email correspondences over the years that shed 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, Im nicer to my husband when I have something special going on thats 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 theyd 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 theyd 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 Womens 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, Walkers 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 isnt 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 Walkers 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 Ive always been in charge of the calendar, and what I didnt realize until recently is that in some way Im 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 theres 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 theyre 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 theres no way to win this battle. So maybe now what women are deciding is that infidelity is a third way.
Of course, its 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, theyre always doing more for less. As Wade put it, Its 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 isnt all its 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 theyd 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 thats 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 doesnt 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 someones 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 were all told and promised it will be.
My friend told me she felt this way of thinking was the only answer, and the way shed 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 moms 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 dont have any illusions that marrying someone else will make me happy, not anymore.
The article is rubbish. Women cheat when they are insecure (about money, looks, status, etc.).
Uhhh.....you’re dragging politics into this? When DJT is sort of the poster boy for straying husbands?
Excuses for adultery are excuses for adultery.
Self-centered narcissism and entitlement, meet blue-pilled beta male cuckadoodles. What could possibly go wrong?
Women who cheat do so because they can while still counting on being given the family / house / money in a divorce.
That would suggest that some guys out there are getting a twofer.
I’ve come across a new way for married women (especially housewives) to cheat without cheating. There are several online games out there where you interact with unknown males who are all animated as hunky young men while the women are animated as slender and often busty young women.
Pick a fake name, invent a profile, interior design your two apartments, meet members of the opposite sex in public locations (beach, dance clubs, yacht, private island, etc.), choose one (or two) and engage in “virtual sex” with the animation of your choice, male or female. There’s a real person behind most of the online personas you meet who you can interact with like normal people yet you can explore sexual fantasies with like-minded adults, all without leaving home.
While the kids are away at school or asleep in their naps, mommy can now live her own alternate world where she can sleep around as much as she wants with no consequences.
Some women even invite their husbands to join in so they can both “cheat” with each other or scratch the itch to stray. The key is to remember the virtual world is just a game and many are not really who they claim to be. Folks with vivid imaginations find that it imitates the real thing just without the tactical stimulus.
If it keeps the woman at home while allowing her to be “naughty” in some fantasy realm, it could even be a way to add some spice in a dull marriage.
Half of all marriages end up in divorce. Half of 100 million marriages. Think about it. Literally tens of millions infidelity by women, even if most infidelity is by men. And that is just within a couple of generations. The dark underbelly of society — infidelity and pornography.
The poor cuck who buys that game for his wife thinking she is satisfied with the virtual roleplaying. lol
A lot of people say that statistic was not accurate.
The cheating goes back to the beginning of time.
I’m saying conservative women have deeper value sets.
The Pill took a lot of risk out of it. Plus there was the free love of the sixties. Cheating didn’t start there, but it ramped up sharply.
Americans are becoming less moral than they have been historically. So of course cheating is more prolific and fewer people feel guilty about it. When you lose your morals, anything goes and it is all about “me, me, me!”.
Cheating was far less prevalent when America was a more moral, God fearing nation. Of course cheating rises as morals decay. What would you expect?
Antibiotics and sulfa drugs took a lot of the risk out of it.
before that, even a yeast infection could become fatally septic.
It is estimated that between one quarter and one third of all women who lived before modern medicine died from some complication relating to their reproductive system, not necessarily involving a pregnancy.
Interesting. The large head on newborns makes the birth process so hazardous it’s a wonder as many women survived as did. Evolution definitely has a glitch there.
Forty years ago, the average marriage lasted twelve years.
It’s probably even less today. The excuse back then was the people of that age having been raised on TV shows like Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best had an unrealistic view of marriage. They compared theirs to Ozzie’s and got out.
Honestly, I don’t know even one woman who does that stuff.
WOMAN OR MAN, IT DOES NOT MATTER!!!!!!
RATIONALIZATION IS NO EXCUSE!!!!!
Thalt shall not commit Adultery.
😇😍😘
Even people who believe in God cheat.
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