Affairs: why, and why now?
by Mira and Charles on February 25th, 2010New insights into why people cheat
Another journalist interviewed us yesterday, this time for a British newspaper, and this time about the how, who, and why of affairs. Here it is:
1. Do you think that people have a different attitude to affairs now than they did say 30 or 40 years ago?
CHI: Yes, and for two main reasons.
First, today women have money and work, as well as divorce laws more likely to be in their favor. And so they are much less likely to be dependent on their cheating spouse for survival. When a woman has to anxiously wonder “where will I go, how will I live?” she is much more likely to find reasons to “explain” or condone her spouse’s infidelity. But when she can survive and thrive in spite of leaving, she is much more likely to say, “I can’t trust him, I’ve been terribly humiliated, this shows how crappy our marriage has been anyway, so I’m out of here.”
Second, precisely because women are now out in the workforce, women are more likely to have affairs themselves. In fact, the rate at which women cheat is now almost equal that of men (if you factor in child rearing and fear of STDs, you could argue that women cheat at virtually the same rate as men.) Now because more men today know what it feels like to be cheated on, they are more likely to be cautious about cheating themselves.
2. What impact do you think modern technology has had on affairs (I’m thinking here of text messaging and the internet)?
CHI:
3. Are people wrong to condemn all affairs, or do they have a function in society?
CHI: This is where our book When Good People Have Affairs has been so misunderstood. One reviewer, who can’t have even looked at the actual book, said we lauded cheaters as good kind people, as if we were saying cheating made them good people. In no way were we saying that. Instead, we were saying that sometimes good people do bad things and that most cheaters are truly sorry and hungry for redemption. This is good news because it means many more relationships can survive infidelity than has been thought.
To answer your question, it is possible to say that affairs are almost always terrible destructive mistakes AND that they have a function in society.
They are destructive mistakes because they almost always cause more harm than help, like a drug that occasionally helps but always has terrible side effects. You would never recommend such a drug, and similarly you would never recommend anyone have an affair.
Having said that, and without denying that at all, it is also true that once the affair has happened, as a therapist I can only help the couple find help and healing wherever I can, including looking at the motives that led to the affair. So if a couple has been in a very stale rut (do ruts get stale?), an affair may very well shake things up (can you shake a rut?) so that with professional guidance they can bring their marriage back to life.
Another function affairs have is to help people see if it makes sense to stay married in the first place. A See-if Affair, for example, will help people see if being with someone else really makes a difference. When it does, it can help people move out of a bad marriage and into a good one. It can also, and I’ve seen this a lot, help people realize that the grass only looks greener on the other side, and that in fact they’d be best off staying where they are. (See-if Affairs can also give a very distorted picture in many cases, as they cheater compares the paramour, bathed in a romantic light, with the spouse, whom they only see in the harsh light of everyday life. They fail to think of what the paramour will look like bathed in that same harsh light.)
4. Do celebrities having affairs have an impact on the normal population and their attitude towards them?
CHI: Everyday people have a terrible sense that their lives are small and drab, without any excitement or glamour. So everything celebrities do has an impact. We want whatever they have, if we can possibly afford it. So when we see them having affairs and seeming to be unscathed (because the excitement is highly publicized, while the pain is mostly private), there is definitely a contagion effect. At the same time, this celebrity effect is small and swamped by the opportunity effect and the unmet-needs effect. Real life is mostly local.
