Education - Affairs

Affairs

According to the Kinsey Institute, which recently reviewed all the major sex studies published over the past 40 years, about 37 percent of married men and 29 percent of married women have had at least one extramarital affair. That's a lot. But interestingly enough, people-especially women think there's a lot more hanky-panky than that going on. In the fall of 1989, the Kinsey Institute tested the "sexual literacy" of about 2,000 randomly selected American adults. When asked what percentage of married American men had had at least one affair, most women said 70!

He Does It, So ...

"The female myth is that all men screw around," says Atlanta psychiatrist Frank Pittman III, M.D., author of Private Lies. In recent years, an increasing number of women have used that as a convenient rationale for having affairs of their own. "To some women, at least, men's alleged unfaithfulness makes their own screwing around only fair -it's not so much a flaw of character as a blow for liberation," says Dr. Pittman, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta.

At the same time, he says, men seem to be having fewer affairs. The cultural ideals of masculinity have begun to shift, so the debonair affair is no longer socially acceptable behavior, no longer an admired male sport. As a society, we treat the infidelities of a Gary Hart far more harshly than we did those of JFK. Still, despite the fact that affairs are surprisingly common, they should not be taken lightly. Marital infidelity is "the primary disrupter of families, the most dreaded and devastating experience in a marriage," notes Dr. Pittman. "It is the most universally accepted justification for divorce. It is even a legally accepted justification for murder in some states and many societies."

Passion without Personal Commitment

People who have affairs tend to be immature, have little ability to project the long term consequences of their actions and have stereotyped ideas about gender roles, Dr. Pittman observes. They tend to "see the differences between men and women as being so determinate and absolute that members of the 'opposite' gender are essentially interchangeable. They don't have a sufficiently personal relationship with their spouse as a person, rather than as a man or a woman. It's easy for them to simply substitute someone else, as long as they are a member of that gender."

Despite all the talk and hoopla about affairs, people still harbor all kinds of misconceptions about them. Among the hundreds of people involved in or affected by affairs who have trooped through his office over the years, Dr. Pittman has noticed a pattern of beliefs that is rather flatly contradicted by statistics, and he undresses several of the prevailing myths.

Myth: Everybody has affairs. Well, that's what people who have affairs almost invariably say. But the truth is that infidelities of one sort or another occur in only about a third of marriages. And even those numbers are misleading- many affairs take place during the last year of a dying marriage. And most of those people have had only one affair, or at most only a couple. Most marital partners are faithful to their spouses, and even if they're not, surveys have shown that the vast majority of people still strongly believe in marital fidelity -for their spouses absolutely, and for themselves usually.

Myth: An affair can liven up a dull marriage. "For most people and most marriages, infidelity is dangerous," notes Dr. Pittman. Once in a great while, affairs do improve a lousy marriage, he says, but those cases are the exceptions. A discovered affair can sometimes provoke a big fight that winds up solving some long standing problem in the marriage, but sometimes so does a car wreck or a child's illness. "To have an affair in order to trigger a crisis from which the marriage might eventually benefit is truly a screwball, convoluted approach to problem solving," he says.

Myth: Affairs prove that love is gone from the marriage. Most people who have affairs are not looking for the love they can no longer find in a marriage; more often, they're looking for friendship. Unfortunately, if the affair/friendship gets sexual, it tends to quickly degenerate into something so complicated that friendship is no longer possible.

"What is so sad, and seems so foolish, about affairs is that many of them might have been wonderful, utterly unthreatening friendships had they not been so naively sexualized by people who are overly preoccupied with gender differences," Dr. Pittman says. Many people simply don't know how to be friends with someone of the opposite sex.

One of the reasons marital infidelities are so common, he believes, is that people don't live near their relatives anymore. Without the comforting circle of family to surround them and support them through dark times, people tend to “'sexualize” friendships simply out of loneliness and then are completely unprepared for the crazy mess that follows.

"Friendship is terribly important to marriage - much more important than romance," maintains Dr. Pittman.

Myth: The affair partner was sexier than the spouse. It's been Dr. Pittman's experience that about half the time, the person who strays from a marriage will admit that the sex was actually better at home. "Affair partners are not chosen because they are the winners of some objective sex contest," he observes. "They are chosen for all manner of strange and usually nonsexual reasons. Affair choices are usually far more neurotic than marriage choices." Maybe that's why he's noticed that affair partners are not necessarily better-looking or sexier or nicer or more accomplished than the spouse they supposedly replace. The only consistent pattern, he says, is that "the choice of an affair partner seems based on the other person's difference from the spouse rather than superiority to the spouse."

Myth: The affair is the fault of the betrayed spouse. This is an incredibly widespread belief- even among betrayed spouses and marriage counselors. But the fact is that one person cannot make another person have an affair. (Sometimes spouses try to do it, but it rarely works.)

"I don't find it helpful for a betrayed spouse to take responsibility for any part of the affair," says Dr. Pittman. The only thing that person can do is be available to solve whatever underlying problems there may be in the marriage. And since it's very difficult to make any progress while an affair is still in progress, the healing can begin only after the affair has stopped.

Myth: After an affair, divorce is inevitable. No question about it: An affair is a crisis in a marriage, and very often it destroys it. But it doesn't have to; the marriage usually can still be salvaged, if both partners are willing to put them- selves through the pain and hard work a reconciliation will require. Therapy may help. Because although therapy often seems relatively ineffective while someone is having an affair, once the truth comes out and the affair is over, therapy can really work.

"I have very rarely seen a couple in therapy divorce because of an affair that is now over," notes Dr. Pittman. "It happens routinely in marriages that are not in therapy."