By Tammy Nelson
(from psychotherapynetworker.org)

How Far Should We Go?

If there's anything fundamental to the meaning of marriage in Western society, it's monogamy. In fact, monogamy may be the only thing that remains essential to most people's idea of marriage. People no longer marry for economic, dynastic, or procreative reasons, as they did for millennia; they can't be compelled to marry by law, religion, or custom; they don't need to marry to have sex or cohabit or even produce and raise children. But throughout all of this staggering change, the requirement and expectation of monogamy as the emotional glue that keeps the whole structure of marriage from collapsing under its own weight has remained constant.

Given the almost universal public denunciation and disapproval of infidelity (which doesn't exclude the barely hidden schadenfreude at the deliciously scandalous goings-on of celebrities, famous preachers, major political figures, sports heroes, or even your office coworker caught in flagrante), you'd think that infidelity must be quite rare. At least nice people don't do it—we wouldn't do it.

Except that we would and we do—much more than most people seem to realize. As a culture committed, in theory, to monogamy, our actions tell a different story. It isn't just that, as therapists, we need to understand that infidelity happens—we all know that already. What some of us may not realize is how often it happens. Research varies, but according to some surveys, such as those reported by Joan Atwood and Limor Schwartz in the 2002 Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy, 55 percent of married women and 65 percent of married men report being unfaithful at some point in their marriage. Up to one-half of married women have at least one lover after they're married and before the age of 40.

If these surveys are correct, the high incidence of infidelity isn't because we live in a particularly licentious, amoral age—the public jeremiads of religious scolds notwithstanding. According to noted anthropologist and researcher Helen Fisher, extramarital affairs have always happened at this high rate, but only now are we getting a more accurate, statistically informed, picture of what's going on. Fisher also reports that what you might call this "state of affairs" holds true across at least five other cultures worldwide that she's studied.

Within our profession, virtually all couples therapists, whatever their model—psychodynamic, systems, behavioral, insight-oriented, solution-focused—have believed since the field's earliest days that no troubled marriage can recover as long as there's a "third party" hovering in the wings. Ongoing infidelity, however defined—sexual, emotional, physical, "cyber"—is, for most therapists, an automatic deal-breaker to meaningful therapy, not to mention clinical improvement in the marriage.

One major impediment to the view that an affair indicates that something is profoundly wrong in the marriage, however, is that 35 to 55 percent of people having affairs report they were happy in their marriage at the time of their infidelity. They also report good sex and rewarding family lives. So how can we continue viewing affairs as symptoms of dysfunctional marriages when apparently so many of them seem to happen to otherwise "normal," even happy couples? The one-size-fits-all view of infidelity never questions the standard model of monogamy, much less helps a couple explore a new model of monogamy that might work better for them and their own particular marriage. Furthermore, a therapist who takes sides, implicitly vilifying one partner as "bad," endorsing the other as "good," is much likelier to lose the couple early on, since infidelity is rarely a black-and-white issue.

A bigger obstacle to our ability to help couples in the wake of an affair is that, too often, we couples therapists—the keepers of the flame of marriage, so to speak—assume we actually understand what monogamy means in a given relationship. For many decades, the old idea—an exclusive sexual and romantic connection with one person throughout the life of the marriage—has comprised our default definition of it, even though we often fudge a bit about the acceptability of outside opposite-gender friendships, work flirtations, and porn use (as long as it doesn't cross some undefined line into "addiction"), and condone a certain amount of open grazing in fantasy life.

But if the stories we hear from couples coming into our offices these days are any indication, we're in for a sea change. Whether we like it or not, many couples are far less encumbered with the legal, moral, and social strictures and expectations around marriage that held sway for our parents or even for us, if we were married 20 to 30 or more years ago. With divorce rates hovering at 50 percent, couples today are extremely aware of the impermanence of marriage in our culture and the many centrifugal forces in society pulling it apart. Once past the first, dewy, romantic days as newlyweds, many couples seem to expect that infidelity, however defined, is likelier than not. But far from becoming jaded and cynical about their own marriages, they want to protect their relationship—in ways that may surprise or even shock some of us. Instead of wanting to trade in the old partner for the new person, they reject the assumption that, somehow, the second time around, love will be "real," and they'll never again be tempted to stray.

Today's couples are far likelier to think about negotiating ahead of time what they mean by "fidelity" and how they define and live monogamy in their own relationship.

It isn't that there's an epidemic of mate-swapping libertines out of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, the iconographic '60s take on the theme. In fact, most couples practicing what I call the "new monogamy" still want and desire a committed monogamous marriage, with the same long-term loving attachment, affection, mutual trust, and security that traditional monogamy has always promised—if not always delivered. It's just that their notions about what constitutes emotional and sexual "commitment," "fidelity," and "monogamy" itself are more expansive and varied than what we've long considered the norm.

So what do we mean by this many-splendored "new monogamy," and how does it compare with the old? The new monogamy is, baldly speaking, the recognition that, for an increasing number of couples, marital attachment involves a more fluid idea of connection to the primary partner than is true of the "old monogamy." Within the new notion of monogamy, each partner assumes that the other is, and will remain, the main attachment, but that outside attachments of one kind or another are allowed—as long as they don't threaten the primary connection. NEXT >

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