The contrast is striking. At a time when America is in a frenzy about workplace sexual harassment— defined as extending from bad language
to sexual assault— psychotherapist Esther Perel is advising couples to learn
to live with adultery. Not just to live with it, but to use it to promote
better intramarital sex.
In truth, by my own theorizing— see my book The Last Psychoanalyst-- some cultures
tolerate adultery and others do not. Some European cultures allowed men mistresses, courtesans and concubines. They allowed women to practice called courtly love.
The reason was simple: marriages were mostly arranged;
they were political and social alliances; they were not about romantic love. Cultures that arrange marriage tolerate adultery.
In Western Europe these cultures were largely Roman
Catholic. Protestantism introduced the practice of love marriage when women, in particular, were given more freedom to choose their
mates. Then adultery fell out of favor… and tended to be stigmatized. See the tale
of the scarlet letter.
Why did the transformation take place? Simply put, too much
adultery caused too much relational confusion. No one knew who was related to
whom with any degree of certainty. Thus, love marriage aimed at producing a more structured social order, not necessarily better orgasms. The point needs emphasis.
Marriage was not designed to give people the most decadent, mind-blowing sexual
experiences.
As I have pointed out in the past Freudian psychoanalysis
has had as its goal to make the world safe for adultery. Thus, a European like
Perel is simply importing a sophisticated European attitude into New York. One
might amuse oneself by pondering the thought that New Yorkers aspire to become
sophisticated Europeans, especially those who were raised in more Catholic
cultures, but such seems to be the case.
Think about this: would a culture that valued marital
fidelity have less incidences of sexual harassment? After all, Harvey Weinstein
was not just a serial harasser and even rapist… but he was also married. So was
Matt Lauer.
Put this down to: be careful what you wish for. If you think
that you can neatly separate these issues, you are mistaken.
In any case, Americans are increasingly getting their
adultery groove on. If we are to believe Zoe Heller— we have no reason not to
believe her—we own the proliferation of adulterous affairs to women’s
liberation, among other things:
Notwithstanding
the problems of definition and the vague statistics, the consensus among social
scientists is that the incidence
of infidelity has been rising in recent decades. This is mostly
attributed to the fact that modern life has increased and democratized the
opportunities for illicit sex. Women, whose adulterous options have
historically been limited by domesticity and economic dependence, have entered
the workforce and discovered new vistas of romantic temptation. (Men are still
the more unfaithful sex, but their rates of infidelity appear to have remained
steady over the past three decades, while, according to some estimates, female rates have risen by as much as forty per cent.)
Senior citizens have had their sexual capacities indefinitely prolonged by
Viagra and hip-replacement surgery. Even the timid and the socially maladroit
have been given a leg up, courtesy of the online pander. Adultery may still be,
as Anthony Burgess described it, the “most creative of sins,” but, thanks to
Tinder et al., engineering a tryst requires significantly less ingenuity and
craft now than at any other time in human history.
To be slightly more clear, and to dispel the insinuation
that liberated women are more trampy than their foremothers, I would point out
that single career women seeing their marital prospects diminish might very
well choose to seduce the married men in the office. I know it's unthinkable, but that does not prevent it from happening.
Strangely enough, Heller adds, we still are intolerant of
adultery. We are tolerant of every other kind of sexual
coupling… but not adultery.
While
we’ve become considerably more relaxed about premarital sex, gay sex, and
interracial sex, our disapproval of extramarital sex has been largely
unaffected by our growing propensity to engage in it. We are eating forbidden
apples more hungrily than ever, but we slap ourselves with every bite. According
to a 2017 Gallup poll, Americans deplore adultery (which is still
illegal in some two dozen states and still included among the crimes of “moral
turpitude” that can justify denial of citizenship) at much higher rates than
they do abortion, animal testing, or euthanasia.
This merely suggests that we are hopelessly naïve. Human
cultures do not make such neat distinctions. Once you say that just about
everything goes when it comes to what happens between the sheets, you cannot
simply draw a random line and expect that people will respect it.
As it happens, Esther Perel wants us all to be more
insouciant, more European about adultery. One has not read her book so one does
not know whether or not she mentions risk factors like: unwanted pregnancies,
STD transmission, and divorce:
The
couples therapist and relationship guru Esther Perel believes otherwise. In her
new book, “The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity” (Harper), she
argues that we would be better off coming to a more compassionate accommodation
of our unruly desires. Decades of administering to adulterers and their
anguished spouses have convinced her that we need “a more nuanced and less
judgmental conversation about infidelity,” one that acknowledges that “the
intricacies of love and desire don’t yield to simple categorizations of good
and bad, victim and culprit.” Our judgmental attitude toward our transgressions
does not make us any less likely to commit them, she argues—“infidelity has a
tenacity that marriage can only envy”—and it keeps us from understanding why we
transgress. The desire to stray is not evil but human.
One feels a quota of sympathy for Perel’s argument
that women who find their husbands cheating should be less self-righteously
moralistic and should not be so fast to throw the bum out:
This
approach, Perel believes, does little justice to the “multifaceted experience
of infidelity.” It demonizes adulterers, without pausing to explore their
motives. It focusses on the traumatic effects of affairs, without acknowledging
their “generative” possibilities. “To look at straying simply in terms of its
ravages is not only reductionistic but also unhelpful,” she writes. Affairs can
be devastatingly painful for the ones betrayed, but they can also be
invigorating for marriages. If couples could be persuaded to take a more
sympathetic, less catastrophic view of infidelity, they would, she proposes,
have a better chance of weathering its occasional occurrence. When people ask
her if she is against or in favor of affairs, her standard response is “yes.”
Heller continues:
In
order to come to any adult reckoning with an affair, the betrayed must avoid
wallowing too long in the warm bath of righteousness. For a period immediately
following the revelation, a certain amount of wild rage and sanctimony is
permissible, but after that the rigorous work of exploring the meaning and
motives of an affair must begin.
And in a reductio ad absurdum, Heller concludes:
In practice,
it must be said, her method seems to demand heroic levels of forbearance on the
part of faithful spouses. They are asked not only to forgo the presumption of
their own moral superiority but to consider and empathize with what has been
meaningful, liberating, or joyous about their partners’ adulterous experiences.
The affair that has caused them so much anguish may have been prompted by
boredom or a longing for sexual variety, or it may have been a bid for
existential “growth, exploration, and transformation.”
You will note that Perel does not much care about the moral
aspect of any affair, the sense of betrayal. I have not read her book, but I
wonder how people find out about such infidelity. Do they tell each other? Do they
offer heartfelt confessions? If so, then the Perel approach might encourage
people to seek a human growth experience—the psychic equivalent of human
growth hormone—and divulge their secrets. I believe that it is better to be more discreet, not to be open and honest about betraying one’s marital
vows. And not to imagine that a sprinkling of of therapeutic fairy dust will heal
it all.
If you would like to confess to a confessor, be my guest. At least the secrecy of the confessional is inviolate. But,
think twice before hurting your spouse with tales of your infidelity. And don’t
imagine that your weak character can be redeemed by psychic
growth.
2 comments:
A few points:
1. Christians, as well as protestants, would find ample support in the Bible for marital fidelity. I find no reason to believe that average English protestants are any more promiscuous than Irish Christians. Marriages arranged for dynastic purposes play by other rules, and this is true for cultures worldwide.
2. Crimes involving moral turpitude would have immigration consequences only if there is a state conviction, which I can't recall ever running across.
3. Adultery is a crime whose enforcement would be more Constitutionally repugnant that socially useful.
Given that infidelity among married women is increasing while the rate among married men is not changing, my guess is that Perel is mostly concerned that we increase our tolerance for women who stray from the marriage bed.
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