I’ve been reading a book about infidelity around the world called “Lust in Translation.” The author, Pamela Druckerman, finds that contrary to what so many Americans believe, our rates of adultery are not particularly high. Yet we spend more energy talking about affairs (potential, actual, or imagined, those that affect us or someone we know or an elected official or a celebrity or someone we’ve just met on any one of myriad talk shows…the list goes on) and take longer to recover from them than pretty much anywhere on the planet.
What I found most interesting was her idea about cultural scripts: In different countries, there are unspoken rules about how to think about affairs, whether you’re one of the participants, the partner being cheated on, or someone outside commenting. Druckerman says that in the U.S., that script involves couching an affair in terms of morality: Adultery says something terrible about the adulterer, which is why so many of her interviewees claim they’re “not the type to have an affair” and profess extreme guilt about what they’re doing, even as they continue. (Though, according to the script, being in love with the other woman or the other man makes it less terrible.) When the betrayed spouse finds out, he or she will say it’s not the sex that hurts the most, it’s the lying. (Ironically, people justify their affairs because we’re a society where the pursuit of personal happiness is as high an individual value as honesty is the highest value in a relationship.) And then there’s the expectation that when an affair is discovered, complete confession is necessary, and the betrayed party must either leave immediately or the couple spends years parsing every detail of the affair, often with the help of a therapist.
The script doesn’t hold up for all Americans, of course, but a lot of this rang true to me as someone who grew up in this country and who practices couples therapy here. We’ve internalized the idea that infidelity is a traumatic event in a relationship, one that causes us to question our entire relationship and the character of the parties involved. When I wrote my upcoming book, Love and Other Natural Disasters, about emotional infidelity, it was a given that my main character Eve would be shattered by her discovery; at the time, I didn’t even think how culturally bound her reaction is. For example, in some countries, an affair isn’t assumed to say anything about the adulterer or about the marriage; guilt doesn’t play much of a part; and once an affair is discovered, a marriage can survive without exhaustive discussions, sometimes without even a mention of what’s transpired. Druckerman concludes, “Adultery brings heartache everywhere, but context and expectations determine the strength of the heartache,” and Americans suffer the most. Does that mean we need a new script? Or does this script help keep our infidelity rates lower than they’d otherwise be?
Just some musings for a Monday morning…