Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing;
a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
When Maria discovered a love note in the pocket of her husband Kenneth’s dress blues, she threw it away and never mentioned it. It was 1964. “What would I do? Where would I go? Who would take a woman with four kids?” When she confided in her mother, her reasoning was confirmed. “Your kids are young. Marriage is long. Don’t let your pride take everything away from you.” Besides, they both figured, this was just what men did.
Fast-forward to 1984. Now it was the turn of Maria’s eldest daughter, Silvia, to confront marital duplicity. Her detection came in the form of several charges from Interflora on her husband Clark’s American Express bill—flowers that clearly had not been delivered to her desk. When she told her mother, Maria was sympathetic, but also glad that her daughter was not condemned to the same fate she had endured: “Men don’t change. You don’t have kids and you have a job. Pack your bags and get out.”
Two years later, Silvia fell in love again, remarried, and eventually—when the time was right—gave birth to twins, Michelle and Zac. The freedoms that she experienced—to have a blue-chip career, to choose if and when to have children, to divorce without stigma, and to remarry—would have been inconceivable for her mother’s generation, and still are for many women all over the world. But in much of the Western hemisphere, in the past half-century, marriage has undergone an extreme makeover. And it continues to transform before our eyes. When Silvia’s son, Zac, came of age, he could choose to legally marry his boyfriend. And when he too uncovered an unwelcome truth about his beloved, it manifested as a secret profile on Grindr.
People often ask, Why is infidelity such a big deal today? Why does it hurt so much? How has it become one of the leading causes of divorce? Only by taking a brief trip back in time to look at the changes in love, sex, and marriage over the last few centuries can we have an informed conversation about modern infidelity. History and culture have always set the stage for our domestic dramas. In particular, the rise of individualism, the emergence of consumer culture, and the mandate for happiness have transformed matrimony and its adulterous shadow. Affairs are not what they used to be because marriage is not what it used to be.
For millennia, matrimony was less a union of two individuals than a strategic partnership between two families that ensured their economic survival and promoted social cohesion. It was a pragmatic arrangement in which children were not sentimentalized and husbands and wives dreamed of productive compatibility. We fulfilled our conjugal responsibilities in return for a much-needed sense of security and belonging. Love might arise, but it certainly was not essential. In any event, it was too flimsy an emotion to support such a weighty institution. Passion has always burned in the human heart, but it arose independent of the bonds of wedlock. In fact, historian Stephanie Coontz makes the intriguing point that when marriage was primarily an economic alliance, adultery was sometimes the space for love. “Most societies have had romantic love, this combination of sexual passion, infatuation, and the romanticization of the partner,” she writes. “But very often, those things were seen as inappropriate when attached to marriage. Because marriage was a political, economic, and mercenary event, many people believed that true, uncontaminated love could only exist without it.”1
Traditional wedlock had a clear mandate based on well-defined gender roles and division of labor. As long as each person did what she or he was supposed to do, it was a good match. “He works hard. He doesn’t drink. He provides for us.” “She’s a good cook. She’s given me many children. She keeps a tidy household.” It was a system in which gender inequality was etched in the law and encoded in the cultural DNA. When women married, they relinquished their individual rights and property, and indeed, they became property themselves.
It’s worth remembering that until recently, marital fidelity and monogamy had nothing to do with love. It was a mainstay of patriarchy, imposed on women, to ensure patrimony and lineage—whose children are mine and who gets the cows (or the goats or the camels) when I die. Pregnancy confirms maternity, but without paternity tests, a father could be tormented for life when his only son and heir was blond and his entire family had not one light hair among them. A bride’s virginity and a wife’s monogamy were critical for protecting his pride and his bloodline.
For women, venturing outside the marital bed was highly risky. They could end up pregnant, publicly humiliated, or dead. Meanwhile, it is old news that in most cultures, men had the tacitly sanctioned freedom to roam with little consequence, supported by a host of theories about masculinity that justified their predilections for tasting widely. The double standard is as old as adultery itself.
“I love you. Let’s get married.” For most of history, those two sentences were never joined. Romanticism changed all that. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, amidst the societal sea change of the Industrial Revolution, marriage was redefined. Gradually it evolved from an economic enterprise to a companionate one—a free-choice engagement between two individuals, based not on duty and obligation but on love and affection. In the move from the village to the city, we became more free but also more alone. Individualism began its remorseless conquest of Western civilization. Mate selection became infused with romantic aspirations meant to counter the increasing isolation of modern life.
Yet despite these changes, a few social realities remained intact well into the mid-twentieth century. Marriage was still intended to last for life; women were economically and legally dependent on their husbands; religion defined morality and dictated the code of conduct; divorce was rare and a cause of great shame and ostracism. And above all, fidelity remained a sine qua non, at least for the female of the species.
As a woman of the fifties, Maria was well aware of her limited options. She had grown up in a world where she had four breakfast cereals to choose from, three TV channels, and two men she knew personally who might be eligible. The fact that she had a say at all in her choice of partner was quite a new development—even today, more than 50 percent of marriages globally are arranged.2
While she loved her husband, Kenneth, sex was primarily about procreation. “After bearing four children in six years, frankly, I was done,” she says. Pleasure just didn’t factor in when she occasionally fulfilled her wifely duty. And Kenneth, whom she described as “a decent and generous man,” had never been initiated into the mysteries of the female anatomy, nor did anyone tell him he should have been. But neither their lackluster sexual relations nor his subsequent compensatory conquests were grounds for divorce.
While the men of Kenneth’s generation had tacit permission to sweeten their marital dissatisfaction with extramarital delicacies, women like Maria were expected to find sweetness in marriage itself. For Maria and Kenneth, as for their contemporaries, matrimony was a lifetime pact, with few ways to exit. They entered their nuptials for better or for worse, till death do us part. Fortunately for those who were miserable, death came sooner than it does today.
Silvia didn’t wait for death to part her from her husband. These days, marriage ends when love dies. As a baby boomer growing up in San Francisco, she had come of age during a cultural turning point that altered coupledom almost beyond recognition. Feminism, contraception, and abortion rights all empowered women to take control of their own loves and lives. Thanks to no-fault divorce laws, passed in California in 1969 and in many more states soon thereafter, leaving an unhappy union was now part of a woman’s menu of choices. And if women could leave, they needed a better reason to stay. Henceforward, the bar of marital quality had been raised significantly.
After her divorce, Silvia put her career first, fighting her way up the corporate ladder in the still-male-dominated world of banking. She dated a few guys—“boring bankers and account executives, like my first husband”—but it wasn’t until she met Jason, a violin maker and music teacher, that she felt ready to give Cupid another chance.
In one of our conversations, I asked Silvia if she was monogamous. She looked at me, surprised. “Yes, of course. I’ve been monogamous with all my boyfriends and both my husbands.” Did she realize the cultural shift implicit in the words she had so casually uttered?
Monogamy used to mean one person for life. Now monogamy means one person at a time.
With her second husband, Silvia demanded equality in her kitchen and her bedroom. Jason swept her off her feet by how well he swept the floor and how well he anticipated her needs. Instead of being defined by unique, gender-based roles, their attachment was conceived in terms of flexible divisions of labor, personal fulfillment, mutual sexual attraction, and intimacy.
First we brought love to marriage. Then we brought sex to love. And then we linked marital happiness with sexual satisfaction. Sex for procreation gave way to sex for recreation. While premarital sex became the norm, marital sex underwent its own little revolution, shifting from a woman’s matrimonial duty to a joint pathway for pleasure and connection.
Today we are engaged in a grand experiment. For the first time ever, we want sex with our spouses not just because we want six children to work on the farm (for which we need to have eight, since at least two might not make it), nor because it is an assigned chore. No, we want sex just because we want it. Ours is sex that is rooted in desire, a sovereign expression of our free choice, and indeed, of our very selves. Today we have sex because we’re in the mood, we feel like it—hopefully, with each other; preferably, at the same time; and ideally, with unflagging passion for decades on end.
In The Transformation of Intimacy, Anthony Giddens explains that when sex was decoupled from reproduction, it became no longer just a feature of our biology but a marker of our identity. Our sexuality has been socialized away from the natural world and has become a “property of the self” that we define and redefine throughout our lives.3 It is an expression of who we are, no longer merely something we do. In our corner of the world, sex is a human right linked to our individuality, our personal freedom, and our self-actualization. Sexual bliss, we believe, is our due—and it has become a pillar of our new conception of intimacy.
The centrality of intimacy in modern marriage is unquestioned. Emotional closeness has shifted from being the by-product of a long-term relationship to being a mandate for one. In the traditional world, intimacy had referred to the companionship and camaraderie born out of sharing the vicissitudes of everyday life—working the land; raising children; weathering loss, sickness, and hardship. Both men and women were more likely to seek friendship and a shoulder to lean on in same-sex relationships. Men bonded over work and beer, women connected through motherhood and borrowing flour.
The modern world is in constant motion, spinning faster and faster. Families are often dispersed, siblings are scattered across continents, and we uproot ourselves for new jobs more easily than a plant is repotted. We have hundreds of virtual “friends” but no one we can ask to feed the cat. We are a lot more free than our grandparents were, but also more disconnected. In our desperate search for a safe harbor, where are we to dock? Marital intimacy has become the sovereign antidote for lives of growing atomization.
Intimacy is “into-me-see.” I am going to talk to you, my beloved, and I am going to share with you my most prized possessions, which are no longer my dowry and the fruit of my womb but my hopes, my aspirations, my fears, my longings, my feelings—in other words, my inner life. And you, my beloved, will give me eye contact. No scrolling while I bare my soul. I need to feel your empathy and validation. My significance depends on it.
Never before have our expectations of marriage taken on such epic proportions. We still want everything the traditional family was meant to provide—security, children, property, and respectability—but now we also want our partner to love us, to desire us, to be interested in us. We should be best friends, trusted confidants, and passionate lovers to boot. The human imagination has conjured up a new Olympus: that love will remain unconditional, intimacy enthralling, and sex oh-so-exciting, for the long haul, with one person. And the long haul keeps getting longer.
Contained within the small circle of the wedding band are vastly contradictory ideals. We want our chosen one to offer stability, safety, predictability, and dependability—all the anchoring experiences. And we want that very same person to supply awe, mystery, adventure, and risk. Give me comfort and give me edge. Give me familiarity and give me novelty. Give me continuity and give me surprise. Lovers today seek to bring under one roof desires that have forever had separate dwellings.
In our secularized society, romantic love has become, as Jungian analyst Robert Johnson writes, “the single greatest energy system in the Western psyche. In our culture, it has supplanted religion as the arena in which men and women seek meaning, transcendence, wholeness, and ecstasy.” In our quest for the “soul mate,” we have conflated the spiritual and the relational, as if they are one and the same. The perfection we long to experience in earthly love used to be sought only in the sanctuary of the divine. When we imbue our partner with godly attributes and we expect him or her to uplift us from the mundane to the sublime, we create, as Johnson puts it, an “unholy muddle of two holy loves”4 that cannot help but disappoint.
Not only do we have endless demands, but on top of it all we want to be happy. That was once reserved for the afterlife. We’ve brought heaven down to earth, within reach of all, and now happiness is no longer just a pursuit, but a mandate. We expect one person to give us what once an entire village used to provide, and we live twice as long. It’s a tall order for a party of two.
At so many weddings, starry-eyed dreamers recite a list of vows, swearing to be everything to each other, from soul mate to lover to teacher to therapist. “I promise to be your greatest fan and your toughest adversary, your partner in crime, and your consolation in disappointment,” says the groom, with a tremble in his voice.
Through her tears, the bride replies, “I promise faithfulness, respect, and self-improvement. I will not only celebrate your triumphs, I will love you all the more for your failures.” Smiling, she adds, “And I promise never to wear heels so you won’t feel short.” Their declarations are heartfelt mantras of committed love. But what a setup. The more they pile up the promises, the more I wonder if they’ll make it through the honeymoon with that list intact. (Of course, in their less dreamy moments, today’s newlyweds are well warned of the fragility of matrimony, hence the prosaic pre-nups that precede the poetic vows.)
We have brought into our conception of marriage everything we once used to look for outside—the adoring gaze of romantic love, the mutual abandon of unbridled sex, the perfect balance of freedom and commitment. In such a blissful partnership, why would we ever stray? The evolution of committed relationships has brought us to a place where we believe infidelity shouldn’t happen, since all the reasons have been removed.
And yet, it does. As much as we hopeless romantics hate to admit it, marriages based on attraction and love are often more fragile than marriages based on material motives. (Although that’s not to say the old, steady marriages were happier.) They leave us more vulnerable to the vagaries of the human heart and the shadow of betrayal.
The men and women I work with invest more in love and happiness than ever before, but in a cruel twist of fate, the resulting sense of entitlement is precisely what’s behind today’s exponential rise of infidelity and divorce. Once we strayed because marriage was not supposed to deliver love and passion. Today we stray because marriage fails to deliver the love, passion, and undivided attention it promised.
Every day in my office I meet consumers of the modern ideology of marriage. They bought the product, got it home, and found that it was missing a few pieces. So they come to the repair shop to fix it so that it looks like what’s on the box. They take their relational aspirations as a given—both what they want and what they deserve to have—and are upset when the romantic ideal doesn’t jibe with the unromantic reality. It’s no surprise that this utopian vision is gathering a growing army of the disenchanted in its wake.
“My needs aren’t being met,” “This marriage is not working for me anymore,” “It’s not the deal I signed up for”—these are laments I hear regularly in my sessions. As psychologist and author Bill Doherty observes, these kinds of statements apply the values of consumerism—“personal gain, low cost, entitlement, and hedging one’s bets”—to our romantic connections. “We still believe in commitment,” he writes, “but powerful voices coming from inside and outside tell us that we are suckers if we settle for less than we think we need and deserve in our marriage.”5
In our consumer society, novelty is key. The obsoleteness of objects is programmed in advance so that it ensures our desire to replace them. And the couple is indeed no exception to these trends. We live in a culture that continually lures us with the promise of something better, younger, perkier. Hence we no longer divorce because we’re unhappy; we divorce because we could be happier.
We’ve come to see immediate gratification and endless variety as our prerogative. Previous generations were taught that life entails sacrifice. “You can’t always get what you want” made sense a half century ago, but who under thirty-five vibes with this message? We doggedly reject frustration. No wonder the constraints of monogamy can induce panic. In a world of endless options, we struggle with what my millennial friends call FOMO—the fear of missing out. FOMO drives what is known as the “hedonic treadmill”—the endless search for something better. The minute we get what we want, our expectations and desires tend to rise, and we end up not feeling any happier. The swiping culture lures us with infinite possibilities, but it also exerts a subtle tyranny. The constant awareness of ready alternatives invites unfavorable comparisons, weakens commitment, and prevents us from enjoying the present moment.
Mirroring a shift in Western society at large, relationships have left the production economy for the experience economy. Marriage, as philosopher Alain de Botton writes, went “from being an institution to being the consecration of a feeling, from being an externally sanctioned rite of passage to being an internally motivated response to an emotional state.”6 For many, love is no longer a verb, but a noun describing a constant state of enthusiasm, infatuation, and desire. The quality of the relationship is now synonymous with the quality of the experience. What good is a stable household, a good income, and well-behaved children if we are bored? We want our relationships to inspire us, to transform us. Their value, and therefore their longevity, is commensurate with how well they continue to satisfy our experiential thirst.
It is all these new prerogatives that drive the story of contemporary infidelity. It’s not our desires that are different today, but the fact that we feel we deserve—indeed, we are obligated—to pursue them. Our primary duty is now to ourselves—even if it comes at the expense of those we love. As Pamela Druckerman points out, “Our high expectations for personal happiness might even make us more likely to cheat. After all, aren’t we entitled to an affair, if that’s what it takes to be fulfilled?”7 When the self and its feelings are central, a new narrative of justification is added to the age-old story of straying desires.
All of this brings us to Silvia’s twins, Zac and Michelle. Now in their late twenties, they are quintessential millennials. The cultural landscape they inhabit is shaped by the values laid out by their parents—individualism, self-fulfillment, egalitarianism—to which they have added a fresh focus on authenticity and transparency. Technology is at the center of their every activity, including the sexual variety. Their libidinal pursuits play out on apps like Tinder, Grindr, Hinge, Snapchat, and Instagram.
Neither Zac nor Michelle is married—like all their friends, they’ve spent their twenties completing their education, traveling, working, and playing. They’ve grown up in a wide-open sexual terrain that no previous generation has encountered—one with more opportunity, but also more ambiguity; fewer limits but few guidelines. As a young queer man, Zac has never known what it was like to sneak into an underground gay club where all the men are married to women. He didn’t have to “come out,” because in some sense he was never in. He knows about the AIDS crisis from movies, but he has a prophylactic pill in his pocket that will keep him safe. When marriage equality became the latest chapter in the evolution of the institution, he got down on one knee and proposed to his boyfriend, Theo, in front of the entire law office where they work. Someday they hope to have a family of their own.
Michelle, an entrepreneur who runs a small virtual reality company, is not sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring. If she wants to be with someone, she’s one swipe away. She dreams of one day getting married, but she’s in no hurry. In fact, she has her eggs on ice so she doesn’t have to fret about her biological clock, and enough money saved that she’ll never be dependent. “Even if I met the right guy tomorrow, I wouldn’t want to have kids for at least five years,” she explains. “I’d want to live with someone and enjoy being a couple before we became parents.” Some refer to this cohabitation period as “beta testing” a relationship. “Besides,” Michelle adds, “if I don’t meet someone, I don’t need a guy to become a mother.” Sex, marriage, and parenthood used to be a package deal. No longer. The boomers separated sex from marriage and reproduction; their children are separating reproduction from sex.
Michelle’s attitudes are common among her generation. “Culturally, young adults have increasingly come to see marriage as a ‘capstone’ rather than a ‘cornerstone,’” say the researchers at the project Knot Yet, “that is, something they do after they have all their other ducks in a row, rather than a foundation for launching into adulthood and parenthood.”8
Walking down the aisle is something Michelle will only do once she feels emotionally mature, professionally settled, financially secure, and ready to move on from the fun of singledom. At that time, she will be looking for a partner who will complement her and who will bestow upon her the deep experience of recognizing her carefully crafted identity. In contrast, for her grandmother Maria, marriage was a formative experience, the cornerstone upon which she and her husband were building their identities together as they moved into adulthood.
Will Michelle’s calculated delay protect her from the adulterous betrayal that Maria suffered? Or will it leave her more vulnerable? Hugo Schwyzer comments in The Atlantic that the “cornerstone” paradigm has an expectation of difficulty built into it, while the “capstone” does not. Couples who marry young are expected to struggle and to come out stronger for it. Hence, the cornerstone model “doesn’t condone infidelity so much as it concedes its near-inevitability.” In contrast, he observes, “The capstone model is much less forgiving of sexual betrayal because it presumes that those who finally get around to marrying should be mature enough to be both self-regulating and scrupulously honest. . . . The evidence suggests, however, that the capstoners are more than a little naïve if they imagine that a rich set of premarital life experiences will serve as an inoculation against infidelity.”9
Maria, now almost eighty and widowed, will attend her grandson’s wedding next month, and perhaps her mind will drift back to her own nuptials. The institution into which Zac and Theo are entering bears little resemblance to that into which she and Kenneth solemnly stepped, more than half a century before.
In order to keep up with modern life, marriage has turned itself inside out, offering ever-greater equality, freedom, and flexibility. And yet there is one matter about which it remains, for the most part, unflinching: infidelity.
The more sexually active our society has become, the more intractable its attitude toward cheating. In fact, it is precisely because we can have plenty of sex before marriage that exclusiveness within marriage has assumed entirely new connotations. These days, most of us arrive at the altar after years of sexual nomadism. By the time we tie the knot, we’ve hooked up, dated, cohabited, and broken up. We used to get married and have sex for the first time. Now we get married and we stop having sex with others.
The conscious choice we make to rein in our sexual freedom is a testament to the seriousness of our commitment. (Of course, in the continuing evolution of this most elastic institution, there are now some who bring multiple partners inside marriage as well.) Faithfulness is now an elective, an expression of primacy and loyalty. By turning our backs on other loves, we confirm the uniqueness of our “significant other.” “I have found The One. I can stop looking.” Miraculously, our desire for others is supposed to evaporate, vanquished by the power of this singular attraction. In a world where it is so easy to feel insignificant—to be laid off, disposable, deleted with a click, unfriended—being chosen has taken on an importance it never had before. Monogamy is the sacred cow of the romantic ideal, for it confirms our specialness. Infidelity says, You’re not so special after all. It shatters the grand ambition of love.
In her seminal book After the Affair, Janis Abrahms Spring eloquently gives voice to this existential torment: “Swept away . . . is your own conviction that you and your partner were meant for each other, that no one could make your partner happier, that together you formed a primal and irreducible union that could not be shared or severed. The affair marks the passing of two innocent illusions—that your marriage is exceptional, and that you are unique or prized.”10
When marriage was an economic arrangement, infidelity threatened our economic security; today marriage is a romantic arrangement and infidelity threatens our emotional security.
Our individualistic society produces an uncanny paradox: As the need for faithfulness intensifies, so too does the pull toward unfaithfulness. In a time when we depend on our partners emotionally for so much, never have affairs carried such a devastating charge. But in a culture that mandates individual fulfillment and lures us with the promise of being happier, never have we been more tempted to stray. Perhaps this is why we condemn infidelity more than ever even as we practice it more than ever.