Asymmetry: a post about adultery

Via Chateau Heartiste, I am alerted to a Telegraph article arguing that men should allow their wives to cheat on them because monogamy is particularly difficult for women.

Of course, this being a socially conservative blog, one of my jobs is to deplore these sorts of things.  However, I found myself in surprising agreement with one of Mrs. Martin’s unstated assumptions.  She argues

“Why is it better to get a divorce and move on when you simply decide “I don’t fancy him anymore”, or the spark is gone…What a trail of destruction you might save yourself from creating if you said instead:  is there something [i.e. open infidelity] we can do here”?

Sexual fidelity is one of the duties of marriage.  There are others.  Kasperite Catholics forget this when they roll out the red carpet for adulterers who have also abandoned their spouses and children (or abandoned their spouses and deprived their children of their father, as the case may be) for a fake second marriage, while these same “merciful” Catholics have showed less interest in accommodating adulterers who have not abandoned their families.  Not that the latter deserve accommodation, but solicitude for the former gives the impression that we care less about violated duties than bourgeois respectability, which is satisfied as well by a simulated marriage as by a real one.  Even orthodox Catholics are too comfortable with accepting those in second marriages who agree to live “as brother and sister”.  Even if any such couples exist, they are ceasing to violate only one of their wedding vows.  Most likely, their true spouses don’t want them back, but let us please give some consideration to those forgotten other vows.

Having an affair is less immoral than divorcing one’s spouse.

Mrs. Martin holds other assumptions that I find more questionable.  If a woman loses sexual attraction for her husband, is it really likely that having sex with another man she is attracted to will make her more content with her marriage?  I admit to being no expert on matters of the heart, but I don’t think that’s how women’s psyches work.

If she were to be fully honest, she wouldn’t speak about a Christmas gift “pass”, with the implication that an unfulfilled woman will only need to cheat once or a small number of times.  Once one has committed a sexual sin once, it is more difficult to abstain from it in the future.  There is a satiation immediately after sexual gratification, but it doesn’t last, and one’s motivation to resist is thereafter significantly weakened.  After all, you’re already an adulteress.  You can’t say anymore that sex is something special reserved for one man or that you’re not that kind of girl.  What difference does it make if you do it n or n+1 times if n>0?  (By the way, that’s the liberating effect of the sacrament of reconciliation:  it resets your counter.  I don’t see how anyone once stumbled could recover chastity without this sacrament.)  Usually the determining factor in fighting sexual temptation is not the strength of the temptation but the strength of the will to resist.  Of course, if she enjoys her affair, then the temptation to continue will grow as well.  Nobody says to herself “That was the best sex I’ve ever had.  Now I never need to do it again.”  It would be very difficult to escape from this trap.

Note that only women get an adultery pass.  I doubt this new double standard could work as well as the old one.  Men having affairs has always been regarded as wrong; the old double standard was that, while it was condemned, people were not as upset about it as they were about a wife’s infidelity (for obvious biological reasons).  But our new earnest and self-righteous cultural elite is not civilized enough to be hypocritical.  They proclaim their adulteries a right and direct their indignation at any wronged husband who reproaches them.  Men winked at each others’ adulteries as a concession to weakness; women will defend each others’ adulteries as a display of strength.  By the time he is 12 years old, every man knows he has a weakness for, and an unhealthy obsession with, sex.  He knows perfectly well that it is something that must be restrained, even if he often fails to properly restrain it.  Women generally don’t have to incorporate such truths into their self-image, and when female writers do confront antisocial aspects of their sexuality, they conclude that society must change rather than that women must be restrained (at least as a public stance, whatever we may turn a blind eye to in private) for the common good.