It's a familiar story by now. Lurid headlines, a disgraced sports star, a wronged wife, and then the mistresses start to appear. In the case of Tiger Woods it was one, two, three, four... the count went up into the teens. John Terry had just the one infidelity, since the start of his marriage; although, admittedly, with the ex-girlfriend of a team-mate. Then there is Ashley Cole: four more mistresses came out of the closet last month, prompting his wife Cheryl to announce their separation.
Of course, there's nothing new about infidelity – or prurience – but watching the coverage I found myself wondering why we feel so strongly. Why do we care so much what goes on in other people's marriages? Sure, adultery seems glamorous and dangerous, but let's face it, it's also as common as dirt. If you know married people, you most likely know people who have cheated or been cheated on at some point, and whose marriages have survived intact, are perhaps even flourishing.
In the summer of 2004, I got a call from an old college fling who had moved nearby. We met for lunch and I was shocked by how inexorably drawn I was to him, how easily he coaxed me back into his bed. At first it was just the sex, which was new, addictively dark and rough – after 13 years in a committed relationship, I justified it as much-needed and harmless extracurricular. I had known my husband Eric almost half my life. We married young, although we'd already known each other for seven years. At the centre of our relationship was a deep understanding. That we knew each other so well seemed proof of a love superior in all ways to all others. If you had told me that I was capable of doing anything that could erode the faith of this most loyal of men, I'd never have believed you.
I was even more surprised, though in retrospect it was totally predictable, when I realised I'd fallen in love with this other man. With D, I was someone different. A co-conspirator. A playmate. Mischievous, sexy, thrillingly amoral. From the beginning, we did most of our flirting and plotting in cyberspace, through emails and text messages that flew fast and furious between us whenever we were apart. Dirty murmurs, teary yearnings, postcoital sighs were all read and tapped out on my BlackBerry's tiny screen, during any moment I could get to myself. (I started visiting the bathroom so often, Eric must have thought my bladder had shrunk to half its former size.) Who knows if my affair would have survived as long as it did without all those secret communiques, but it certainly would not have been discovered so quickly.
A few clicks of a mouse was all it took for Eric to find evidence of my betrayal. Chaos ensued. I broke it off with D, then found myself drawn back in again. Meanwhile, Eric and I wrangled, tearfully and angrily, for months and months about what our next move would be. Many couples would have just called it quits, but instead we cried, drank, watched a lot of TV and went to bed together at night, except when he didn't come home – because Eric began seeing other women, sometimes staying out all night without explanation, trailing home the next morning full of a remorse that was actually something else, a recrimination.
We had a trial separation. D and I broke up many times until, finally, it ended for good. But throughout it all Eric didn't leave. And I couldn't even comprehend the pain of leaving him. At first I thought we would never survive the pain of staying together either. But as we fought and cried and struggled to understand just what, and who, we wanted, we discovered that something between us remained unbroken.
I expected negative reactions when my book, Cleaving, was published. In it, I wrote about this period in my life and how I had acted so hurtfully toward my husband. I realised that the act of writing about this agonisingly personal material could be seen as a second betrayal, as stark as the first.
There was also the fact that my first book, Julie & Julia, which was transformed into a very sweet and popular movie, was about two marriages (mine to Eric, and the culinary icon Julia Child's to her husband, Paul) that could be held up as ideals of the institution. Julie & Julia the book, but most especially the movie, tells two parallel stories of strong, seemingly perfect unions. The kind of marriages that we all seem not only to want, but expect as our right – perfect harmony, perfect understanding, perfect sex. Now, I had dared to acknowledge that this confection of a marriage was not always so pretty. I knew that some would prefer the simple version.
What I was not prepared for was the depth of the anger – a rage that seemed sometimes more akin to terror. The attacks, especially ones launched from the safe anonymity of the internet, were vicious – commenters on my blog called me a "soiled, narcissistic whore" and accused me of defiling the institution of marriage. People questioned my husband's manhood for allowing himself to be "cuckolded", and for staying once my bad behaviour was uncovered. They might as well have put a scarlet A on my chest. It was as if my adultery, and the damage I had done to my own marriage, went beyond a mere selfish act of indiscretion. As if just acknowledging the fact that one woman could love, or make love to, a man other than her husband threatened to topple the very idea of marriage – to ruin it for everyone. As a female friend and fellow philanderer put it, "It's like we're contagious."
In the midst of this moral hysteria, a series of books have been published suggesting that we have lost sight of what it means to make a marriage work: that an affair need not signal the end of love. At the extreme end of this is French psychologist Maryse Vaillant, whose recent book suggests that infidelity is not only unavoidable, but can be beneficial to relationships; that the "pact of fidelity is not natural but cultural". But somewhere in the middle sit figures such as London-based marital therapist Andrew G Marshall, whose book How Can I Ever Trust You Again?, published earlier this year, examines how couples can recover from adultery. The book is primarily for those who have recently discovered a partner's infidelity, and is careful to balance the needs and hurts of both parties. He calls the perpetrator of the affair the "Discovered" rather than the "Adulterer". (The partner who has been cheated on is the "Discoverer".) "It's perfectly possible to turn an infidelity from the worst thing that ever happened in your relationship to the best," Marshall claims. "Couples who have been through an infidelity are always the most miserable but, after they've done the work, they're the happiest. When you've been hurt so much, and want so desperately not to go back there, you're willing to work harder and look deeper."
Kate Figes, author of Couples: The Truth, published in January, maintains a similar belief in the possibility of reconciliation. Like Marshall, Figes starts off from the assumption that lifelong relationships, and the intimacy and stability they provide, are a basic human need, worth working to save and grow. She sees our modern emphasis on infidelity as a deal-breaker – accompanied by our readiness to judge other couples who attempt to work through it – as short-sighted. "A great many marriages and long-term relationships survive affairs," she notes. "But they need to be able to flout strong social expectations to do so."
So where does that mob mentality come from? Why can't we acknowledge that we aren't always perfect? That, as Eric and I used to say to one another in our darkest moments, no one can know what anyone's marriage is really like.
Back when I was in the grip of my own affair, I read Laura Kipnis's amusing and thought-provoking Against Love: A Polemic, first published in 2003. It proved to me a sort of life buoy at a time when nothing seemed certain and everything grimly serious. With her tongue firmly in her cheek, Kipnis celebrates adulterers as rebels kicking their heels in the traces of an institution engineered to keep people docile and dedicated to the status quo. At a moment when I felt oppressed by my guilt, Kipnis's book allowed a brief moment of levity, breathing room and, yes, a bit of self-justification. I gave copies of it to both my husband and my lover, maybe to expose something of what I was thinking, maybe just to give a much-needed laugh.
Seven years later, Kipnis is not quite so light-hearted. She wonders if perhaps the jolly tone that allowed her to talk of adultery without taboo also allowed her to let go mostly unacknowledged the very real pain of those who have been hurt by a partner's indiscretions. It's easy, and perhaps correct, to criticise contemporary marriage as being built, unrealistically, on the idea that one person can fulfil all your needs – as lover, co-parent and best friend – for all time. But, she says now, that's where we are today.
Once there was a world of arranged unions and marriage as politics and finance; now, in a world of sexual independence, relative gender equality and an increasingly frayed social fabric, we have marriage as intimacy. "It's a double bind," Kipnis says. "Adultery is more of an issue now, because we are closer."
But still it happens, all the time. I think of one friend who wrote to me about the aftermath of her own affair: "I was being really quiet one day in the car, and whenever I'm quiet he gets worried. Rather than ignoring my distance, he asked me what I was thinking. I told him that I wondered if he ever wished I hadn't told him. Amazingly, this is what he said: 'I would go through it all over again to know that we would be here, so much closer and more honest than ever before.'"
There was a time when I thought infidelity was without excuse or redeeming value. And I'd never deny the hurt my actions caused, to my husband, to me, maybe even (who knows?) to my lover. But the fact is that as we stood amid the rubble, Eric and I looked at one another and saw things we hadn't seen before. That hurt, but it also made us realise that everything had collapsed for reasons we'd been ignoring, and that we valued what remained enough to try to build a new home for it.
So we went to counselling. I remember the first day, as we sat in that office together. I thought, if I open my mouth, if I voice what I feel – that I didn't know what I wanted, that I loved someone else, that I hurt – the pain of it will end our marriage. But I spoke. And when I stopped speaking, we were still standing. And here Eric and I stand now, on a far shore, closer than we were before, and stronger. So, no. To those who want endless punishment, who want me in my scarlet A, I cannot comply. I cannot say that I regret.
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