The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People (39 page)

Not many people reflect on a spouse's adultery with the comical, cerebral detachment of Leopold Bloom in James Joyce's
Ulysses:

As natural as any and every natural act of a nature expressed or understood executed in natured nature by natural creatures in accordance with his, her and their natured natures, of dissimilar similarity. As not as calamitous as a cataclysmic annihilation of the

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planet in consequence of collision with a dark sun. As less reprehensible than theft, highway robbery, cruelty to children and animals, obtaining money under false pretenses, forgery, embezzlement, misappropriation of public money, betrayal of public trust, malingering, mayhem, corruption of minors, criminal libel, blackmail, contempt of court, arson, treason, felony, mutiny of the high seas, trespass, burglary, jailbreaking, practice of unnatural vice, desertion from armed forces in the field, perjury, poaching, usury, intelligence with the king's enemies, impersonation, criminal assault, manslaughter, willful and premeditated murder. As not more abnormal than all other altered processes of adaptation to altered conditions of existence, resulting in a reciprocal equilibrium between the bodily organism and its attendant circumstances, foods, beverages, acquired habits, indulged inclinations, and significant disease.

But then Mr. Bloom, whose wife had an afternoon rendezvous with her hot new lover, the aptly named Blazes Boylan, concludes his reverie by noting that Molly's affair is "more than inevitable, irreparable." We have already seen that human beings are not, biologically speaking, monogamous. But they are also disinclined to tolerate departures from monogamy with the blithe assurance that because they are "natural," they are okay. At the same time, Leopold Bloom is wrong: Marital infidelity is not inevitable (nor, one hopes, necessarily irreparable either).

For human beings, sex has three great functions: procreational, relational, and recreational. The first is obvious. The second speaks to the deep bonding and connectedness that often develop between lovers and that-- according, at least, to Western religious tradition--should precede sexual relations between people. The third aspect of sex, recreational, is doubtless the most controversial. But the fact remains that sex is, or can be, great fun and a powerful recreational urge in its own right.

In
Ars Amatoria,
the Roman poet Ovid justifies what is perhaps the most notorious, and ruinous, of all cases of adultery: Helen's affair with Paris, which precipitated the Trojan War and "launched a thousand ships." It seems that Helen's husband Menelaus was away at the time:

Afraid of lonely nights, her spouse away Safe in her guest's warm bosom, Helen lay. What folly, Menelaus, forth to wend, Beneath one rooftree leaving wife and friend?... Blameless is* Helen, and her lover too: They did what you or anyone would do.

SO WHAT?
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traditions, psychological processes, and personal experiences. So what if monogamy is not natural? And if adultery is? Can anything human be natural? Can anything human be unnatural? And what difference does it make?

"All tragedies are finish'd by a death," wrote Byron, whereas "All comedies are ended by a marriage." But whether or not monogamous marriage is our "natural" state, the human comedy rarely ends with it; more often, marriage is only a beginning.

lorsaking all others," say the wedding vows of almost every Jewish or

Christian denomination. Fail in this promised forsaking and it can be

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very cosdy, not only in money but in career, peace of mind, one's marriage and family, self-esteem, and the esteem of others. Sometimes extramarital affairs are hushed up, even in high places, as were John F. Kennedy's many infidelities in the White House. At other times, they become public and are ruinous, as with the great nineteenth-century Irish leader Parnell, who nearly brought independence to his country, only to be publicly shamed and politically discredited when his affair with a married woman, Mrs. Kitty O'Shea, was revealed.

And sometimes extramarital affairs become front-page news, complete with lurid details, denials, recantings, impeachment, and then, despite the shame, a degree of exoneration.

In Too
Far to Go,
John Updike wrote that marriage is a "million mundane moments shared." Without love, that sharing would presumably not be sought in the first place; and out of that sharing, love matures and grows. However, the sharing of a million mundane moments can also get pretty boring. Holy wedlock can become holy deadlock. As an anonymous Greek author wrote more than 2,000 years ago:

Once plighted, no men would go awhoring; They'd stay with the ones they adore, If women were half as alluring After the act as before.

According to Denis de Rougemont, there is an "inescapable conflict in the West between passion and marriage." Our civilization must recognize, he urges, "that marriage, upon which its social structure stands, is more serious than the love which it cultivates, and that marriage cannot be founded on a fine ardor."

The issue, for historian de Rougemont, is the
danger
of passion: We adore passion, and we are fascinated by it. According to de Rougemont, we even have a perverse desire to achieve unhappiness, to attain tragic proportions:

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Western Man is drawn to what destroys "the happiness of the married couple" at least as much as to anything that ensures it. Where does this contradiction come from? If the breakdown of marriage has been simply due to the attractiveness of the forbidden, it still remains to be seen why we hanker after unhappiness, and what notion of love--what secret of our existence, of the human mind, perhaps of our history--this hankering must hint at.

Maybe some people go outside monogamy precisely so that they will be caught and punished--and thus achieve access to the romantic, the intense, and the tragic: "whether in fact or in dreams, in remorse or in terror, in the delight of revolt or the disquiet of temptation." In any event, many would ruefully agree with Alexandre Dumas (the younger) that "the chains of marriage are so heavy that it takes two to bear them, and sometimes three."

11 the world loves a lover, and the more deeply he or she loves, the

better. Yet we don't normally speak of a passionate marriage. A

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good marriage, a happy marriage, a comfortable and compatible marriage, yes, but only rarely a passionate one. Or at least, not for long. "They lived happily ever after." Sure. But "They lived passionately ever after"? Come on.

If nothing else, it would be exhausting. To live in a state of perpetual passion would be to forgo much of the rest of life, and, in truth, there
are
other things. Love can deepen and broaden, provide new areas of connectedness and new strengths, but it rarely becomes more passionate. Even the simplest animals, the protozoa, are subject to the most primitive form of learning, habituation. An animal habituates to something when it stops responding to it or responds less than it used to. We habituate to smells, to sounds, even to sights, as when we stop seeing the paintings or photos on our wall. One way to counter habituation is to change the stimulus: You may have habituated to the sound of the refrigerator motor, but when it turns itself off, or changes pitch, you suddenly notice it again. Some people periodically rearrange the art on their walls so as to appreciate it afresh. Rearranging our love lives, however, is a different matter.

Passion is by definition short lived, or at most medium lived. Almost never is it long-lasting. It flourishes when new and freshly kindled, or perhaps when it is forbidden, as in the case of Romeo and Juliet and, of course, adultery. It also gets a shot in the arm from a change, when directed toward someone new (or, as any experienced--and happily--married couple knows, when the familiar person is experienced in a different way).

SO WHAT?
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Biblical tradition, however, was not nearly so uniformly sex-hating as the writings of early Christians might suggest. Old Testament men commonly had multiple wives, and some of the most reputable had numerous lovers as well as courtesans. The Song of Solomon is erotically charged--and so, apparently, was Solomon himself. Polygyny was widely accepted, and adultery was problematic only when it involved someone's wife or daughter; that is, a woman who was clearly associated with a man. Adultery was defined as a crime against a
man,
either husband or father ... as it still is in much of the world today, especially regions influenced by Islam. Sexual relations between a married man and a woman who had neither a husband nor a father was not considered to violate any dictates, either of society or of God.

The Tenth Commandment does not say "Thou shalt not covet another woman." Rather, it is specifically concerned with protecting the rights of one's
neighbor,
by keeping gallivanting men away from other men's wives.

We may hear about loyal subjects or faithful servants--rarely about loyal rulers or faithful kings. "Ich dien" (I serve) is the motto of the Prince of Wales, but let's be honest: The prince is more likely to be served. Loyalty or fidelity is typically something that the strong demand of the weak. It may therefore surprise no one that the double standard demands fidelity from the wife, while typically winking at comparable actions by the husband. In ancient India, sex by a married man with a prostitute or slave woman wasn't adultery, unless she was someone else's property, in which case it was an offense against the owner, not against the woman herself, and certainly not against the Lothario's wife. It is worth noting, incidentally, that male-oriented sexual ethics of this sort do not necessarily imply a rigid prud-ishness on the part of society at large: India, for example, is home of the world's first and most detailed sex manual, the
Kama Sutra,
and Indian lore has long glorified the pleasures of sex, to the point that Shiva and his wife were sometimes pictured as prolonging intercourse almost to infinity.

Among the ancient Hebrews, at least, there were other reasons for enforcing a double standard. Marriage was especially important as a means of establishing the property rights of geneological succession. Thus, an adulterous wife disrupted the careful system of biological relatedness upon which the social network depended.

Generally, Protestantism has been more agitated about adultery than has Catholicism, probably because the latter prohibits divorce and remarriage-- at least without an annulment. Thus, when divorce is very difficult to obtain because of religious reasons, extramarital affairs are less threatening to the continuation of the marriage. A wife may feel insulted, belittled, and generally furious at her philandering husband, but at least she is less likely to find her marriage terminated as a result. Her status as wife remains

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relatively unchallenged. (On the other hand, she might want to be relieved of such a spouse, but reluctant to go through the time and expense involved in an annulment.) By contrast, the availability of divorce among Protestants has upped the ante, making it possible that an extramarital affair can have more serious consequences. The American Puritans were especially severe in their punishment of adultery, which for a time was a capital crime in both the Massachusetts and Plymouth colonies.