Beware the Poet in the Windstorm

Is it possible to be happily married and stray? Or does such a thing happen only in the movies?

In “Unfaithful,” a beautiful suburban housewife named Connie Sumner (played by Diane Lane) seems to have a warm and happy marriage. Her equally good-looking husband (Richard Gere) is not only a reliable, ample provider, but tells his wife things like, “You really have no idea how beautiful you are, do you?” She drives a Range Rover, has a gravity-defying body that is the envy of her girlfriends, volunteers for her son’s school fund-raisers and lives in a two-story lakefront house that looks like the ultimate Restoration Hardware fantasy.

And then, one day, she is literally blown into the arms of a sexy, poetic Frenchman (Olivier Martinez) by a freak windstorm.

The movie’s director, Adrian Lyne, has said that in order to show the arbitrary nature of infidelity, he intentionally made the Sumners’ marriage a loving one. Some viewers, a few of whom have aired their objections in newspaper essays, have argued that the movie’s premise--a “happily married” wife and mother engaging in an extramarital dalliance--is implausible. But a happy marriage, say experts on infidelity, does not necessarily protect against infidelity.

“The myth is that if you have a happy marriage, it prevents you from having an affair,” said Shirley P. Glass, a clinical psychologist practicing in Owings Mills, Md., and author of “Not Just Friends: Protecting Your Marriage From Infidelity and Healing the Trauma of Betrayal” (Free Press) scheduled for release in January. “The common perception is that if someone has an affair, something must be wrong with the marriage. Even many therapists think that.”

In a survey of 400 therapists, Glass found that 40% of the professionals viewed an affair as a symptom of an unhappy marriage, with female therapists believing it more strongly than males. But a survey of 300 married individuals conducted by Glass in 1980 (and divided equally between the genders), found that 56% of men and 34% of women who had had an extramarital affair reported that they were happily married, loved their partner and enjoyed sex with their spouse. Men in long-term marriages who were unfaithful reported high levels of marital satisfaction. It was the reverse with women. It is difficult to estimate how prevalent infidelity is, but a 1994 University of Chicago survey, Sex in America, found that 25% of men reported that they had had an extramarital affair compared to 12% of women.

“Women generally think that if you love your partner, you wouldn’t even be interested in an affair,” said Glass, who added that in her infidelity survey, women said they had affairs for love, emotional intimacy and sex, in that order. Men said sex was the primary reason for infidelity. Many men who have affairs feel entitled to take advantage of every opportunity for extramarital sex, she said.

The conventional wisdom that only someone who is unhappily married would have an extramarital fling comes from the prevailing cultural belief that marriage is supposed to make one happy and whole. When the marriage falls short, the thinking follows, there is a logical cause to stray or at least to think about it.

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Lots of Factors at Work, Including Opportunity

“People insist that nobody would fool around unless there is something wrong with their marriage,” said Frank Pittman, an Atlanta-based psychiatrist who is an expert on the issue of infidelity and author of “Private Lies: Infidelity and the Betrayal of Intimacy” (Norton, 1989). “In other words, an infidelity has to be the fault of a wife who made her husband do it, or a husband must be a brute or loser to make her do it.” Vulnerability to infidelity doesn’t have only to do with the quality of one’s relationship but also with opportunity (windstorm, anyone?), personal ethics (whether infidelity violates one’s moral values) and social context (working or living in an environment where affairs are tolerated).

“Some people don’t get invited into an affair, so the fact that they don’t have an affair might not be a reflection of their character,” said Pittman. “Men generally have affairs because they think they are entitled [due to approving cultural messages] even though they know it is wrong. Women generally have to work up a fair amount of anger toward their husband because they know better.... They know what a risk it is, so they can only justify it with a lot of anger in the marriage.” Though we would like to believe that if we keep our relationships alive and vital, infidelity won’t happen, it is not necessarily true, adds Paul Kovacs, a clinical psychologist in Santa Monica. “People who are happily married are less likely to go looking for an affair and most of the people who have affairs are unsatisfied and hurting. But humans are born with the capacity to be infatuated with and feel affection toward any number of human beings.” In other words, being happily married and falling into a pool of lust over a luminous personification of sexiness can coexist. What determines whether chemistry between two people becomes carnal knowledge can spring gradually from a series of decisions.

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‘Great Passion Is Always Irrational by Definition’

“Affairs might start with two people saying, ‘This is only going to be a friendship,’ then, ‘Well, we are going to have an affair, but it won’t progress too far and I can keep a secret and keep it from getting out of control,’” said Kovacs. “Great passion is always irrational by definition.” Naturally, the very qualities that make a marriage secure, satisfying and fulfilling make it predictable and, well, boring. Some people have affairs ostensibly to relieve boredom, for romance, sexual adventure and emotional nourishment. Sometimes, it’s just a case of bad judgment at the office late one night with a seductive colleague. In the bestseller “The Erotic Silence of the American Wife” (Turtle Bay Books, 1992), author Dalma Heyn argued that women who had affairs did so in part because they were unable to express their whole sexual selves in the context of marriage. The irony of such affairs is that such sexual daring would often be a welcome tonic in the marital bed.

“It is not universal, but most betrayed partners would be delighted if their partner behaved in the marriage the way they did in the affair,” said Glass. After Connie Sumner emerges from a cafe bathroom where she and her lover have had an aerobic, spontaneous sexual tryst, an unsuspecting friend pronounces that all affairs end disastrously. The comment foreshadows what happens as the revelations about the affair play out to the movie’s end. Infidelity often leads to divorce, but affairs don’t have to end a marriage, according to psychologists who specialize in the delicate process of helping couples rebuild their relationships after an affair.

“For the spouse who is betrayed, there is a loss of innocence and a feeling that he or she can never trust again in the way they did before,” Glass said. “But one of the things I usually ask the person who had the affair is, ‘What did you learn about yourself in that other relationship that you would like to bring back to the marriage?’”

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Birds & Bees, a column on relationships and sexuality, runs on Mondays. Kathleen Kelleher’s e-mail is [email protected].