Infidelity

introduction

In American society we tend to draw lines between normal and abnormal, sick and well, “sane” and “insane,” and the addicted versus those with just a few bad habits. In a similar vein we often think there’s a clear division between a “good” spouse and adulterer. I’m here to explain that in reality the differences between these false binaries are not actually so clearly delineated.

Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic: The Archaeology of Medical Perception documented how the foundations of Western medicine in the nineteenth century were rooted in such distinctions. The new physicians of the 1800s used their medical gaze to create scientific divisions between normal and diseased states that became critical to our understanding of mental and physical illness. But when it comes to matters of the mind, the lines are actually quite blurry. And when it comes to infidelity, most people live in the gray zone.

The great American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan, MD, was fond of saying that even the sickest mentally ill person is much more like us than different. Nowhere is that fragile line between normal and abnormal more evident than with love and sex. With the right drivers, incentives, and opportunities, any of us can become obsessed with another person. After all, isn’t that what falling in love is all about?

Infidelity, defined as a breach in the promise of sexual exclusivity, is the end product of our normal impulses for love and lust gone haywire. Infidelity is a leading cause of divorce in this country. Romantic betrayal can be so devastating that it leads to suicide, homicide, and other crimes of passion. All this, despite the fact that more than 50 percent of “committed” dating people cheat, at least 20 percent of “monogamous” married people cheat, and many of the rest of us supposedly “upstanding citizens” think about it nonstop, although we tend to keep the thoughts to ourselves out of fear of reprisal from our partners and our community. Our adulterous thoughts can sometimes lead us to live in shame, hating ourselves. Although we might tell our partners everything else, our unfaithful thoughts and actions usually remain unspoken. The purpose of this book is to get us thinking about what goes unsaid and to help both adulterers and betrayed spouses alike.

In the pages that follow I quote the scientific literature and explain new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience. I delve into recent findings in genetics that reveal how our genes affect our behavior. I discuss how the new field of epigenetics is demonstrating that not only can our genes affect our behaviors but our behaviors and thoughts can actually change our genes.

My background in treating addiction significantly informs my take on the realities of infidelity. I argue in this book that sex and love are the primordial addictions, meaning our brains evolved to get us addicted to sex and love. These, I argue, are normal addictions. If anything can hook you, it’s lust and romance! After all, the survival of our species depends on it. But in cases of infidelity this irrational exuberance can bring on a truckload of trouble. Understanding our human frailties does not absolve cheaters of responsibility, of course, but it can grant us a new perspective that helps all of us make wiser, more informed choices before we act.

This book is about the role that our brains, our minds (or psychology), and our culture play in infidelity. We’ll learn from biological anthropologists and sociologists who have studied the development of infidelity through the course of human evolution. We’ll hear from psychologists, who explain how modern times are rife with sexual triggers, and from neuroscientists who understand how our brains betray us. All these experts together offer important perspectives to help explain how and why we get in trouble with sex so that we can learn how to better get a handle on desires that lead to destructive behaviors.

In Part I we will explore the science surrounding sex and infidelity with an intimate glimpse into the brain’s reward systems and how they can become hijacked—leading us into destructive behaviors that often include pulling us toward destructive choices, even if we don’t actually enjoy them. In Part II we’ll discuss the different ways people stray, by and large driven by human tendencies toward seeking novelty. In Part III we’ll talk solutions. I’ll offer case studies that provide examples of how couples move past an affair. I’ll discuss guiding principles to help partners discover their true sexual and romantic potential, unhindered by obstacles like ego and insecurity. And I’ll offer practical guidelines to help you avoid—or move out of—the morasses that have ensnared many couples. Although a book about infidelity by nature points out how love and sex can go awry, the take-home message from this book is that passionate love can endure despite our innate tendency to cheat and our built-in drive to destroy the good in our lives.

A Little About Me

As a psychiatrist, I am disinclined to talk about myself. Yet before I discuss my patients, I think it’s only fair to share a little about how I began working with infidelity. As a young doctor I was thrust into treating philanderers because of my dual interests in the scientific study of sex and my specialization in addiction medicine. (Philanderer, by the way, is a term that in common parlance is used to refer to men only. But I’ll use it in this book to refer to women too, particularly as philander in its Latin derivation implies “lover of men.”) Yet long before my professional journey, like many people, my very first experience with infidelity was what I witnessed as a child. This book is not at all about my life, but without a doubt, my own experiences have shaped how I now understand my patients and their families.

My dad co-owned a small meat company in Philadelphia, supplying all the ingredients for Philly’s famous steak sandwiches to local restaurants and the food stands along the Atlantic City Boardwalk. As the company salesman, my dad was rarely home, presumably because he was working so hard. My mother was a devoted wife, kind and joyful, and like many white, Jewish, middle-class mothers in the 1960s, she dedicated her entire being to homemaking and childcare. My mother’s normal maternal worries were made much worse by the deteriorating mental health of my second-oldest sister, Merle, who slowly devolved from a bright, happy child into a hallucinating schizophrenic person.

During the next decade my wonderful sister’s terrible illness plagued her. Merle sought refuge in her room until she could tolerate the hallucinations no longer, and she jumped from her window, three stories above to the concrete pavement. The fall didn’t kill her (although the illness ultimately did), and my beloved sister lived out her life with severe physical and mental limitations. My mother was beside herself with grief and despair. I retreated to my studies and decided to become a psychiatrist to help families like mine. My oldest sister ultimately became a psychologist. Meanwhile my father spent more nights away and, I suspect, sought relief from other women.

I share all this to explain that infidelity exists in a context—in a couple and in a family with its own particular array of hopes and disappointments, triumphs and tragedies. Affairs, new sex, and budding romance can be as much of an escape as drugs and alcohol, and denying affair(s) often reigns supreme. Many families hang onto myths to protect themselves from the truth. In my own family we believed that Dad spent many nights sleeping on the side of the highway. My goal for including this personal information is simply to convey that I both understand how complicated and contextual infidelity is and appreciate how, if my own father could stray, many other decent men and women could easily do the same. As I learned firsthand, infidelity can hit a family like a cluster bomb, perpetually kept a secret and rattling generations to come. On a visceral level many spouses and their children find it impossible to believe, forget, forgive, or reconcile.

Treating philandering spouses became one of my specialties largely by accident. After medical school, medical internship, and a psychiatry residency, during my fellowship at the Cornell Medical Center/New York Presbyterian Hospital, I specialized in sexual disorders and chemical addiction. I studied the early use of Viagra to treat impotence and worked in the field of alcohol, opiate, and cocaine addiction. Early on I was recommended to a public figure who’d had relentless struggles with infidelity. He and his supporters figured that I, an expert in sexual problems (like impotence) and chemical addiction (like alcoholism), could be the one to treat his sex addiction and discreetly and effectively extricate him from his personal and public morass.

In the aftermath of a salacious exposé, he came to my office battered and bruised, mocked and humiliated, and in great pain and anguish. His status and family (whom he loved) might never be the same. I treated him well enough and helped him restore his life. But I knew that if I was going to treat more people with sexual compulsivity, I needed more information and experience. So I went to train with the preeminent sex addiction psychologist, Patrick Carnes, PhD.

Largely derided by academics and my fellow psychiatrists, Dr. Carnes was the first psychologist to popularize the term sex addiction and quickly became one of my closest colleagues. Around the same time the American Psychiatric Association acknowledged that behaviors such as gambling and, possibly, compulsive internet use could be addictive. Although sex addiction is (still) not accepted as a diagnosis, the new terminology of “behavioral addictions” has enabled psychiatrists to think more expansively about the addictive potential of behaviors involving food and sex. The more I studied with Dr. Carnes, the more I realized that he was onto something potentially lifesaving for my patients. Some years later I was pleased to develop and coedit the first academic book about sexual compulsivity and other behavioral addictions.

The book in your hands is, of course, not a textbook, but it does bring the principles I’ve learned in science to the human experiences of sex and love. Today we know so much about compulsivity, infidelity, and the science of the brain. By understanding this science, you can begin to understand yourself, your spouse, and your predicament, granting you important tools for managing desires and behaviors so you are not stuck operating at the whim of your emotions and your impulses.

Caveat Emptor

This book contains no easy path to guaranteed happiness; instead, it offers many reasonable paths away from self-destruction. I’m not about to tell you that you can have your cake and eat it too or convince you that your marriage can benefit from affairs that are based on disrespect, lying, and cheating. That’s hogwash. What you won’t find in the following pages are ten easy steps to marital bliss and sexual nirvana.

What you will find, however, are clear explanations of the science of how your mind works and how and why affairs develop. I will explain how you, your spouse, and even your relationship with one another can survive and even thrive following a secret affair. My patients usually become even stronger as individuals and couples after the discovery of an affair, and I’ll tell you how to make that happen. The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, wrote that he could treat neurotic misery, but he couldn’t save people from normal unhappiness. Borrowing from Freud, my job is to rid people not of the normal hiccups and hurdles of relationships but rather of the needless pain and self-torture of cheating.

How do cheaters hurt themselves? The goal of addressing infidelity is not just to promote honesty between spouses but to help us all live lives in accordance with our own ideals. The worst damage that adulterers cause by their infidelity is not only disloyalty to their partner but also betraying themselves through breaking faith with their own hopes and dreams about establishing a trusting, enduring, and loving relationship with someone to whom they’ve pledged their love.

Whether you’ve been unfaithful or have discovered the unfaithfulness of your partner, the goal is to help you avoid impulsively and unknowingly destroying your life, your love, and your family. This book is designed to make you an informed owner of your mind and a conscious participant in your sexuality and your relationship as well as to give you the greatest satisfaction through wonderful sex and genuine, sustainable love.

I will present dozens of real-life cases drawn from the stories revealed in my treatment office by people who, other than being unfaithful, are usually good and decent citizens, as well as stories offered by spouses who were betrayed despite being loving and dedicated partners. The details have been anonymized, and the experiences of two or more actual patients have been merged into each single case study to prevent identification and protect patient privacy. All the stories presented are real and not at all exaggerated, and each of the patients discussed in detail generously gave me their permission to use their stories.

Cheating is an equal-opportunity enterprise, affecting people of all socioeconomic groups, races, religions, sexual orientations, and marital arrangements. In this book I use familiar gender names and pronouns (man and woman, he and she), but this content applies equally to different genders as well as to people of various sexual orientations. Although I often use the terms “spouse” and “marriage,” readers may fill in their own descriptors for themselves, their partners, and their own particular version of a long-term, committed, romantic relationship. This book even applies to relationships without the prerequisite of monogamy because, as I’ll explain in Chapter 1, infidelity has less to do with sex per se and more to do with acts of deception. Therefore, this book is not a diatribe for monogamy. I believe that, with honesty and integrity, people can be happy whether monogamous, nonmonogamous, polyamorous, or even asexual. This book is simply a means to overcome our tendency to deceive and destroy the love in our lives.

Now, let’s get to it.