Last week, Yvonne called me to say she was in Manila. I right away invited her to lunch. Surprisingly, my gregarious friend who always wanted to go to new "in" places suggested to meet somewhere very private like my home. And for a good reason! She was in tears most of the lunch that she could hardly eat. What I learned during the lunch was so depressing that I was also in tears and could hardly eat. She and her husband were divorcing because she caught him having a three-year ongoing affair with the secretary of his best friend. In between sobs (I could really get so emotional!), I told her about my conversation with her husband during that dinner in New York, and how he struck me as a man so in love with his wife. I would never have thought that he was not faithful to her with the way he was extolling her many virtues. He was so convincing that I promised myself to look for a man like him, someone with his qualities: faithful, and so in love with his wife! What the double-edge husband did not tell me was he was also in love with another woman! That night, I was in a very angry mood because of Yvonne’s experience. I vicariously put myself in her shoes and I was fuming mad at her husband. I called up my sister to tell her about Yvonne’s fate and she could not believe that I was cursing the husband in every sentence. It was not the first time I heard of unfaithful husbands, but this one took the cake. I felt as betrayed as Yvonne because he was such a hypocrite. Yvonne’s experience made me ask and ponder: Why is monogamy so difficult for many?
It seems that sexual infidelity is one of humanity’s great obsessions. We abhor it, yet we want to hear about it and most cannot resist it. It’s what has kept Jerry Springer on TV for the past 15 years and Greek mythology alive in its retelling for the past 3,000 years. In the many stories that we hear, whether recent or historical, we are reminded of the emotional and social fallout of infidelities. Not to mention the scowls it gets from the world’s biggest religious groups. Perhaps for us human mortals, monogamy does not come naturally and biology predisposes us to seek multiple sex partners. That’s what zoologist David Barash, PhD, and Judith Lipton, MD, argue in their book The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People. Virtually all animals, they say, are far from being 100 percent monogamous 100 percent of the time. "The only completely, fatalistically monogamous animal we’ve been able to identify is a tapeworm found in the intestines of fish. That’s because the male and female worms fuse together in the abdomen and never separate afterwards," Lipton says. Other animals, humans included, are motivated to ensure their reproductive success not only by picking the highest quality mate they can get but also by taking others on the side.
"The examples where monogamy is perceived to be the norm are generally facades when you actually do DNA testing and see who is sleeping with whom." Lipton and Barash make a distinction between sexual infidelities and "social monogamy." Even in animals that mate for life like many birds do, DNA tests reveal that the offsprings are often not related to the male of the pair.
This is the case with people, too. Lipton once contacted a Canadian hospital where doctors were running some genetic tests to find out children’s risks for inherited diseases. In about 10 percent of the samples, the children were not related to the supposed father.
Some dubious statistics show that as many as 50 percent of women cheat on their husbands and 70 percent of men cheat on their wives. According to the 1992 Health and Social Life Survey, it is clear that men are more prone to infidelity and notably, the longer they live, the more likely they are to cheat.
Don David Lusterman, a marriage and family therapist and author of Infidelity: A Survival Guide, there are reasons why people cheat on their mates. He cites them as:
1) They don’t feel special in their existing relationship. So, given the attention of another man or woman, they just suddenly feel more special.
2) The proverbial midlife crisis.
3) The young person who got committed early and has not tasted enough of everything.
4) They like the feeling of "conquests" to feed their ego.
5) Others have some internal frustrations in their marriage and they actively seek what they want outside the relationship.
What are not taken into account in the surveys of infidelity are other kinds of infidelity besides having sex. Does a stolen kiss count? What about erotic chats with strangers online? A lap dance?
Lusterman emphatically states that "infidelity occurs when one member of a couple secretly violates the commitment to monogamy. That’s a very inclusive definition."
But another angle is, what would mortify one partner could be tolerated by another. If your partner considers it cheating, then it probably is!
What are the merits of fidelity?
"Well, for an evolutionary standpoint, it has its advantage for men. It ensures that the child you are working so hard to rear is biologically related to you," states Dr. Lipton.
There is also the angle of trust. It is so reassuring to know that you and your mate trust each other because both of you are monogamous.
So, my dear friend Yvonne, console yourself with the fact that you are not the only one in this world suffering the fate of a betrayed wife. The surveys clearly show it. But next time around, be more careful in your choice of a mate. But then again, being careful does not ensure us of anything as we all know that people change and relationships evolve into something lasting and meaningful or into something short-lived and disastrous. I would not know what to advise you except to hope and pray hard for the blessings of having a faithful and loving husband. God knows what is best for us!