Shattered Vows

Rebuild your relationship by rebuilding trust. Then open "windows" in the relationship.

By Hara Estroff Marano, Shirley Glass, published on July 01, 1998 - last reviewed on September 13, 2005

Hold on to your wedding ring. It's difficult, but possible, to repair the damage caused by infidelity. Increasingly, that's what couples want. But let go of assumptions. In an interview with Hara Estroff Marano, a leading expert challenges everything you think you know about the most explosive subject of the year.

Hara Marano: Infidelity appears to be the topic of the year. What has struck you most about the reaction to what may or may not be some kind of infidelity in high places?

Shirley Glass: Whatever horror or dismay people have about it, they're able to separate the way the President is performing in office and the way he appears to be performing in his marriage. That's especially interesting because it seems to reflect the split in his life. We don't know for sure, but he apparently is very much involved in his family life. He's not an absentee father or husband. Whatever it is that they share -- and they share a lot, publicly and privately -- he has a compartment in which he is attracted to young women, and it is separate from his primary relationships.

HM: Is this compartmentalizing characteristic of people who get into affairs?

SG: It's much more characteristic of men. Most women believe that if you love your partner, you wouldn't even be interested in an affair; therefore, if someone has an affair, it means that they don't love their partner and they do love the person they had the affair with. But my research shows there are many men who do love their partners, who enjoy good sex at home, who nevertheless never turn down an opportunity for extramarital sex. In fact, 56 percent of the men I sampled who had extramarital intercourse said that their marriages were happy, versus 34 percent of the women.

That's how I got into this.

HM: Because?

SG: Being a woman, I believed that if a man had an affair, it meant that he had a terrible marriage, and that he probably wasn't getting it at home -- the old keep-your-husband-happy-so-he-won't-stray idea. That puts too much of a burden on the woman. I found that she could be everything wonderful, and he might still stray, if that's in his value system, his family background, or his psychodynamic structure.

I was in graduate school when I heard that a man I knew, married for over 40 years, had recently died and his wife was so bereaved because they had had the most wonderful marriage. He had been her lover, her friend, her support system. She missed him immensely. I thought that was a beautiful story. When I told my husband about it, he got a funny look that made me ask, What do you know? He proceeded to tell me that one night when he took the kids out for dinner to an out-of-the-way restaurant, that very man walked in with a young blonde woman. When he saw my husband, he walked out.

HM: How did that influence you?

SG: I wondered what that meant. Did he fool his wife all those years and really not love her? How is it possible to be married for over 40 years and think you have a good marriage? It occurred to me that an affair could mean something different than I believed.

Another belief that was an early casualty was the hydraulic pump theory -- that you only have so much energy for something. By this belief, if your partner is getting sex outside, you would know it, because your partner wouldn't be wanting sex at home. However, some people are even more passionate at home when they are having extramarital sex. I was stunned to hear a man tell me that when he left his affair partner and came home he found himself desiring his wife more than he had in a long time, because he was so sexually aroused by his affair. That made me question the pump theory.

Many of our beliefs about the behavior of others come from how we see things for ourselves. A man who associates sneaking around with having sex will, if his wife is sneaking around, find it very hard to believe that she could be emotionally involved without being sexually involved. On the other hand, a woman usually cannot believe that her husband could be sexually involved and not be emotionally involved. We put the same meaning on it for our partner that it would have for us. I call that the error of assumed similarity.

HM: What infidelity research have you done?

SG: My first research study was actually based on a sex questionnaire in Psychology Today in the '70s. I analyzed the data, looking at the effect of extra-marital sex, length of marriage, and gender difference on marital satisfaction and romanticism. I found enormous gender differences.

Men in long-term marriages who had affairs had very high marital satisfaction -- and women in long-term marriages having affairs had the lowest satisfaction of all. Everybody's marital satisfaction went down the longer they were married, except the men who had affairs. But in early marriages, men who had affairs were significantly less happy. An affair is more serious if it happens earlier in the marriage.

Explaining these gender differences was the basis of my dissertation. I theorized that men were having sexual affairs and women emotional affairs.

HM: Are affairs about sex?