SG: Those who stay in therapy and have stopped the affair have a
real good chance. After an affair is first uncovered and the involved
person vows to stop it, it usually doesn't stop right away. That would be
coitus interruptus; there has to be some kind of closure. There will be
secret meetings to say good bye or to make sure that you can really let
go. But that should happen in the first few weeks or months.
HM: Are some occupations or settings particularly conducive to
affairs?
SG: I don't know any place where the risk is low. When I was doing
research for my dissertation, I went to the Baltimore-Washington airport
and to an office park and gave out questionnaires. I'd go up to the men,
quite imposing in their pinstripe suits and starched collars, and ask if
they'd complete an anonymous research questionnaire on marriage.
I was stunned when the forms came back; so many of the men who had
looked so conservative had engaged in extramarital sex. It is now known
that, while we suspect the liberals, conservative men are actually more
likely to be having extramarital affairs -- because they split sex and
affection. There are the nice girls you marry and the wild girls you have
sex with.
HM: The double standard is alive and well.
SG: Men who score high on traits of authoritarianism are more
likely to separate sex and affection than men who are low in
authoritarianism. Military officers fall into this category.
People in high-drama professions -- among doctors, those in the ER,
trauma surgeons, cardiologists -- engage in a certain amount of living on
the edge that is associated with affairs. Certainly, being in the
entertainment business is a risk; there's a lot of glamour, and people
are away from home a lot. Often you're in a make-believe world with
another person.
HM: To hear that a person can be happily married and having an
affair is surprising.
SG: I often get asked, "How can women stay with men who have
repeated affairs?" Many people believe the Clintons have some kind of an
arrangement.
I don't know anything about their marriage, but I do know that it's
more comfortable for people to believe they have an arrangement. When
something bad happens to others, we distance ourselves from it, try to
find an explanation that couldn't possibly apply to us.
HM: You use the metaphor of walls and windows in talking about
affairs.
SG: There is almost always a wall of secrecy around the affair; the
primary partner does not know what's happening on the other side of that
wall. In the affair, there is often a window into the marriage, like a
one-way mirror.
To reconstruct the marriage, you have to reverse the walls and
windows -- put up a wall with the affair partner and put up a window inside
the marriage. Answering a spouse's questions about what happened in the
affair is a way to reverse the process. It's a matter of who's on the
inside and who's on the outside. Sometimes people will open windows but
not put up walls. Sometimes they put up walls but don't open the windows.
Unless you do both, you cannot rebuild safety and trust in the
marriage.
Tags:
absentee father,
affair,
being a woman,
challenges,
dismay,
explosive subject,
extramarital intercourse,
extramarital sex,
good sex,
hara estroff marano,
horror,
infidelity,
many men,
marriage,
relationships,
sex at home,
shirley glass,
trust,
wedding ring,
young women
