Masters and Johnson: Adultery

Extramarital sex hasn't disappeared in the Nineties. In fact, there is little evidence that participation in extramarital sex has even slowed down a notch in the age of AIDS. Reflecting this reality, affairs are the regular subject of movies, television shows and novels. In many ways, it seems as though America is obsessed with extramarital sex.

Most married couples claim to believe in the value of monogamy, but a sizable number of married men and women stray from this ideal. Various estimates suggest that anywhere from 26 percent to 66 percent of married American men and 18 percent to 69 percent of married American women have had extramarital sex. And, according to another group of researchers, 90 percent of the wives in a sample who suspected their husbands of straying outside the marriage were correct in their assumptions, while 87 percent of the husbands who thought their wives had had extramarital experiences were accurate. Our own findings support those results, though there are many instances where one or more affairs have occurred but are unsuspected by the spouse. However, stark statistics don't do much to illuminate the subject beyond suggesting that extramarital sex can hardly be considered unusual or abnormal behavior.

Unlike some authorities, we do not see all extramarital sex as inherently destructive. While we certainly agree that extramarital sex can be a divisive (and frequently explosive) issue, there are also many situations in which its positive aspects outweigh its negatives by a wide margin. Affairs can help keep a marriage together by reducing sexual tension, which in turn can lessen other forms of marital conflict. Affairs sometimes turn out to be personal growth experiences. Affairs don't always provide better sex or more happiness than a marriage; because of this, they can help a person appreciate the quality of his or her marriage at a time when this may have been in question. Perhaps, paradoxically, affairs sometimes lead to a rejuvenation of sex within a marriage, so in this sense they may actually contribute to marital satisfaction.

Our willingness to see that extramarital involvements can have a positive side should not be taken as a wholehearted endorsement of such behavior. We are firmly convinced that the down side of extramarital sex usually looms larger than any potential benefits that can be objectively ascribed to this situation.

Types of Affairs

As a matter of convenience, we will designate affairs that last less than six months as short-term. In this category come situation-specific affairs, which are typically one-night stands or short-term liaisons that arise because the opportunity presents itself as convenient and alluring rather than as a result of premeditation. Other common types of short-term affairs (in addition to the ones that are situation-specific) include those we can label as anger-revenge affairs and predivorce affairs.

Situation-specific affairs share several other common features. For example, they are kindled by alcohol use more than any other type of affair. Alcohol provides just enough loosening of ordinary social inhibitions that many individuals who were not actively on the prowl for extramarital sex acquiesce to the intrigue of the situation far more readily than they would have done while stone-cold sober. Another frequent element of situation-specific affairs is that they generally have a low probability of being discovered, which adds some obvious luster to their appeal. In large part, this stems from two facts: These affairs usually involve strangers (or someone who isn't in the spouse's circle of friends or acquaintances), and they often occur some distances from one's home. For these reasons, the situation-specific affair carries less baggage that other affairs. The simplicity of such affairs fulfills whatever requirements the two participants bring to bed with them.

From our research, we believe that at least a quarter of participants in these brief, unplanned affairs are either absolute neophytes or have had limited experience with extramarital sexual involvement. Condsider this account from a repentant 30-year-old minister whose wife was home in Atlanta with the kids while he was attending a religious seminar in Washington, D.C.: "I have always been a person who tires to practice what he preaches, to put it in kind to trite terms, so I am very ashmed of what I'm about to tell you. After eight years of a completely happy marriage, after having gently turned down seductive congregants on dozens of occasions, and afer having sworn to myself that I could resist any temptation that was thrown my way, I was much weaker that I ever could have imagined. Here's what happened: I went out to dinner with a group of six or seven people who were at this seminar. When we want back to the hotel, we went into the bar for more conversation. Looking back, I had had a few glasses of wine at dinner; at the I had another dirnk or two. Suddenly, there were just three of us sitting there--a teacher from Oklahoma, a woman form Ohio and me. The teacher got up and excused himself, and this woman--asked if I wouldn't keep her company while she finished her drink. Gallant person that I am, I agreed. Before I realized what was happening, she was rubbing my leg with her foot and running her moist tongue around her lips over and over again. I was on fire, and all I could think about was having her douse my flame. We got to her room in about 20 seconds, and we jumped on each other before I could even catch my breath. Now, I'm not blaming her in any way. I was a completely willing participant. But the next morning when I woke up, I felt like I had lost my head completely. I have never gotten up the courage to tell my wife what happened. It's just something I chalk up to experience, and something that I hope has taught me a lesson."

Anger-revenge affairs are also apt to be short-lived, though there are exceptions that have considerable staying power. Revenge affairs can be seen particularly among women who have no interest in the intricacies and logistical planning that a string of affairs involves. For them, the convenience of a once-a-week or once-a-month lover is a good trade-off for one who might be more attractive or exciting. For anyone choosing an affair primarily as a means of venting anger or getting back at a spouse for real or imagined injustices, the sex itself has a different sort of meaning than in most other affairs. "Look at how I'm degrading myself" is often just a transparent way of saying, "Look how I'm degrading you" to an inattentive or hostile spouse. Consider the following 34-year-old artist's plight--and her solution: "I'm just a normal sort of woman with normal needs and wants. I thought I had a pretty normal marriage. But my husband turned into such a fanatical fitness nut, with two hours a day of running and another hours a day at his office health club, that my place was more like the cook and trainer for the Olympic team than his wife. I had to make special vitamin-wheat-germ-eggwhite concoctions. I had to wash the hamburger meat to eliminate fat. I had to get up at 5:30 in the morning so he could have his morning run. And with all of this training, he fell asleep by 9:00 every night. I became so angry when Bill escalated his training to 80 miles of roadwork a week that I wanted a divorce. Instead, I got back at him by starting an affair with one of his buddies, one who was happy to stay home and have sex instead of pounding the pavement in the pouring rain."

Predivorce affairs are more like test flights--forays into the world of sex outside marriage as a prelude to making the final decision to terminate an already shaky relationship. Predivorce affairs allow a man or a woman to examine several critical issues: Am I really missing something in my marriage, or is everyone's sex pretty much the same as mine? Can I function adequately with a new partner? What sexual and relationship issues will I face after I get divorced?

Long-term affairs serve a broader range of purposes and, in general, assume greater complexity. Long-term affairs commonly fall into the following categories: Marriage maintenance affairs, hedonistic affairs, cathartic affairs, intimacy reduction affairs, kinky affairs and reactive affairs.

Marriage maintenance affairs are convenient arrangements that provide a key ingredient that is missing from one or the other partner's marriage. By supplying this much-needed element, the affair actually stabilizes the marriage and makes a breakup less likely. The missing element may be the same for both people--for example, it may be a willingness to experiment with sex--but frequently the affair provides different ingredients to the participants in a mutually beneficial exchange.

Although common wisdom has it that affairs often lead to marital dissolution, we have encountered hundreds of marriages held together and solidified by affairs. Generally, they fell in the category of marriage maintenance affairs. As several people have told us, these affairs are cheaper and more interesting than going to a marriage counselor.

Hedonistic affairs focus on the sexual and sensual action. They are pure and straightforward demonstrations of Freud's pleasure principle: They rarely lead to emotional entanglements and generally avoid the recriminations and ambiguities of other types of affairs that have a more driving focus. For those who are able to regard sex as a form of recreation--a term we do not (continued on page 152)Adultery(continued from page 64) use with negative connotations--these affairs fit the bill quite perfectly.

Cathartic affairs allow a participant to vent feelings through the conduct of the affair (something psychiatrists call "acting out") as well as by having someone to talk with about troublesome or unresolved issues that are inadequately recognized or dealt with in his or her marriage. The extramarital partner in a cathartic affair often plays a pseudotherapist role, whether or not he or she realizes it. Unlike a therapist, however, the role of the partner is not meant to be objective: The person who is unloading his or her gripes and troubles wants a completely sympathetic listener, not someone who dispenses advice.

Intimacy reduction affairs help individuals who are conflicted by ambivalence over the intimacy demanded by their spouses. The affair is a buffer against too much closeness in a marriage: Sexual involvement outside marriage creates a safety zone of emotional distance within the marriage.

Kinky affairs make up only a small portion of extramarital relationships, accounting for well under one percent of such alliances. Here, the partners are complementary to, or tolerant of, each other's unconventional sexual needs. In one case we studied, the male was especially aroused by being humiliated or demeaned by a woman. After a considerable amount of searching, in which he was repeatedly rejected by women who wanted less bizarre behavior from their lovers, he managed to find a woman who combined his need for being ordered around with her own erotic impulses. The result was that she found a partner who would have sex with her in public places--at a baseball stadium during a game, in the stacks of a public library or under a blanket on a beach, surrounded by hundreds of other couples.

Reactive affairs are triggered by a person's need to redefine or reassure himself or herself in light of changing life circumstances. The male mid-life crisis is a prime example: This is frequently a time when men question their vigor and attractiveness and attempt to prove their youthfulness to themselves by turning to younger sexual partners. A similar example, which is also related to changes in self-perception, comes when a woman whose life has been focused on being a mother suddenly confronts the emotional void created by the empty-nest syndrome, when her children have all left the home. With free time on her hands, a lack of focus and a wish to reexamine and redefine her life, it is not so unusual for the empty-nester to discover her sexuality and to opt for the excitement and rejuvenation of an emotionally satisfying extramarital relationship. Reactive affairs can also occur at younger ages, as with women who find themselves rebelling against the role of mommy when their children are young.

What Triggers Affairs?

There is no question in our minds that the greatest difference between men and women in the motivation for having affairs is this: Men tend to seek sexual variety and excitement, while women look for emotional returns. Women enter extramarital affairs for numerous reasons, of course. But the vast majority explain their motivation in terms of a search for better feelings in the face of being emotionally dissatisfied with their husbands. Here's how one 38-year-old woman described it to us: "Tom decided some years ago that I wasn't a good sexual partner. Whenever we had oral sex, he told me I wasn't doing it right. When we had intercourse, I was always too slow or too cold or too mechanical. On many occasions he'd say to me, 'You're lucky I'm your husband--no other man would ever be interested in you sexually.' Little did he know that the three men I'd had affairs with in the past sang an opposite tune, telling me that my tongue was fantastic, my lovemaking was the most exciting they'd ever had and my sexual responsiveness was, as one of them put it, like a string of Chinese firecrackers."

Many women who have affairs subconsciously barter their sexual favors for a sense of being a desirable, valued person. As one perceptive woman noted, "I trade 15 minutes in bed for a whole week of feeling wanted. I don't think that's such a bad trade-off." The extramarital partners of these women generally are quick to recognize the rules of the game: Their expected role is to be attentive, warm and sympathetic listeners, even if their actual time together is limited. Men who fail to meet these needs for their extramarital partners are usually doomed to short-lived affairs. Men who are adept at reading their partners' emotional requirements are, in contrast, able to sustain longer affairs on their own terms.

In four decades we have encountered only a handful of instances in which men turned to extramarital involvements in order to punish a spouse, whereas the revenge motif figures prominently in a quarter to a third of women's extramarital forays. Undoubtedly, the most common factor is the discovery of a husband's infidelity. Here are several explanations that women have given us that are typical of their reasoning. A 29-year-old computer programmer: "After eight years of marriage, I had never even flirted with another man and would never have dreamed of doing so. As far as I was concerned, almost everything about my marriage was good and solid. But then I found out that Dave had been having an affair with his secretary for more than two years. It made me so furious that I went out to a bar the first time he was away from home and let myself get picked up by a traveling salesman. I don't remember the sex very well, but I sure remember feeling, 'I'm getting even with that son of a bitch' the whole time the guy was on top of me." A 33-year-old schoolteacher: "I was brought up to think that extramarital sex was sinful. With two daughters and a seven-year marriage, an affair was the last thing on my mind. But after I discovered that my husband was messing around, I was madder than a bat out of hell. For revenge, I seduced his best friend and made sure he heard about it. What's good for the goose is good for the gander." A 42-year-old nurse: "I know that it's startling for a minister's wife to be telling you this. I can hardly believe it myself, because it's really out of character. But after John admitted to me that he had been sexually involved with several women in his congregation, something snapped inside, and I started to sleep around as sort of the ultimate act of revenge. I couldn't think of any other way to hurt him as much as he had hurt me."

It is, by the way, remarkable that in extramarital affairs involving two married people, the woman is usually the one in control. In contrast, when a married man has an affair with a single woman, the control is far more likely to be vested in the man. This is not only what we might call the operational control of the affair but also the strategic control over the longer-term outcome, especially whether or not the man leaves his wife. Clearly, the woman is most likely to decide if an affair starts, even if the man is the instigator. (In a substantial number of cases, women are the seducers rather than the seduced.) Once an affair is a fait accompli, it is usually the woman who decides how often, when, where and what the conditions for continuing the affair might be. Similarly, the types of sex permitted are virtually always governed by the woman rather than the man. The exception here may be if the woman wants to indulge in sadomasochistic action and the man demurs.

The explanation given by this 33-year-old female psychologist addresses another fairly common aspect of how revenge plays out in the battle between the sexes: "I had been married for a dozen years when I discovered that my husband had been moving money from his medical practice to an offshore bank account in his name alone. At first I felt betrayed. After all, I had sacrificed plenty while he was in medical school and serving his medical residency. Those were lean years, and now I deserved to reap the rewards of our improving position. Once I got beyond my initial reaction, I became outraged and angry. So I lashed out at him the easiest way I knew how: I seduced his partner and made sure my husband found out about it. In retrospect, this may not have been a smart or mature thing to do, but at the time I wasn't trying to accomplish anything but making him cry out in pain."

Many married women find, to their surprise, that an affair brings a taste of empowerment and self-esteem that they previously lacked. This boost to their self-esteem stems from at least four separate dynamics. First, the element of active choice replaces the sex-as-duty dullness that tarnishes many marriages. The married woman involved in an affair is likely to be treated with attentiveness and affection that kindles a feeling of being special and being wanted that is reminiscent of one of the most positive aspects of her courtship days. An affair almost inevitably endorses a woman's sense of attractiveness and desirability. And affairs give married women an alternate reality in their lives--a way of combating roles they have found unsatisfying and replacing them, even if fleetingly, with new ways of self-expressiveness and different patterns of behavior.

Of course, some women opt to have affairs simply because they are sexually dissatisfied and are looking for an innovative, physically stimulating lover. This is neatly shown by a few comments from women we have interviewed. A 34-year-old businesswoman: "My husband thinks sex is a lot like a two-minute drill on a football field: Although there's some body contact and movement, as long as he scores he's happy. How I feel or respond doesn't seem to enter his head." A 29-year-old physician: "My husband is a nice guy and we're basically happy together, but our sex life can only be described as boring. No matter how many times I've tried to show him or tell him what I like, he always seems to slip back into the same old patterns, and I'm the one left high and dry. I'm sure it would shock a lot of people, but I called my old college boyfriend and propositioned him, so now I get my sexual stimulation the way I like it, and I'm an easier person to be around." A 48-year-old housewife: "My husband is a successful accountant, a good father and an all-around good guy, but when it comes to making love, it's like he's doing tax calculations in his head: He's precise, mechanical and unexciting. I can live with this as long as I have a lover who can take care of my needs with a spicier kind of sexual interaction. The latest one is a kid who's almost ten years younger than me. I met him at a golf tournament last summer, and I let him think he was seducing me."

As we mentioned, with a high degree of consistency men seek extramarital liaisons for the sexual excitement and variety they hope to find. In fact, in a survey that we conducted recently of 200 married men who had had affairs, 87 percent said that their primary reason was sexual. Here are some typical comments: A 29-year-old stockbroker: "There's nothing wrong with my marriage, and my sex life at home isn't bad. It's just missing the sizzle that used to be there. Extramarital sex brings that sizzle front and center for me. As long as my wife doesn't find out about it, it's actually contributing to a better marriage, because I'm a happier, more satisfied person." A 46-year-old attorney: "I've been married for 23 years, and for 23 years I've had the same kind of sex. I finally decided that there had to be something more exciting, and I was right. I found exactly what I wanted: She's ten years younger than my wife, 20 pounds lighter and she gives great head, too."

Unlike women, few men deliberately turn to extramarital affairs for nonsexual reasons. While men's sexual involvements may lead to emotional involvements--after all, it is not always easy to separate sex from intimacy--the emotional bonds that form seem almost parenthetic to what men see as the purpose of extramarital activities.

The Effects of Affairs

There is an innate deceit involved in extramarital dalliances, and that deceit breeds numerous and often unanticipated complications. If a person's extramarital activities are discovered (which happens in a surprisingly large number of cases), there is a sizable risk that it will seriously undermine the trust and intimacy of his or her marriage. The uninvolved spouse (that is, the one who wasn't a participant in the extramarital sex) rarely reacts with casual acceptance unless he or she has had extramarital activities, too. Instead, the reaction is apt to be one of shock or outrage, and it is likely to set off negative consequences that reverberate through the marriage over time.

To some, extramarital sex is such a profound violation of moral and religious principles, it shatters a fundamental pillar of marital stability that can never be put back together again. In other marriages, the problems precipitated by the discovery of clandestine extramarital involvements have nothing to do with moral or religious beliefs but are strictly grounded in how the affair affects the dynamics of marriage.

A 33-year-old man who had been married for five years told us, "When I found out that Lauren had been having an affair, I felt like I had been raped." This comment points to another negative aspect of the discovery of an affair: It victimizes the uninvolved partner without giving him or her any prior warning or means of avoiding such victimization. This is not just a matter of fairness or equal opportunity, though some spouses might see it that way ("If I'd known what that bastard was doing, I would've had some fun of my own").

Uninvolved spouses may be victimized in a number of other ways beyond having their feelings hurt and their trust seriously eroded. For instance, they may have been exposed to sexually transmitted diseases or may have been victimized economically, too. The spouse who was sexually involved with someone else may have been paying for motel rooms, dinners, weekend trysts and little (or not so little) romantic presents, or may have had an arrangement in which substantial sums were being paid for rent or other forms of support. In addition, the uninvolved spouse has been victimized in another way: He or she has had a substantial element of the balance of control in the marriage taken away in a unilateral and selfish manner.

To examine the nature of extramarital sex without recognizing its inherent selfishness (except when it is done openly and with mutual advance consent) is to miss one of its core features, a feature that contributes greatly to its negative impact. Selfishness is not always inimical to a good marriage or to good sex, but selfishness played out surreptitiously, while pretending to be loving, selfless, considerate and monogamous, is a form of theft. What is stolen is the bond of trust and its attendant consent to mutual vulnerability between spouses. Such vulnerability is based largely on the assumption that neither partner is out to hurt the other. It is not so much the extramarital sex that is destructive as it is the unprincipled deceitfulness of the behavior. Perhaps this is why, in another era, many wives were relatively unconcerned by their husbands' visits to brothels: The risk of emotional involvement was minuscule, so the nonmarital sexual activity per se wasn't threatening.

"One perceptive woman noted, 'I trade 15 minutes in bed for a whole week of feeling wanted.'"