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The cheat is on - a look at adultery around the world (Pamela Druckerman - The Financial Times )
April 22, 2007 5:58 PM
Copyright The Financial Times
April 21 2007
The morning after Francois Mitterrand’s funeral, Le Monde reported that the late president’s mistress and illegitimate daughter stood by the grave alongside his wife and sons. That tableau has become famous internationally as proof that the French are not like you and me - at least when it comes to affairs of the heart.
In fact, although French presidents seem to have an infidelity record approaching 100 per cent, they don’t deserve to be pilloried alone. Even supposedly more prudish countries have had legendary philanderers, from England’s Henry VIII to the US’s John F. Kennedy.
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But ordinary middle-class adulterers are harder to pin down. Despite the French public’s apparently unconcerned response to Mitterrand’s infidelity, most French citizens are quite faithful spouses and partners. According to a 2004 national survey, just 3.8 per cent of married men and 2 per cent of women said they had had more than one partner in the past year (the best approximation of infidelity) - fewer than in similar surveys in the US and UK. Alain Giami, director of research at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research, says the French are also more faithful than Americans during courtship, and that both marriages and affairs last longer in France than they do in the US. “In France, a relationship that has a sexual component appears to involve a higher degree of commitment than in the US,” says Giami in a paper he co-authored.
If France isn’t the world capital of adultery, which country takes the prize? Global sex research is patchy and incomplete. In Russia, for instance, there’s never been a national sex survey. Soviet governments barely permitted public discussions of sex, let alone the sort of poll that might prove comrades were engaging in banned activities such as extramarital affairs. And now religious groups there have taken up where their atheist communist forebears left off, putting pressure on Moscow not to fund any research related to sex.
Official sanction and funding are only the first hurdles. Contemporary researchers can’t even agree on what to call infidelity. In Nigeria, they prefer the term “sexual networking”, while Finnish scientists call affairs “parallel relationships”. One French team was so eager to appear morally neutral it opted for what sounded like a term you might learn in an accounting course: “simultaneous multi-partnerships”.
That’s just linguistics; what exactly constitutes cheating is also up for debate. A poll in one South African magazine created separate categories for men who cheat and men who cheat while drunk. And where some surveys ask Americans about “either vaginal or anal intercourse”, others include a much wider range of activities. A 1992 survey defined sex as a “mutually voluntary activity with another person that involves genital contact and sexual excitement or arousal, that is, feeling really turned on, even if intercourse or orgasm did not occur”.
Although it is easy to laugh at tongue-tied researchers, it is actually possible to get a handle on not just how many people cheat, but how they do it. Infidelity may seem like a secret, lawless realm in which people make private decisions about how to behave, but affairs do have rules. These differ by country, even by neighbourhood, and they dictate the valid excuses for cheating and the emotional narrative of affairs.
Art can show us these subtle distinctions: in American movies, having an affair usually means you’re the villain, while in French films, it more often means you’re the protagonist. I found, while travelling the world to research a book on the subject, that simple conversation can also whittle out the emotional rules. In Japan, a married woman was confused when I asked if she felt guilty about having a lover; the thought hadn’t occurred to her, as she was otherwise meeting her obligations to her family.
In Moscow, a family psychologist perked up when I brought up the subject of adultery. “It’s obligatory,” she said. Surely I had misunderstood her? “No,” she insisted, “I think it’s wise,” and went on to explain that she had enjoyed a number of extramarital affairs during her own 15-year marriage - although lately she had cut back because she was so busy at work. Then she wrote her name in my notebook to make sure I got the spelling right.
Since the 1970s, Americans have grown more tolerant about most social issues related to sex. They are more accepting of homosexuality, of unmarried people living together, of divorce and of having sex and babies out of wedlock. But on the topic of extramarital sex they have become stricter. In 1973, 70 per cent of Americans said affairs are “always wrong”. By 2004, the figure had risen to nearly 82 per cent. And in a Gallup poll in 2006, Americans said adultery was morally worse than either polygamy or human cloning. A comparison of attitudes in 24 countries found that Americans were tied with the Irish and Filipinos as the world’s most prudish when it comes to infidelity.
I felt the full force of this taboo in Memphis, Tennessee, when I sat down for a barbecue lunch with a married couple, Kevin and April (I changed all names). April’s affair with a co-worker had ended nearly two years earlier, and it was the only time she had been unfaithful during her 20-year marriage. But moments after our food arrived, she was weeping into her pork platter as Kevin went through a catalogue of her offences, ending with a moral: “There should be total honesty in relationships, no secrets.” Apparently this was one of their good periods: “Neither of us cries as much as we used to, because of the anti-depressants,” Kevin said.
April’s infidelity - or the echo of it - dominates their marriage. Kevin, 62, has put his 48-year-old wife in a kind of suburban purdah. She only leaves the house for work or to go out with him. If she’s a few minutes late coming home, he leaves increasingly hostile messages on her mobile phone. He searches her purse, checks her mobile phone bills and randomly presses the redial button on the home phone to see who she has been calling. Several times she has discovered a voice-activated tape recorder in her car.
When they’re together, which is most of the time, Kevin and April have agonising “cry talks” about the affair. Kevin learns more about the topic of affairs by reading self-help books and attending a weekly recovery group. Recently, he drove to Nashville for a weekend seminar on affairs, and came home convinced that infidelity runs in families and that - despite her denials - April’s parents must have had affairs too.
April and Kevin might seem extreme, but in many ways their experience is typically American. Two years of trauma after an infidelity is fairly common. So is the fact that their private infidelity crisis is being managed by specialists. In the US, an affair is an occasion for consulting therapists, adultery gurus, relationship coaches, support groups, internet chat rooms and self- help books. It’s also an opportunity to attend seminars, healing weekends and religious retreats dealing with affairs. No other country has anything approaching the scale of the US’s marriage counselling industry, and some of the bodies involved warn couples to expect “thousands of hours” of conversation about what happened.
The American mantra on affairs is: “It’s not the sex, it’s the lying.” Thus telling the truth has become the country’s cure. Although US therapists have different methods, many believe that the “betrayed spouse” is entitled to ask the “offending spouse” for every dirty detail of the affair. Some couples create detailed chronologies covering several years. The process only stops when the betrayed spouse can’t take it anymore, or when he or she is satisfied that every lie has been overturned. If stray lies trickle out afterwards, the spouse may suffer traumatising flashbacks.
There’s no empirical evidence about whether this does any good. For April, being cast as the villain in this moral fable is hard to swallow. “I don’t think it was me, I think it was almost like a different person,” she says. “I’ve never thought of myself as being the type to have an affair.”
It is tempting to blame such affair-induced angst on the the country’s religiosity, but that’s not a good marker of which Americans commit adultery. In 2001, researchers found that among people who rated their marriages as “pretty happy” or “not too happy”, even going to religious services two or more times a week barely affected whether they’d had extramarital sex. For all those hours in church to matter, their marriages had to be “very happy”.
In Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country and one of the most religious, the attitude toward affairs is almost casual, at least in middle-class circles. Local slang sums up the attitude: a no-strings-attached affair is called a bobok bobok siang, or just B.B.S., meaning an “afternoon nap”, and a brief love affair is known as a selingkuh or a “wonderful interval”.
Unlike Iran, where convicted adulterers can be stoned to death, Indonesia handles adultery in secular courts, and metes out jail sentences as punishment - still a harsh method of dealing with the act, but relatively mild in the Muslim world. The factor that is really supposed to keep men from cheating is that if they’re not satisfied with one wife, they can take three more; although sanctioned polygamy seems to legitimise the idea that men cannot be content with just one woman.
The middle-class women and men I met in Indonesia consistently told me that adultery was absolutely wrong because the Koran forbids it, but then went on to reveal that many of their friends had lovers. “Polygamy is something that induces adultery, because before they get married for the second time there’s a period of adultery,” says Paulus Wirutomo, who heads the sociology department at the University of Indonesia. “Islam is not permissive, but there’s an emphasis on formality.”
Indonesia’s most famous polygamist, a fried-chicken magnate called Puspo Wardoyo, agrees. “Most of my friends are cheaters - they cheat with prostitutes just for play,” he says. Meanwhile Ria, a petite 24-year-old with a three-year-old child, a husband who earns a good living and an unmarried boyfriend she sleeps with once a week and text-messages a dozen times a day, says: “Look at me. I am a Muslim, I wear this veil. But I have another life.” She wears a diamond ring from her husband and a gold band from her lover.
Ria knows she is risking the wrath of both her husband and her very devout, middle-class family. She also knows that not only are the men around her cheating, but so are many of her girlfriends. And while she married young to a man her family approved of, she still craves intimacy and adventure. “I love my husband, but I need someone else to make me feel alive,” she says.
There is a staggering amount of bad data on adultery, but the figures we can trust come largely thanks to HIV. As the virus gathered velocity in the 1980s and 1990s, scientists managed to get funding for an unprecedented amount of large-scale sex research. These data sets, while imperfect, reveal that men in poor countries are generally much more unfaithful than those in rich ones. Married or cohabiting men in Togo top the list at 37 per cent, followed closely by those in the Ivory Coast. Urban parts of China show about 18.3 per cent of the married men cheating. Latin men live up to their amorous reputation, with 18 per cent of married or cohabiting men in the Dominican Republic, 15 per cent in Mexico City and 12 per cent in Brazil having multiple partners. Levels of women admitting to cheating in these countries, meanwhile, are extremely low or negligible.
Men in rich countries are more faithful. In Switzerland, just 3 per cent of married or cohabiting men said they cheated in the past year, according to a 1997 survey for the New Encounter Module Project; compared with 2.5 per cent in Australia. The exception is Scandinavia. In Norway, nearly 11 per cent of married or partnered men and 6.6 per cent of women had more than one lover in the past year. The UK follows close behind, with 9.3 per cent of married or cohabiting men and 5.1 per cent of married or cohabiting women confessing to multiple sex partners.
The fact that women everywhere report less cheating than men poses a conundrum for researchers: are married men just bedding single women or out-of-towners? Or is there, as some researchers suggested in the 1990s, a group of women - possibly prostitutes, possibly just freelance mistresses - running around serving many married men?
Japan seems a good place to investigate this, since salarymen in Tokyo spend much of their free time carousing with each other. James Farrer, a sociologist at Tokyo’s Sophia University, says: “If you go to a party in America and you don’t bring your wife, you’re asked, ‘Why is your wife not here?’ Your leaving her at home is a kind of insult to her and an insult to your marriage. Whereas here, in Japan, to bring your wife to a lot of social occasions is seen as out of place and inappropriate.”
Perhaps more importantly, the intimacy, openness and good sex that’s supposed to be the glue for American couples isn’t something Japanese couples appear to strive for. Hiromi Ikeuchi, a divorce counsellor in Tokyo, says some men are proud of having a chaste marriage. “There are some Japanese men who believe you shouldn’t bring either sex or work into the home,” she says. Yoko Itamoto, a matchmaker who conducts state-funded field research on marriage, says husbands and wives often grow so distant that sex seems embarrassingly personal. “We start to have a sense of sex as a dirty act - the physicality of it, the liquid, people touching each other… Both men and women get this idea,” Itamoto says.
Japan’s live sex industry brought in 2.3 trillion yen in 2001, up from 1.7 trillion 10 years earlier, according to an economist at the Dai-ichi Life Research Institute. Whether these encounters count as cheating depends on who you ask. I didn’t hear about any Japanese marriages breaking up over a husband’s visits to sex clubs. A divorce lawyer told me that paid sex doesn’t even meet the legal standard of adultery or furin. Customers of these clubs apparently don’t consider it furin either. Several quoted a saying: “If you pay for it, it’s not cheating.” Men say their wives don’t ask them where they’ve been. The wives apparently have a saying, too: “As long as he’s safe, it’s good that he’s out.”
But the don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy is wearing thin among some middle-class urbanites. Satoshi, a 39-year-old who works for a construction company, told me that after he got back from a business trip, his wife of 10 years searched his bag and found a flyer for a call girl in Sendai, a coastal city two hours north of Tokyo. Rather than being bothered by the infidelity, his wife seemed to envy his freedom. After that, she made a new group of friends at her sports club and took up scuba diving. Divorce papers soon followed.
Others couples are trying to work things out. But, for some, the model for reconciliation isn’t western-style psychotherapy - it’s the sex industry. Atsuko Okano, who runs a a marriage counselling service of sorts in Tokyo, brings in female sex workers - known as “soap ladies” - to tutor husbands and wives. The soap ladies introduce men to mood lighting, candles and compliments. Wives get a makeover that begins with a purging of oversized t-shirts and granny underwear. Instead of shouting “hello” from the stove, the women learn to greet their husbands with full-body hugs. A visualisation exercise helps them understand the seductive atmosphere in sex clubs. Okano’s three-month programme costs about $2,500. She also runs a six-month programme, costing about $4,200, for cases where the wife “isn’t pretty”.
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