The last sexual taboo?

by Daria Casalini

Traditional social values were deeply shaken by the sexual revolution of the 1960s. But today, Americans are increasingly intolerant of extramarital relationships

It’s the end of summer when Noah and Alison meet in the tourist town of Montauk, Long Island. He’s a school teacher in New York trying to write his second novel after the failure of the first one. She’s a waitress at Lobster Roll, a local restaurant, trying to cope with the death of her only child. They’re both married when they first meet, but they fall in love and begin an affair.

 

Noah and Alison are the main characters of one of the most popular television series of the moment, The Affair. This is only one of many programmes that explores the psychological effects of extramarital relationships. Mistresses, Scandal and Masters of Sex are on the same list.

 

Though American society indirectly glamorises adultery through television, news media, literature and movies, very few people consider it morally acceptable when it comes to real life, according to a Gallup Values and Beliefs poll published in 2015. 

 

“It’s like what you do when you’re young in grade school, and you chase boys around in the playground or a boy chases you around in the playground. You know, it’s fun to be chased,” says Terrie Walsh, a marriage and family therapist based in New York.

 

She’s been doing the job for thirty years. Her office is in the heart of Manhattan with a big window facing Central Park. “The real challenge,” she continues, “is can you, as a grown up, really commit to one person and go up and down with that one person?”

 

This is the question millions of couples answer every day when they pronounce their wedding vows: “In sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part.”

 

Except that we tend to live much longer than our ancestors and we often divorce before death do us part. “In the past people died younger, no one stayed together for fifty years. So you weren’t looking at this very long biological boundary of being tied up,” says Walsh in an urgent tone. “Is it normal for someone to be with one person? No one ever planned it that way.”

 

Over the centuries so much has changed in Western society’s attitude towards sexual morality. Premarital sex has not been a taboo since the 1960s, gay marriages in the US are now fully legalised and voluntary childlessness is increasing, as well as the number of couples who decide not to marry at all, despite living together. American citizens have accepted and changed their views on a number of moral issues, but marital infidelity is not one of them.

 

In fact, Americans are more likely to believe extramarital sex is always wrong now than they were during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, according to The General Social Survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago.

 

“It would seem to fall in line with an increased divorce rate,” says Dr. Evelyn Stephens, a New York psychiatrist who treats infidelity and family conflict. “Less tolerance of a partner's transgressions would make it easier to self-righteously ask for a divorce.” Is infidelity a transgression we’re not willing to tolerate any more?

 

Beth Riley, a 57-year-old woman from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, turned a blind eye to her husband’s affairs more than once. Married to Jay for thirty-four years, their marriage survived Jay’s first affair, but failed with the second one, when he left her for the other woman.

 

“I let it get swept under the rug in order to keep my family together,” says Beth. A mother of three, she’s been divorced for two years now. “I look back and realize I was shrinking as a woman, walking on egg shells trying so hard to have my husband love me,” she says. “He could do whatever he wanted and know I would not leave.”

 

Two years post-divorce Beth admits she’s still a work in progress. Her professional life is rewarding and she’s learning to enjoy her new-found freedom. “I was ‘loved’ conditionally, if that is really possible. Now I love not working so hard trying to prove myself to feel loved,” she adds.

 

Accurate statistics on the average time needed to recover from an affair are hard to come by due to key factors that vary from couple to couple, but affair recovery experts generally agree that it takes at least two years to heal. 

 

Still, already in the 60s and 70s, the “swinging” generation was experimenting with the idea of switching partners, introducing a sexual openness that radically changed Western society. Today, especially in America where schools tend to advocate abstinence and religion plays a fundamental role in some states, the consequences of adultery are more dire than ever.

 

Richard Sussman, a psychotherapist based in Weston, Connecticut, believes that open relationships, with specific guidelines as to what’s acceptable, are preferable to the secretiveness of affairs but considers them very difficult to manage because of the natural sense of jealousy and insecurity. “The open marriages of the 1960s for the most part were all failures,” he says. “I recently spoke to someone who had one who said he was really grateful that he went through it but he would never do it again.”

 

Although ninety percent of the population disapproves of extramarital affairs, almost a third of Americans are engaged in a relationship of this kind, according to the General Social Survey conducted by the University of Chicago.

 

Americans don’t cheat less than Europeans, they just feel more guilty about it. This is the opinion of Dr. Suzanne Mallouk, a New York psychiatrist who treats patients suffering from depression following the discovery of the affair. “I think we are more puritanical and sexually repressed than Europeans,” she says. “There’s lot of shame around sexuality here in the US, together with hypocrisy.”

 

But what leads one in three Americans to look outside the marriage for relief? Sussman thinks it’s all about the ability to communicate openly in the couple. “If frank discussions do not occur either because of fear of hurting the other or receiving hurt, frustrations will grow into resentments which are more likely to be acted out in the form of affairs.”

 

The honeymoon stage is a concept familiar to everyone. There’s no general agreement on how long this time of euphoria, when couples are focussed only on the romantic part of the relationship, lasts. For some people it’s the first months, for others the first two years. But what is supported by the research is that during this stage we only focus on the positive aspects and qualities of the other person, without really being aware of their totality.

 

“Affairs are like the honeymoon again,” Walsh says. One of her patients left his wife for a woman he had an affair with. They met during a business trip in Los Angeles and saw each other secretly for a few months. They’ve been together for a couple of years and Walsh says he’s now experiencing the same problems he had with his first wife. “Infidelity is a temporary solution to an unhappy situation. That’s what it is,” she adds.

 

In a country where the national ethos revolves around self control and the pursuit of perfection is everything, maybe this attitude to adultery is to be expected. It will certainly take some time to break the infidelity taboo. But there are some sex counselors and psychologists who are starting to talk openly about it, and this may be a step towards the acceptance of imperfection.