Marriage Killers, Part 2: Infidelity

The statisticians tell us that about half of all married people, men and women virtually alike, will commit adultery (defined for the purposes of these studies as some sort of overt sexual act) at some time while married. I can tell you from my experience as a "divorce lawyer" that some kind of what I will call "infidelity" (a term which I will define later in this essay) is involved about three quarters of the divorces that come through my office.

This statement is probably not surprising. What may be surprising is that infidelity is almost never the precipitating factor in the divorce. In other words, I very rarely see the stereotypical case, so familiar to us from television dramas, in which one spouse discovers that the other is having an affair and storms off to the lawyer's office to obtain a divorce. Rather, what I see far more frequently is that the parties are getting a divorce because they have "grown apart" or "don't get along" or "don't love each other any more" and, when I learn more about the couple, I find out that one OR BOTH of the parties have been unfaithful, often for many months or years.

In fact, I worked on one case a few years ago where the couple expressed total mystification about why the love had gone out of their marriage in the past two or three years. Yet, as I came to get to know my client better, he confessed that he had been having a series of affairs with women he knew through his employment, beginning five years ago. AND, as I was interviewing witnesses for the child custody phase of the trial, one of my client's friends told me that he had been having an affair with the wife for more than four years.

Neither of these spouses was aware that the other had been unfaithful, and had been so for many years. Yet, both of them knew that something was wrong with their marriage and that they needed to get a divorce.

I leave to the psychologists and the metaphysicians the issue of whether the infidelity is a cause of the distance that this couple, and so many others for whom this story stands as an archetype, experienced. I do know the unfaithfulness of these people cannot have made them feel closer to each other.

My observation of my clients is that infidelity is the dry rot of marriage. That is, it is often the decay and weakness that robs the marriage of the strength that would have allowed it to withstand the other stresses of life, so that when those stresses arise, it collapses, much like a dry rotted house that is felled by a windstorm that the homes around it endure. Infidelity rots the marriage, even though the other party never discovers it, in two ways: dishonesty--that is, the partner who is being unfaithful knows he or she is being unfaithful communicates that subtly to the other partner; and, "emotional embezzlement," which is what I call the diversion of a partener's emotional resources that belong in the marriage to someone outside of the relationship.

The inherent dishonesty of infidelity subtly but powerfully robs the marriage of trust, closeness, and emotional warmth because the cheating spouse, quite simply, knows he or she is cheating. Not only does that knowledge trigger guilt that cannot help but change the way the cheating spouse treats the other, but it creates a web of lies and secrets and barriers to intimacy that drain the lifeblood of the marriage the way a leach drains its host of blood. The cheating spouse has a whole part of his or her life that must now be kept a secret from the other, must constantly guard every statement to the other spouse, must constantly be on the watch for any evidence that would betray the affair, and has to put on academy award performance every day in order to "look innocent" to the other.

It is almost certain that the other spouse will know that there is "something wrong." What is particularly tragic, is that the "innocent spouse" will often not suspect an affair, but will sense that the other spouse is becoming "distant" and may blame him or herself for driving the other away or for somehow "losing" the other's love. In that way, the dishonesty that is part an parcel of infidelity poisons the marriage and, in all likelihood, slowly kills it.

The other face of infidelity, emotional embezzlement, can sink a marriage the same way that financial embezzlement can drive an otherwise healthy business into bankruptcy--by taking away the narrow margin of resources that separates success from failure. About half of all marriages end in divorce, in part because staying happily married in today's culture and with the demands placed on today's families is inherently difficult. People have so little time and energy to devote to each other to making their families successful and making their marriages work. If one of the partners is having an affair, precious time, energy, effort, and emotional vitality that should go into the marriage is going elsewhere. It's like a business that has a three pecent profit margin having four percent of its revenues being stolen. The four percent may not be very much, BUT IT IS ENOUGH TO SINK THE BUSINESS.

I think there are a lot of marriages out there with a one or two percent "profit margin." They need every available resource to make them work.

And here is where I apply a different definition of "infidelity" than a lot of people. I do not define this word in the way that Bill Clinton did. Essentially, I believe that if you are married and you are seeking any kind of sexual excitement or gratification from another person outside the marriage, you are being unfaithful. In other words, if you are exchanging sexy emails online, having sexually oriented exchanges with someone in a chatroom, flirting with a co-worker even though both of you know "it will never go anywhere, but it is exciting now," every bit of excitement, energy, and sexuality you are investing in that other person is being stolen from the marriage. It belongs there, not between you and that other person.

And, if you believe you can have these kinds of outside sexual and romantic interests short of intercourse without harming the marriage, you are just plain wrong. The resources that you are diverting stay diverted--forever. That energy, once invested in some other person is gone for good. The time you spend thinking about, fantacizing, writing emails, flirting, or whatever is gone forever from the moment you spend it. Further, imagine what happens if your spouse discovers what you are doing. It happens more often than you think, because lots of spouses discover these things without ever telling the other. Do you believe that your spouse is sure that you have done nothing but send emails? Do you really believe your spouse will ever, EVER trust you completely again.

If you do, you are kidding yourself.

And don't get me started on what happens when your spouse discovers that you are actually having sex with someone else. People constantly tell themselves that they can have an affair because, not only are they likely to get away with it undiscovered but, even if they are found out, a good marriage can survive an affair.

Well, I've already talked about how an affair, even if undiscovered, can destroy a marriage. As for what happens when one is discovered, no reasonable person can believe that the discovery doesn't harm the marriage. As for marriages surviving affairs, well, I suppose there are marriages that survive affairs. But, then again, I know that there are people who have walked on the moon, swum the English Channel, climed Mount Everest, or memorized the Old Testament. That doesn't mean that you or I will ever do any of those things. Similarly, just because some unusual marriages survived affairs, don't count on yours making it.

In short, if you are unfaithful, in any way, you can absolutely count on it harming your marriage, one way or another. Bet on it. Take it to the bank. Even if your spouse never finds out.

Infidelity is a marriage killer. If you value your marriage, you will be utterly faithful, in every way. You will not only avoid having sex with anyone else, but you will also avoid any kind of sexuality, any romantic interest, any flirtation, anything of any kind that diverts your romantic and sexual energies from your marriage. Don't count on not being discovered. Don't count on your marriage "weathering the storm." You are just lying to yourself to justify gratifying your own desires of the moment.

Infidelity is one of the major factors that brings people to my office, even if they never know it. So many of the marriages I deal with were mortally wounded by infidelity long before they actually died, their deaths blamed on some other "cause" seized upon by the heartbroken husbands and wives who come into my office to tell their gut wrenching stories, cry up boxes of my kleenex, and show me the pictures of their children whose sad eyes silently scream from the photographs that things have not been happy at home for a long, long time.

Postscript--for more about Marriage Killers and the book that my wife, Kathleen Honsinger, and I published on the subject, see my post on this blog for April 14, 2011.