Helping him become what he pledged not to be: another perspective on the problem of infidelity (reprint)

From January 2009

As we get back to post-inauguration blogging, I’m turning to an email I got from a woman last week. “Tara” wrote another in the series of missives from young (21) year-old women contemplating a relationship with an older (36) man. The trick on this one is Tara is interested in a married fellow, one who claims, as so many do, to be in a less than fulfilling marriage. Tara asked me a couple of other questions, but finished with this one:

…do you think that the decision to cheat lies within the hands of the involved person, or does it share a weight equally with the “other woman”? am i bound by ethics and decency to his wife, even if he is the one who makes that decision (as to whether a sexual or emotional affair happens.)

The simple answer is that cheating is cheating, and that anyone who knowingly enters into a relationship with someone who is pledged to another through marriage or another sort of monogamous arrangement gets a full and equal share of the blame. That’s perhaps the response of our age, though a history of adultery and its prohibitions reveals that that has not always been a universally held position. In different times and places, only the married cheater has been blamed, or only the woman. And some folks like to parse out differences between what is “adultery” and what is “infidelity”, even though most of us use the former to refer to the extra-marital subset of the latter. But while the history of Western law and religion makes clear that our sense of what kinds of extra-marital or pre-marital sex are wrong is a moving target, the modern received consensus is that having sex with someone who is pledged to another is bad.

For many of us, the real offense of infidelity (I use the term broadly, to encompass emotional as well as sexual affairs) lies in betrayal. The very word means to “break faith”. To be cheated on is painful enough, but to be lied to is, in a very real sense, worse. While most cheaters cover up their behavior through active lies or lies of omission, the real deceit lies in the betrayal of the original promise to be monogamous. Whether as part of a marriage ceremony or simply an informal agreement to “not see other people right now”, most (not all) relationships make their way towards some sort of mutual pledge of fidelity. To cheat is to break that pledge unilaterally. And once we’ve cheated, we’ve in a very real sense called into question every other aspect of the relationship; our pledges of fidelity aren’t just about what we promise not to do with our hearts and bodies, they are pledges about the effort we intend to put into this particular bond.

When I was going through the Twelve Steps with a strict sponsor many years ago, the subject of my many infidelities in my first marriage came up. I offered to Jack my “reasons” for cheating on my first wife. He snorted at all of them, and explained what I have come to see as the modern way of understanding the problem of infidelity. “Hugo, it doesn’t matter what your reasons were. You need to understand, when you cheat on your wife, you’re not just betraying her, or any God you happen to believe in. The greatest problem with cheating is that it turns you into a liar; on a soul level, every time you sleep with another woman behind your wife’s back, you know you’re breaking a promise you made. No one can break his own promise and be happy.” I was in a pedantic mood, and snapped back that that sounded less modern than Aristotlelian, to which Jack — who wouldn’t have known Aristotle from Adam –replied that it didn’t matter what it sounded like, it was simply true. And of course, Aristotle was right, and Jack was right. One of the great tragedies of infidelity lies not in what it does to others but what it teaches us about ourselves — that we are fundamentally untrustworthy. And it is hard to be happy while living with the dissonance between one’s language and one’s life.

Promises of fidelity can be ended without betrayal; a mutually agreed divorce or break-up serves notice to one’s partner and one’s community that a particular bond has reached the end of its usefulness. Though the Church may teach that sex after divorce is still adultery, that position misses the whole point of the offense. A negotiated end to a pledge is worlds away from a secretive betrayal. When both parties (or the courts) have agreed that a bond no longer binds, then that bond has lost its power. If one’s spouse or partner no longer has any reason to have faith in one’s commitment, then “infidelity” is impossible because there is nothing left to betray. Promises made are constitutive — they help create the reality of a relationship; promises mutually ended are also constitutive — they create a new reality in which each partner is free to seek new forms of happiness.

But what does this have to do with Tara’s question? If I were more of a communitarian sort, I would argue that Tara has a moral obligation to respect the pledge made between this older man who has captured her interest and his wife. I would argue that a healthy society functions best when we respect not only the agreements we ourselves have made, but we do our best to help those around us uphold their own contracts and promises. After all, in many wedding ceremonies, it is customary for the minister presiding to ask the congregation if they will collectively do all that they can to uphold and sustain the newlyweds in their marriage; this recognizes the importance of community in nurturing seeminly private relationships. I would challenge Tara to consider this notion that others’ bonds are our business, at least to the extent that we do wrong when we actively seek to undermine them.

But I think a more compelling argument can be made from a more individualistic perspective (albeit one consistent with Aristotle and Jack). If Tara cares about this married man, then she surely wants what is best for him. While she may not recognize any obligation on her part either to his wife or to the bond between them, she presumably feels some tug of loyalty to him as a person. If she has an affair with him, she becomes an instrument through which he breaks a pledge he made not only to his wife but in a very real sense, to himself. When he promised his wife fidelity, he made a statement about his own identity: “I am not a cheater and do not wish to cheat.” When Tara sleeps with this man, she participates with him in his own “self-betrayal”. Whether or not she feels obligated by a promise in which she didn’t participate is irrelevant — her bond of concern for her prospective lover ought to include a regard for his happiness. And whatever protestations he may make to the contrary, deep happiness is radically incongruent with oath-breaking. When she sleeps with him, in other words, she is helping him to become what he pledged not to be.

None of this should be read as lifting the burden of fidelity off of the shoulders of those who are actually married. If we cheat, it is our fault, and not the fault of those who may deliberately or unintentionally tempt us. In the end, as adults, we are sovereign over our choices, and men have the same capacity for self-control as women. But it is also reasonable to suggest that whatever our feelings about monogamy as an institution, we have a responsibility to those we love and care for to help them make choices that are congruent with their values — and their pledges. Tara may owe nothing to the woman to whom her older man is married, but she ought to let the affection she feels for him — and her desire for him not to betray himself — to act as an influence upon her.