Adultery and betrayal? 1, What is the question?

This is really less a blog entry than an essay. I have tried to keep it short and informal, but there is no disguising that it is a pure “thought piece” rather than any more mundane kind of narrative. My only excuse for working it out far enough to write it – and then for posting it here – is that it addresses a question that has genuinely puzzled me over the years. Indeed, it was a misunderstanding of the very issues raised here that befuddled me so badly when I tried to think about sex and infidelity way back in the prehistory of my relationship with Wife. I have described elsewhere how I thought I should believe one thing, and then I found out in practice – to my genuine amazement – that I felt very differently. The reason I was confused is that I didn’t understand the things I finally figured out in late June or early July of this year, and that I explain in the course of this essay.

To help articulate the internal structure of the discussion, I have broken the essay into three parts.



What is it that makes infidelity a betrayal? To put it another way, why should we call it “infidelity” at all when someone in a marriage fucks someone outside the marriage? What is it about sex that makes this an instance of breaking faith?

That everybody sees it this way is hardly in question. Nobody seriously questions what the word “infidelity” means, nor the shorter and simpler “cheating”. There are blogs – many of them – written by unfaithful spouses to chronicle their amours. I enjoy reading these blogs so I hope none of the authors takes this wrong: but it is clear to me that they all accept that what they are practising is infidelity, unfaithfulness, cheating. They all accept that there is some kind of apparently legitimate claim which their spouses have over them to prevent them from fucking other people, and which they have deliberately chosen to flout for one reason or another. Even Wife, when she professes to be mystified by the “prejudice” that one “cannot” love more than one other person romantically at a time, is plainly defensive rather than genuinely puzzled. She knows that by fucking other men she is implicitly inviting a judgment, and that it speaks against her. All her answers – the justifications, the accusations, the proud declarations of freedom from social convention – are so much noise designed (I think) to distract her own attention from the voice of this judgment, because she really can’t stand to hear it.

But what is so special about sex? I don’t care if Wife takes a friend for an afternoon of shopping for shoes (so long as the bill isn’t too high); in fact, if she invited me, I would actively look for an excuse not to go. Why do I care if she takes a friend for an afternoon of rapturous sex? It’s not the same, but why not?



You can find part 2 here.