Adultery and betrayal? 3, Adultery as betrayal

This is part 3 of an extended essay. You can find part 2 here.

And now we can begin to answer why infidelity looks like betrayal. Or almost: first, we need to know what betrayal is.

I’m not really familiar with any recent literature on betrayal, so to look this up I turned to Google. And I found a very interesting article by Rodger Jackson, written back in 2000. Jackson starts by defining trust as follows: “Trust is a disposition on the part of one person (the trusting party) to extend to another (the trusted party) discretionary power over something the truster values (the “object of trust”) with the confident expectation that the trusted party will have the good will and competence to successfully care for it” [sic]. Jackson notes that the relationship of trust itself can be one of the most valuable “objects of trust” and then identifies two ways that trust can be violated: betrayal and abandonment.

For my purposes, the distinction between these two is almost incidental. It is the definition of trust itself that I find most useful. For one thing, it explains to me why I always feel so violated whenever Wife complains about me to her friends (or lovers). I have never understood this logically before, because I have thought that it is only reasonable for her to be able to discuss her feelings with her friends: if it so happens that her feelings include anger towards me (regardless whether I ever really did the things she accuses me of) – well, those are her feelings and she is entitled to them. But Jackson’s definition allows me to put my finger on another dimension of this. After all, there is an “object” here which I prize (i.e., value) and over which I have extended discretionary power to Wife: I mean my good name. When Wife complains about me to her friends, she drags that good name though the mud – or, in Jackson’s terms, she very dramatically fails “to successfully care for it.” [sic, as if I need to say so. Jackson splits his infinitives regularly and with abandon.]

Very well, what about the case of adultery? When Wife fucks another man (or a woman), is there some “object of trust” for which she is failing to care adequately?

There are a number of easy answers – easy, at any rate, to a sufficiently conservative mind – which turn out to be wrong or incoherent. For example:

• Could the “object of trust” be her body? Is that the thing which I value, and for which she is taking inadequate care?
  
  Well no, not really. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. In the first place, I don’t own Wife’s body. In the second place, I think I would get jealous of a lover even if her body were benefitted by the extra attention.
  
  I mean, suppose Wife’s doctor told me she was suffering from some rare disease where she needed to fuck a minimum of x times a day to prevent bad things from happening, and suppose x was a number I just couldn’t keep up with. Then it would be a medical necessity for her to fuck more often: fucking other men would become the means by which Wife cared successfully for her body, which I value. Would I therefore stop feeling that my trust had been violated? Wishful thinking! More likely I would still obsess over her “unfaithfulness” and “betrayal” ... even if it had been commanded on medical authority.
  


• Well, then maybe her virtue is the “object of trust”? Maybe that is the valuable thing that I fear is not adequately cared for when she fucks someone else?
  
  Sorry, that doesn’t make any sense either; the problem is that to say her “virtue” is the object for which she is failing to care – taking the word in the Victorian sense of “sexual virtue” which is the only meaningful definition in this context – begs the question. Wife’s “virtue” in that sense is only valuable in the first place on the assumption that adultery is a form of betrayal. Therefore we cannot in turn use Wife’s failure to guard her “virtue” as a reason to say adultery is a form of betrayal.
  


• It is a difficult question to answer. Note also that the very difficulty of the question gives support to the polyamorist position. For years, Wife defended her affairs to me by asking how they could possibly hurt me? What was there of mine that was the slightest bit damaged or injured? Then when I couldn’t answer the question, she took that as a license to continue. So did I, really – at least to the extent that I felt it would be completely irrational to ask her to stop when I couldn’t give a rational explanation of where the harm lay.

But that is not to say that there isn’t an answer.

Remember that the meaning of sex is couplehood: fucking creates a couple where there was none before; and remember that your emotions think this means a couple in which each partner puts the other one first, in which each partner is a home or refuge for the other from the storms of the world. So whatever battles you have to fight out in the world, whatever injuries you suffer, whatever wounds you nurse or scars you bear, you can always come back to the person you fuck to find shelter. There, at least, you can put down your weapons, strip off your armor, bind up your wounds and relax. There, at least, you know you are secure and you can relax. There you don’t have to be on guard, because you know that you are the center of your partner’s world, the number one priority. There you are safe and at home.

Only ... how do you feel when you come back to your home at long last, after a day that has beaten and bruised you, and you find a total stranger at ease in your living room, relaxing with his feet up, drinking your beer, eating your chips, and watching your television? Disoriented? Shocked? Violated? Betrayed?

Exactly.

If the one place that I could always find refuge from the slings and arrows of the world was with Wife – or, more graphically, in Wife – then what does it mean to me when I find one of her boyfriends there too? What has become of my refuge? And am I still the center of her world? Surely he must be too – and how can any world have two centers? Or more?

In the blink of an eye, everything has changed and I no longer know where I am.

This is why adultery makes the cheated-upon spouse so crazy: when you find out, it yanks all your security out from under you at once. Suddenly you are lost, and none of your familiar landmarks lead you back to safety any more. Suddenly you are homeless because some squatter has taken over your home and evicted you. Or at least you have to share your home, possibly for good. And nobody even asked you, or gave you the slightest warning in advance.

In my case, Wife nearly always tried to reassure me that she still loved me. “It’s just that I don’t believe you can only love one person.” But that never helped. I would just wonder, “Then what does she mean by love? Does she mean she’ll always take my side, no matter what? Not possible: because if I and her boyfriend ever fight (God forbid!), she can’t take both our sides even though she says she loves us both. Therefore love must not mean that for her. Therefore I can no longer rely on her as a perfect refuge, or a perfect home ... because some days, for some battles, she just won’t be there.”

Many people can’t take the shock and sense of violation; that’s why the discovery of adultery so often means divorce. In a sense, they decide they would rather be homeless than share their home with strangers. Maybe in a while they can make a new home somewhere else, with somebody else. For me, because I have stayed with Wife all these years, it has been different. I have stayed with her, knowing that I could never trust her completely to be there every single time, that I could not rely on her for my metaphysical security ... that I would always have to be just a little bit on guard. In one sense it is sad. In another sense, I guess the lesson that I would have to be a little bit on guard may have been oddly helpful. I have needed a low level of constant watchfulness to deal with her mental illness, which is usually cyclic but can burst forth in terrifying and unexpected thunderstorms. And I have needed a better self-reliance to deal with her physical illnesses, which have steadily robbed her of her strength and endurance and ambition.

But all of this is by the way. The important point is the most basic one. Adultery invites a stranger into the secret refuge that you thought was yours alone, the one place in all the world that you could always be at home. And that is why it counts as a betrayal.