http://www.theage.com.au/news/relationships/our-cheating-hearts/2007/08/02/1185648022772.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2
Last year, A Gallup poll on moral issues revealed that Americans were more offended by adultery than they were by either polygamy or human cloning. Forget mortgages, politics and footy, the real dinner party stopper is talk of infidelity. But if it's so abhorrent, how do so many of us find ourselves caught up in it?
For Angus Black (not his real name), a brief affair three years ago highlighted some self-esteem issues. "I was feeling neglected by my wife.
Her career was powering ahead while I was stuck in a job I hated," Black says. He met a woman at his local pub's trivia quiz night and he admits he felt flattered by her attention. "My wife was travelling interstate a lot, so it was easy for me to kid myself that she didn't really care and that this woman and I were just friends." They exchanged numbers and before long he was seeing her several nights a week under the guise of going for a jog.
"Affairs become an intoxicating high, which is a fantasy and an escape," says Canadian Anne Bercht, whose Beyond Affairs Network (www.beyondaffairs.com) and Passionate Life Seminars provide support to people devastated by a cheating partner. Bercht argues that affairs don't involve all the minutiae of regular life that marriage brings. After her husband's philandering, she wrote a book entitled My Husband's Affair Became the Best Thing that Ever Happened to Me, detailing the trauma and how their marriage survived.
Before emails and mobile phones came along, infidelity was generally imagined as extramarital hot sex, seedy hotels and naughty lingerie. Now the term is more ambiguous. Sure, if you are sleeping with someone outside your primary relationship, you've crossed a line. But are you really "just friends" with the woman from work, your flirty male pal at the gym or the "virtual" stranger with whom you've been exchanging emails? Where and when does cheekiness morph into cheating?
"From my perspective fidelity is about trust and being unfaithful is a betrayal of that trust and a betrayal of self," says Chris Meney, director of the marriage and family office for the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney.
However, Meney also recognises we are fallible. "Temptations are a part of the human condition. We all have to confront and deal with those realities."
This challenging aspect of the human condition provided the rich material for a new book, Lust in Translation: the Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee, by former Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent Pamela Druckerman.
Her survey investigates the varied practices of infidelity, globally. Every country has different terms and mores and plays out infidelity according to a different "script", Druckerman says. "Everyone has flaws in their marriages, things that aren't quite perfect," she told The Observer earlier this month. In the UK and the US, she says, if you want to justify your cheating, "you start complaining about your marriage, and that way, you're not some lousy guy who cheats on his wife because he wants sex, you're a puppy dog who's looking for love".
But other nations don't have the same guilt. "The French, for example, are much more comfortable with the idea that their affair partner is just that - an affair partner," Druckerman said.
According to Druckerman's research, Australians rate fairly well in the fidelity charts. In 2002, some 2.5 per cent of men and 1.8 per cent of women in Australia who were cohabiting or married, had had more than one sexual partner in the previous year (see table, next page).
Hard figures, though, can be difficult to collate. In Australia, while infidelity is recognised anecdotally as a key relationship buster, the Australian Bureau of Statistics collects solid data on marriage and divorce, but not on cheating.
Gary Banks, principal clinical psychologist at the Sydney Counselling Centre, warns that research into cheating is complicated. "There's an inherent [problem] in infidelity research," he says. "If we are dealing with a breach of trust, then research into the behaviour of secrecy and lying may be inherently flawed."
So with all this confusion about where to draw the line, how do we decide where infidelity starts?
Whether you meet and cheat in person or online, the general consensus is that infidelity is the same whether it's via protein or pixels. Last year, research by Dr Simone Buzwell and her colleague Elizabeth Hardy, from Swinburne's Australian Centre for Emerging Technologies and Society, revealed that of the 78 per cent of adults who used the internet, 13 per cent were using it to form online social relationships additional to their primary relationships. "It appears that the internet is replacing traditional routes to friendship and romance," Buzwell says.
For those wanting to betray, the internet has plenty of opportunities. "People don't come here looking for a scrabble partner," says David Miller, founder of Loving Links, a British extramarital dating service, now in its 12th year of business.
"In the old days we advertised in the quality press like The Guardian, and we run a forum that is terribly erudite," he says breezily down the phone.
"We also offer a one-to-one consulting service where we meet people and match them, and charge lots of money," he says with relish. Men are charged a hefty £1500 ($3500) but women only £350, an indication that male clients are easier to come by.
What does he think drives people to seek affairs? "Adults now don't want to grow up," he told The Guardian. "We're told that we should be having this, this and this, and we feel hard done by if we don't. It's also the case for the baby-boomer generation: we're all Peter Pans, and no one's yet sent us a letter saying we have to stop having fun and sex."
Others have found unconventional ways to resolve the desire to stray.
Sydney's Couples Club - an inner-city swingers' club - is going strong after 17 years. John*, its proprietor for the past five years, explains that the club allocates special nights for couples and women only, as well as "couples plus" sessions, which admit couples plus single men. John estimates about 15 per cent of guests are repeat visitors and believes that many people use a visit to the club to spice up their relationship, rather than splitting up and going their separate ways. "If people are playing together, are they being unfaithful to each other? I doubt it, because it's consensual," he says.
Many who want hard evidence of a partner's infidelity contact a private detective. Glenn Ryan is a licensed private inquiry agent who has made his living chasing down cheats. He switched from computing to detecting after being inspired by the TV series Magnum, P.I. His business, Caught in the Act Investigations, has attracted more than 2000 clients in the past five years.
He says: "By the time you have picked up the phone to call us, you have gone through stomach-churning events and a roller-coaster of emotions because you have found a number of clues that caused your suppositions."
Ryan says 99 per cent of his clients have already confronted their partners before contacting him and estimates that about 15 per cent of the cheaters are using sex workers.
"Jogger" Angus Black's affair came to an end when he was made redundant in the same week his wife endured a health scare. "I realised that it was my fault, not hers, that I was in a dead-end job," he says.
He immediately broke off his other relationship but, after an internal debate as to whether or not to confess, decided to keep quiet. "In the end I just didn't want her to feel worse," he says. "We were waiting on the biopsy results and I'd been pretty unsupportive of her career and detached; I guess I was jealous."
Black quietly undertook to counselling and, after a few "very confrontational" sessions, he concurs there was an element of self-preservation involved in his decision to keep his secret. "She would never trust me ever again if I told her," he says.
* Surname omitted by request.
Lust in Translation: The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee, by Pamela Druckerman, is available online and will be published here by Penguin in September.
