More and more couples are choosing open marriages-- that is, marriages in which they spouses agree that being sexual with someone outside the marriage is okay.
The bad news is that no one seems to want to talk about the obvious: male infidelity is different than female infidelity. I hate to let the cat out of the bag, but men and women are different. Not only are their sexual appetites different, but when they do want sex, they want it for different reasons.
I’ve written previously about the fundamental mismatch in sexual appetites between men and women. The natural corollary is that no one should be surprised by male infidelity. Frankly, I don’t think anyone really is surprised when it happens. So why does our society continue to be shocked and appalled when men are unfaithful (if that's what you want to call it)?
Then there’s the fact than men and women experience sex differently. For a man, sex is usually about fulfilling a physical need and can be, in fact, meaningless. Most women aren’t capable of meaningless sex. Yes, some are, but for most women, sex is typically about an emotion need, like attention, self-esteem, or yes, revenge. Here's the rub: emotional needs can usually be met by a change in behavior by the partner, while physical needs sometimes require, a different partner.
Just ask America’s favorite sex columnist, Dan Savage. Here's an excerpt from a recent bio:
Spring and Doyle both hint at a larger truth about men and women, which is that, generally speaking, they view sex differently. While there are plenty of women who can separate sex from love, can be happily promiscuous or could have a meaningless, one-time fling, there are — let’s face it — more men like that. The world of Savage Love will always appeal more to men, even men who truly love their partners. Cheating men are often telling the truth when they say, “She meant nothing to me.” It really was just sex...
...“The mistake that straight people made,” Savage told me, “was imposing the monogamous expectation on men. Men were never expected to be monogamous. Men had concubines, mistresses and access to prostitutes, until everybody decided marriage had to be egalitarian and fairsey.” In the feminist revolution, rather than extending to women “the same latitude and license and pressure-release valve that men had always enjoyed,” we extended to men the confines women had always endured. “And it’s been a disaster for marriage.”
Historically, our society seemed to understand a man's need for sexual fulfillment. Here’s historian Stephanie Coontz describing infidelity in the 18th century:
We have stunning letters from American men of that period talking to fellow male friends, including a brother-in-law or a father-in-law, about how they contracted syphilis from a whore, how they visited a cute little prostitute! They were fully open about their non-monogamy but totally unaccepting of women's non-monogamy.
Since then we've developed new expectations of fairness, and equal disapproval of male and female adultery is probably at an all-time high….now it makes it really difficult for people to have a happy marriage that doesn't conform to the new expectations.
And even today, other cultures seem to know the score:
Now, certainly cross-culturally there have been a lot of societies that have built into the expectations of marriage a certain amount of tolerance of affairs, and some of them even for females as well as males.Well, let's not go that far.
Of course many women don’t want to accept this. Conspicuously, they don’t argue that women need sex to be happy, just that it isn't fair. Boo hoo. Nature made men and women different, and there isn't anything anyone can do about that.
But who knows, maybe I'm wrong. There may be hope yet for men who'd like to tame their inner beast:
Life itself can affect testosterone. When a man enters a steady relationship, his levels tend to drop somewhat, and then drop even further when he has small children. (This may be nature’s way of trying to ensure that fathers remain monogamous and supportive of their offspring.)
We'll see. But in the end, I think it boils down to this, as Mr. Savage puts it:
Women can go on marrying and pretending that their boyfriends and husbands are Mr. Darcy or some RomCom dream man. But where’s that going to get ’em? Besides divorce court?The choice is yours ladies...
