Often, they loved their husbands, but felt in some fundamental way that their needs (sexual, emotional, psychological) were not being met inside the marriage. There was deception but little secrecy or shame. What surprised me most about these conversations was not that my friends were cheating, but that many of them were so nonchalant in the way they described their extramarital adventures. These women were turning to infidelity not as a way to explode a marriage, but as a way to stay in it. Not long after, another told me that while she’d never had sex with another man, she’d had so many emotional affairs and inappropriate email correspondences over the years that she’d had to buy a separate hard drive to store them all. Almost before I’d finished processing this, another friend told me she was 100 percent faithful to her husband, except when she was out of town for work each month. Then one day, one of them confided in me she’d been having two overlapping affairs over the course of five years. If these women friends were angry unfulfilled or resentful, they didn’t show it. On the surface, their husbands were reasonable, the marriages modern and equitable. They had cute kids, mortgages, busy social lives, matching sets of dishes. Like me, they were doing the family thing. From a distance, they seemed happy enough, or at least content. These questions first occurred to me a few years ago when I began to wonder how many of my friends were actually faithful to their husbands. So what exactly is happening inside marriages to shift the numbers? What has changed about monogamy or family life in the past 27 years to account for the closing gap? And why have so many women begun to feel entitled to the kind of behavior long accepted (albeit disapprovingly) as a male prerogative? More women than ever are cheating, she tells us, or are willing to admit that they are cheating - and while Perel spends much of her book examining the psychological meaning, motivation, and impact of these affairs, she offers little insight into the significance of the rise itself. Since 1990, notes the psychoanalyst and writer, the rate of married women who report they’ve been unfaithful has increased by 40 percent, while the rate among men has remained the same. One of the more interesting facts in Esther Perel’s new book, State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity, comes near the beginning. Sex has always been a powerful form of control.
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