Marital Affairs: What Happens After Cheating

BALTIMORE, Aug. 15, 2010— -- Brian Bercht cheated on his wife, Anne, 10 years ago. It was a full-blown affair, with clandestine lunch meetings and a growing emotional attachment to the other woman.

It wasn't that Brian didn't love his wife of 18 years, he says. But he felt empty and vulnerable. And he was unprepared for the attraction he felt toward the co-worker who would become his lover.

"I didn't think it would ever happen to me," he says.

For her part, Anne Bercht remembers the pain. She describes how she did not sleep or eat for months.

"If we had been fighting, if we had had a bad sex life -- if we had been struggling -- maybe I would have been able to accept it," she says. "But all of that increased my level of devastation and shock. I couldn't think straight."

Not only was she grappling with the pain coming from her marriage, Anne says, she felt that she was facing a world packed with stereotypes and snide jokes, but very little practical advice. In some ways infidelity was everywhere -- on television and in songs, in grocery checkout magazines and whispered water-cooler conversations, but it was also nowhere. People might allude to others having affairs, but nobody talked about it in the first person. It was never about them.

If a society's approach to infidelity and marriage shows a lot about that culture, then it's not a stretch to assume that the United States is one confused place.

A spate of recent public scandals -- from Tiger Woods to David Letterman, from Sen. John Ensign to Gov. Mark Sanford, to the suspected shenanigans of Jon Gosselin of reality TV's Jon and Kate -- might make it seem as if this is a country well versed in the moral and emotional ambiguities of infidelity. But Anne Bercht's experience, say therapists and researchers who work with couples, is far more typical.

Despite all their exposure to and snickering about infidelity, Americans are becoming increasingly conservative about marital transgressions. At the same time, however, they are more likely to accept infidelity in their own relationships -- and, with the help of a cottage industry of therapists, counselors, and gurus, more likely to confront it directly.

The explanation for this dichotomy -- Americans maintaining a uniquely idealistic view of "I do" while seeming to accept a new strain of realism -- is rooted in fundamental changes in notions of morality and marriage. And it is all amplified by that modern-day tempter and confession booth: the Internet.

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The moral crosscurrents Americans feel about infidelity are reflected in the arithmetic. According to the National Science Foundation's longitudinal General Social Survey, Americans say they are becoming more intolerant of extramarital relationships: In 2006, 80.6 percent of Americans said that infidelity is always wrong -- up from 73.4 percent in 1991. (Another 14.6 percent in 2006 said that infidelity is "almost always wrong.") In the 2008 Gallup Values and Beliefs poll, Americans as a group found extramarital affairs morally worse than polygamy, human cloning, and suicide.

Yet many Americans cheat. Although numbers on adultery are notoriously difficult to pin down (in large part because people lie to researchers), many studies put lifetime infidelity rates around 30 percent for men, slightly lower for women. (There are various estimates, however, that range from 3 percent to 80 percent.)

Americans are also more likely now than ever before to accept adultery as part of marriage. Only 50 percent or 60 percent of Americans say that adultery would be an automatic deal breaker for their marriage, says Pepper Schwartz, a sociology professor at the University of Washington who has written many books on sex, love, and relationships; a decade ago that number was closer to 90 percent.

In short, there is a substantial difference between what we say we should do and what we do.

"Every study I know shows 85 percent of people or more saying that nonmonogamy is wrong in every instance," Schwartz says. "But people also feel that you should eat three nutritious meals a day low in sugar and high in calcium."

Adding to the social confusion is the way public scandals send different pop culture messages on the subject. In recent months, for instance, the revelations of Woods's multiple affairs have derailed his contracts with some corporate sponsors. At the same time, his mistresses have graced the covers of almost every celebrity magazine since the story broke.

All of this, say therapists who work with couples in crisis, makes dealing with infidelity -- regardless of one's role in the matter -- excruciatingly difficult.

"Everything is so open, so sexualized, people don't know what values to follow," says Donna Bellafiore, author of "Straight Talk About Betrayal: A Self-Help Guide for Couples." "It is extremely painful. In a lot of ways, it's much more difficult today."

By the time Anne and Brian rebuilt their relationship -- Anne says it took two years before she decided that she would remain in the marriage -- she was convinced that she needed to do something. She decided to write a book -- "My Husband's Affair Became the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me" -- and she and Brian started holding weekend retreats for struggling couples.