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Photo illustration by CJ Burton for Newsweek By By Lorraine Ali and Lisa Miller Newsweek July 12 issue - When groups of women get together, especially if they're mothers and have been married for more than six or seven years, and especially if there's alcohol involved, the conversation is usually the same. They talk about the kids and work-how stressed they are, how busy and bone tired. They gripe about their husbands and, if they're being perfectly honest and the wine kicks in, they talk about the disappointments in their marriages. Not long ago, over lunch in Los Angeles, this conversation took a surprising turn, when Erin, who is in her early 40s and has been married for more than a decade, spilled it. It started with an old friend, whom she began meeting every several months for long dinners and some heavy petting. Then she began giving herself permission to flirt with, kiss-well, actually, make out with-men she met on business trips. She understands it's a "Clintonian" distinction, but she won't have sex with anyone except her husband, whom she loves. But she also loves the unexpected thrill of meeting someone new. "I don't know how long you've been married, but do you remember the kiss that would just launch a thousand kisses?"
Our readers write on the changing rules of infidelity Erin started seeing other men when she went back to work after her youngest child entered preschool. Wearing great clothes, meeting new people, alive for the first time in years to the idea that she was interesting beyond her contributions at PTA meetings. Veronica, on the other hand, fell in love with a man who was not her husband while she was safely at home in the Dallas suburbs looking after her two children. Hers is the more familiar story: isolated and lonely, married to an airline pilot, Veronica, now 35, took up with a wealthy businessman she met at a Dallas nightclub. Her lover gave her everything her husband didn't: compliments, Tiffany jewelry, flowers and love notes. Veronica's lover sent a bouquet to her home one afternoon, her husband answered the door and, in one made-for-Hollywood moment, the marriage was over. Now remarried (to a new man), Veronica says she and her friends half-jokingly talk about starting a Web site for married women who want to date.
Infidelity: Confessions of a Personal Trainer Much has changed since Emma Bovary chose suicide with arsenic over living her life branded an adulteress-humiliated, impoverished and stripped of her romantic ideals. in a divorce, an unfaithful wife could lose everything, even the property she owned before marriage. The reality is this: American women today have more opportunity to fool around than ever; when they do fool around, they're more likely to tell their friends about it, and those friends are more likely to lend them a sympathetic ear. They probably use technology to facilitate their affairs, and if they get caught, they're almost as likely to wind up in a wing chair in a marriage counselor's office as in divorce court. Finally, if they do separate from their husbands, women, especially if they're college educated, are better able to make a go of it-pay the bills, keep at least partial custody of the children, remarry if they want to-than their philandering foremothers. "It was just so ruinous for a woman to be caught in adultery in past times, you had to be really driven or motivated to do it," says Peter D Kramer, clinical professor of psychiatry at Brown University and author of "Should You Leave?" "Now you can get away with it, there's a social role that fits you."
Lorraine Ali joined us for a talk on the rise of infidelity among married women. Just how many married women have had sex with people who are not their husbands? It's hard to say for sure, because people lie to pollsters when they talk about sex, and studies vary wildly. In 1991, the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago asked married women if they'd ever had sex outside their marriage, and 10 percent said yes. When the same pollsters asked the same question in 2002, the "yes" responses rose to 15 percent, while the number of men stayed flat at about 22 percent. The best interpretation of the data: the cheating rate for women is approaching that of men, says Tom Smith, author of the NORC's reports on sexual behavior. "Women have suddenly begun to give themselves the same permission to step over the boundary the way that men have." A rise in female infidelity, though titillating, does not do much to clarify the paradoxes in American culture surrounding sex. Phil and "Sex and the City" have made every imaginable sex act fodder for cocktail-party conversation. At the same time, Americans developed a lower tolerance for infidelity: 80 percent of Americans say infidelity is "always wrong," according to the NORC, up from 70 percent in 1970. Popular opinion is on to something: infidelity can be devastating. If discovered, it can upend a marriage and create chaos in a family. Nevertheless, in America, as in other parts of the world, a double standard continues to thrive: boys will be boys, but girls are supposed to be good. Even though women are narrowing the gap, men still do the bulk of the domestic damage. "Bill Clinton, who we're all loving on TV-he's a charmer. A weak or wandering mother is a scarier image, she adds.
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