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   Home  > Books

The Monogamy Myth: A Personal Handbook for Recovering from Affairs

By Peggy Vaughan

The Monogamy Myth

The Monogamy Myth is the belief that monogamy is the norm in our society and that it is supported by society as a whole. The effect of believing that most marriages or committed relationships are monogamous is that if an affair happens, it's seen strictly as a personal failure of the people involved. This leads to personal blame, personal shame, wounded pride, and almost universal feelings of devastation.

The reality is that monogamy is not the norm, not by today's standards, anyway. Conservative estimates are that 60 percent of men and 40 percent of women will have an extramarital affair. These figures are even more significant when we consider the total number of marriages involved, since it's unlikely that all the men and women having affairs happen to be married to each other. If even half of the women having affairs (or 20 percent) are married to men not included in the 60 percent having affairs, then at least one partner will have an affair in approximately 80 percent of all marriages. With this many marriages affected, it's unreasonable to think affairs are due only to the failures and shortcomings of individual husbands or wives.

According to the Monogamy Myth, society as a whole is supportive of monogamy and of people's efforts to remain monogamous, leading people to expect to have a monogamous marriage. This reinforces the idea of personal failure for those people who fail to achieve monogamy.

In reality, while society gives lip service to monogamy, there are significant societal factors that actually support and encourage affairs. This is not to say that all the blame should be placed on society. That would be just as shortsighted as blaming only the particular people involved. But we can make a significant difference, both in the incidence of affairs and in the difficulty of dealing with them, by taking a broader look at the social structure within which they take place.

Seeing problems in a societal context is already happening in a number of other areas. We're coming to see the underlying conditions that lead to violence instead of focusing only on individual acts of violence. We're coming to see the lifestyle habits that lead to disease instead of focusing only on individual incidences of illness. In the same way, we need to see the factors in society that contribute to affairs instead of focusing only on the individual who has an affair.

We need to reject the Monogamy Myth, not to excuse those who have affairs, but to relieve the sense of shame and inadequacy felt by their mates. Since they keep their shame and anger hidden, they seldom get enough perspective to completely recover from these feelings, regardless of whether they stay married or get a divorce. Surviving this experience if it has happened (or avoiding it if it hasn't) is best accomplished by dealing with reality, not holding on to a myth.

Introduction: The Myth and the Reality

New Hope for Monogamy

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.


In this book
- Review

Sample Chapter
- Table of Contents
- Introduction: The Myth and the Reality
- The Monogamy Myth
- New Hope for Monogamy
- Why it's everybody's business

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