Extramarital Affairs: Hope for recovery
By Peggy Vaughan
Is Monogamy "Natural?
People often get caught up in a debate over whether people are naturally monogamous or naturally have affairs. That's a useless debate, as was clearly expressed by Jessie Bernard in her classic work, The Future of Marriage:
"Millions of words have been used to document both the naturalness and the unnaturalness of monogamy. The question...is, actually, unanswerable. We will never know if there is anything intrinsic in human nature that limits the ways the sexes can relate to one another because no one has ever survived outside of any culture long enough to teach us. Human nature seems to be able to take almost any form of marriage—or unable to take any form."
We can only understand monogamy and affairs in a societal context, in terms of the attitudes of society as a whole. Normally, when we try to understand why affairs happen we look only at the reasons why a person might want to have an affair, such as the excitement of sexual variety. But this doesn't explain why affairs happen. People may want to have affairs for a wide range of reasons, but their decision to act on those desires is affected by the values and actions of those around them.
Affairs happen in so many marriages that it's unreasonable to think they're due solely to factors within each marriage. Whatever the personal factors involved in affairs, they are more than outweighed by the significant, powerful, and pervasive societal factors. We have a responsibility to learn more about our role, individually and as a whole, in supporting the societal factors that contribute to affairs.
Bottom Line: Debating the "naturalness" or "unnaturalness" of monogamy is a way of avoiding dealing directly with this issue. Regardless of whether or not it's "natural," it's happening; so starting from there, there is much to learn.