An article of faith among the men with whom I discussed these issues (and an idea ignored, if not contested, by most of the women I know) was that the hunger for sexual variety was a basic and natural and more or less irresistible impulse. "I haven't ever seen anyone who doesn't deliver on every single demand their sexuality makes on them. We make the mistake of thinking some people have a stronger will, they don't," says a forward-thinking friend. "There is no more unnatural principle of social organization than sexual exclusivity." But like other of my male sources, he didn't want me to use his name. "Don't get me divorced!" was the refrain. All of these guys nursed a fantasy, as quaintly surreal as an old tinted postcard, of a perfectible world in which we might have sex outside our primary relationships and say that it doesn't mean anything.
Braverman pointed out that American habits, even on the Upper East Side, have a moralistic component. That affects men too. "I'm not a sociologist," she cautioned. "But we have a history of puritanism as a very dominant sensibility in the United States. That's not the dominant sensibility in France or Italy. My observation is that often when people are having an affair, they get very involved and they start questioning their attachment to the marriage, which becomes very threatening to the marriage's survival. The husbands here don't treat the affairs in the way we imagine Europeans treat their affairs."
Recent science has tended to support my side of the argument. In the last fifteen years, the evidence has grown that our sexuality is hardwired, and the science is changing the culture. My sister Alice, a respectable suburban woman happily married for eons, says that she's come to respect the fact that sexuality runs the gamut: Some people seem happy with a sexless marriage, while others aren't built for monogamy. The only morality she hangs on to is how honest one person is with the other about their stuff going into a marriage.
My sister has been influenced by evolutionary psychology, the widely publicized theory that the sex drive is genetically programmed. One of the leaders in the field, David Buss, author of The Evolution of Desire and a professor at the University of Texas, says that men's genes program them to seek many mates and try to monopolize the reproductive lives of those mates. But women are also programmed for infidelity, Buss says. They have a drive to monopolize the economic resources of their mate, according to the theory, but also to keep a man or two in reserve, because men die earlier than women, or men go off, and women need protection.
Recent analyses of genetic databases reveal that fully 10 percent of people have different biological fathers from the men they name as their fathers, Buss notes; that's evidence of women cheating. But Buss says the difference between the genders in the desire for variety is not minor (as, say, the gender difference in height is, about 10 percent on average); it is staggering, like the difference between how far the average man and woman can throw a rock. Consider the Website meet2cheat, in which married people find one another for recreational sex; it charges $59 for a man's three-month entry fee, $9 for a woman. Cheating wives are harder to come by. "Women are going to get bored, just like men, but I don't think they have this driving constant need," says Nancy Heneson, a science writer who's covered evolutionary psychology since its early days.
As even the evolutionary psychologists will tell you, though, life isn't just chemicals. "Cultural and social attitudes come in and sweep everything off the table," Heneson says. Society is far more judgmental about women who cheat than men; just read Anna Karenina. Anna Hammond, an arts executive who has written on feminist subjects, points out that infidelity is more costly to a woman than a man: It tends to end a marriage when a woman is discovered, while a marriage 'absorbs' it in the man's case.
"Men have more freedom to act. It's not because men have more desire or are genetically programmed. It's because the social and economic ramifications of it are so much more severe for women." Hammond told me of women friends who have had long affairs and only told one or two close women friends about them lest word get out. The women got a lot from the affairs, she said, passion and a sense of themselves as sexual. "Women do these things, too, but they do them completely in secret."
Marital passion, and its absence, was a major theme in the responses to my e-mail. "I think that marriages in which both parties are members of the meritocracy seem to be especially vulnerable," said one friend in Los Angeles. "I see in the [Spitzers] something of what I see in other well-educated power couples - a career trajectory that excludes passion and lust. I know a lot of guys who seem trapped in sexless marriages."
A New York friend expanded the point. "My wife tells me that none of her friends are interested in sex. Do middle-aged, married women who are no longer interested in having sex with their husbands expect them to remain faithful? They don't want it thrown in their faces, but if they think about it for a bit, they have to realize that that intense need is being met somehow."
Susan Squire, the author of a forthcoming history of marriage called I Don't, told me that marriage wasn't made to handle all the sexual pressure we're putting on it. For one thing, the average life span is far greater than it was 100 years ago; what is marriage to do with all that time? And in days gone by, marriage was a more formal institution whose purposes were breeding and family. Squire says that cultural standards of morality have changed dramatically. In ancient aristocracies, rich men had courtesans for pleasure and concubines for quick sex. In the Victorian age, prostitution was far more open than it is today. America is a special case. By the early-twentieth century, she says, the combined impact of egalitarian ideals and the movies had burdened American marriage with a new responsibility: providing romantic love forever. Squire says that the first couples therapy began cropping up in the thirties, when people found their marriages weren't measuring up to cultural expectations.
"Marriage isn't the problem; it's the best answer anyone's come up with," Squire says. "Men and women are equally oppressed by expectations. Expectations are ridiculously high now. Nobody expected you to find personal fulfillment and happiness in marriage. Marriage can be very satisfying, but it's not going to be this heady romance for 40 years." Marriage involves routine, and routine kills passion. "What does Bataille say?" Squire continues."There is nothing erotic that is not transgressive. Marriage has many benefits and values, but eroticism is not one of them.
A long and supportive marriage may be more valuable than a sexually faithful one, Squire says. Why does society consider it more moral for you to break up a marriage, go through a divorce, disrupt your children's lives maybe forever, just to be able to fuck someone with whom the fucking is going to get just as boring as it was with the first person before long?
Sitting in Schiller's, I explained Squire's history to my friend and suggested that we could change sexual norms to, say, encourage New York waitresses to look on being mistresses as a cool option. That's fringe, my friend said dismissively. Wives weren't going to allow it, and we men grant them a lot of power; they're all as dominant as Yoko Ono. Look, we're the weaker animal," he said. They commandeer the situation. He and I love our wives and depend on them. In each of our cases, they make our homes, manage our social calendar, bind up our wounds and finish our thoughts, and are stitched into our extended families more intimately than we are. They seem emotionally better equipped than we are. If my marriage broke up, my wife could easily move in with a sister. I'd be as lost as plankton.
Later, I related my friend's Yoko analogy to my wife. She pointed out that Ono and Lennon had a marriage based on what they both cared most passionately about, art - not money or sex, to judge from the fact that Lennon went off for a year with a mistress and the marriage survived. But how many of us can afford that? Tuten says that even the New York art world is short on mistresses. Victor Hugo had a mistress even when he was in exile in Jersey. He lived in a house with his family and the mistress lived down the road, and he went to and fro. I don’t know anyone in the art world who has that. I don't know too many men who have enough money to set up an apartment for a woman.
I have met women who said that. Women who really think that they enjoy being prostitutes, being sex workers, as they say. They would say, "I feel in command, I have determination over my life situation in a way I've never had it before. I'm loved by my customers." But these are the exceptions. They are not the main." Had these women been given a choice, they would have chosen other things. "Because even among these women, you would find there it has a high cost. Problems with intimacy and sexuality after they quit their career. They dissociate their feelings in order to survive - The problem has been to make it whole again."
Websites
More than 600,000 people have joined the dating website for married people. William Flew went to a masked ball to ask why
Let us be clear: R loves his wife. In fact, he says, stroking the arms of J, "I love my wife to bits."
J is sitting beside him on a chaise longue, wearing an elaborate Venetian mask, and isn't R's wife.
"I don't like the idea of anyone getting hurt," R says. That's why he doesn't tell his wife about his affairs. Not that he lies, mind. He prides himself on his honesty. "I only deceive my wife in ways she wants to be deceived."
R, 41, met J - neither of them want to use their real names - on Illicit Encounters, a website for married people looking to have affairs. Tonight, in a Soho champagne bar, they are attending its masked ball. And they are far from ashamed.
"The whole idea is to not wreck a marriage," says J, who has in fact been round to R's house for a family dinner - his wife and children thinking she was a business contact. "It's to enhance a marriage. Some couples don't have enough time for each other. This provides a way of finding fulfilment."
The time was when having an extramarital affair involved significant deception and some considerable risk. But, as with so many things - flight bookings, house-hunting, stalking old schoolfriends - the internet has streamlined the process considerably.
For today's technophilic philanderer, there is, in fact, an embarrassment of extramarital riches. Maritalaffair.co.uk will help you to arrange dates with married people and "horney" singles from around the country, all the while promising to be a site "where the grass is always greener". Affairs4u.com (not, it should be pointed out, a sister website of the popular holiday broker cottages4u) offers "discreet intimate encounters" with fellow marrieds. And then there is Illicit Encounters (IE), which is, Rosie Freeman-Jones, its spokeswoman, assures me, "less tawdry and sex-based than the competitors".
As far as Freeman-Jones is concerned, Illicit Encounters is just recognising a market that most would rather ignore. Despite societal disapproval, Britain is not and never has been an especially faithful country. Even on their wedding day, surveys show that one man in five and one woman in ten do not intend to be faithful. The figures get worse the higher the social class. Professional men, of the sort that Illicit Encounters claims to attract, are twice as likely to have had an affair in the past year than those in more menial jobs.
This is perhaps why IE wants to rehabilitate the image of the affair. "The reputation of people who have affairs is awful," Freeman-Jones tells me. "But when it comes to affairs that last a long period of time, and exist outside of the marriage? We have a different view on that."
In the eight years it has been running, Illicit Encounters has gained 630,000 members: 1 per cent of the population, or 3 per cent of the married population. While that includes many who will never have paid the money to be an active member, as a statement of intent it is still illuminating or (depending on your views on this sort of thing) shocking.
R knows where he stands on the illuminating-versus-shocking debate. "This actively helps my marriage," he says. "It helps me feel attractive, makes me more attractive to her, and gives me an outlet other than disturbing her." Beside him, J nods.
And, R says, his wife suspects nothing. "Shortly after we got married she said she would be shocked if I told her I'd had an affair. So I looked at her and said, "I've had three affairs". She burst out laughing and said, "OK, I wouldn't be shocked, I wouldn't believe you". Actually, I had had three affairs since I'd been with her."
To break the ice, Illicit Encounters has given each woman a padlock on a necklace, and each man a key. The idea is to find the woman who fits the key and, along the way, to get in some mingling. For a surprising number of women I meet, 'mingling' means winking suggestively through a mask, then saying some sort of variant of: "Will you put your key in my lock?"
Suzy, a 38-year-old here with her sister, has "been a mum and wife for years. Now it's got to the point where my home life isn't enough. I love my husband, and I love my life with my husband. I know it sounds weird, but I just want more." She chose Illicit Encounters rather than a normal dating site because "if he found out, it would be a devastation. The whole benefit of this site is both parties have too much to lose."
O is married with three children. She says she is still with her husband only for the sake of the children. "Physically, there's nothing there with him any more. I think he suspects, though."
S, now divorced and wearing an excellent purple dress, joined the site because, well, because we’re living too long. "When they wrote the marriage vows no one was expected to live with anyone longer than 20 years," she says. "I found I wanted something more. To start with, it was an ego boost. I wanted to know if there was anyone out there who would find me attractive. And I found that!"
The ball is well under way. The padlocks, and most of the masks, have been discarded. Satisfied with the turnout, IE's employees are talking shop. "Reading is a terrible hotbed," says Freeman-Jones. "Berkshire and all the Home Counties are great for us." They all nod. Adam Scott, IE's chief executive, says he once went on Radio Kent to talk about the site. "We told them that our membership in Kent is the equivalent of the population of Sevenoaks. There was a deathly silence."
For an aspect of human society that is, for obvious reasons, rather difficult to research, IE's membership list provides data that most sociologists could only dream of acquiring. London, perhaps surprisingly, has relatively low membership compared with the size of its population. Manchester is high. So, also possibly surprisingly, is Devon. "They probably all know each other," Scott suggests. The pricing structure, too, gives rather stark clues to the demographics of demand. For men, the site costs £149.99 a month. For women, it is free.