Love Affairs: Marriage and Infidelity

By Lee Ji-eun

About 10 years ago, a university student accused her mother of being unfaithful on the Internet. Netizens became infuriated with the mother, after she was identified along with her workplace by the daughter. However, she countered with a statement on her actual problems on the Internet.

The mother said she was forced to have sex by her teacher during her high school days. She was obliged to marry him after she got pregnant. However, she was determined to divorce him because he frequently hit her and committed adultery. After this posting, there were heated mixed reactions on the website for a considerable period.

There were 114,300 divorces in Korea last year, or nine per 1,000 couples. The main reasons behind the divorces were irreconcilable differences and financial problems. Unfaithfulness came third but it is far beyond the first two reasons in the destructive power on both spouses and a third person involved. Why does infidelity destroy marriage? Is it unforgivable? How can we deal with extramarital affairs? Two books have been published on the issue _ one each by an American philosopher and psychologist, who have analyzed married life to answer such questions.

“Love Affairs: Marriage and Infidelity,” authored by Richard Taylor, who taught metaphysics and ethics at Brown and other U.S. universities, is quite different from books by other philosophers. In general, philosophers interpret married life from an ethical perspective, but this book consists of interviews of people who experienced affairs or suffered from partner’s affairs to explain real marital life.

The author claims romantic love during dating is totally different from conjugal love, the core of married life. While romantic love is a chemical reaction that shuns rationality and makes them attracted to each other emotionally, conjugal love is when the couple satisfy each other’s desires, according to the author.

Unfaithfulness comes at any time when the couple fails to fully meet the desires of the other.

It is generally thought that people who have extramarital affairs have extraordinarily strong sexual desires. But Taylor says that those who have affairs with others are not a different people. “People who are faithful are just lucky or timid. So, they don’t have to feel proud of being faithful,” said the author. “There is no acceptable reason to say marriage is important. There are no acceptable reasons to claim that honest affairs have no positive meaning.” He emphasizes that the idea that people commit adultery to seek pleasure has long been misunderstood.

He claims that adultery is the result of a failed married life, not the reason, which is the core message of the book. If even innocent people are not satisfied with their married life, they would have affairs too, according to the philosopher.

In his analysis of the reason and process of adultery, he explains that women have affairs when they feel boring with their husband and men commit adultery when their wives are indifferent to them.

What both feel fundamentally is that they are not treated as important by their partners.

It would be more difficult to solve the problem if one part of a couple brands the unfaithful spouse as a home destroyer, despises the man as a womanizer and ascribes the break-up to a third party. Readers are reminded that “the problem exists within married life but not other identities such as either of the couple or a third party.”

The author suggested several rules to help the couple solve marriage problems. “If you find that either you or your spouse is unfaithful, you should not be supposed to snoop, entrap or engage the partner but just get out of the situation.

Psychologist Arnold Lazarus, who has consulted troubled couples for decades, gives more specific advice. His latest publication, “Marital Myths Revisited” deals with two dozen wrong beliefs that might ruin marriage.

Mistaken notions such as “Husbands and wives should do everything together,” “A happy marriage requires total trust,” “Good spouses should make their partners happy” have come from compulsive ideas about happy marriages, according to the author.

Like Taylor, Lazarus claims that it is not true that romantic love makes a good marriage and extramarital affairs will destroy a marriage.

In addition, he stresses that happy and successful married couples should keep in mind that they have to share each other’s lives and develop their relationship continuously in order to sustain a satisfied life. He said that it is important to know how to change romantic love to conjugal love, the basis for a successful marriage. He pointed out required conditions such as kindness, consideration, communication, harmony of habits, and agreement about what is important in values and topics.

“I am sorry to everyone, who consoled me and jeered my mother. I am also sorry to my mother,” said the university student, who disclosed her mother’s affairs, in a new posting on the Internet. “I hope you stop arguing.”

This incident proves that the common advice of the two books is correct that affairs cannot be solved when they are made public.