Changing Standards

Whether or not marital infidelity is actually increasing in the U.S., adultery has become almost a lighthearted and guilt-free pastime. Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Bal Harbour, Fla., last week, Dr. Leon Salzman of Georgetown University Medical School noted that, contrary to popular thinking, a large number of adulterers are neither anxious nor conscience-stricken. With ridiculous ease, these philanderers convince themselves that an affair is either necessary to maintain their own mental health or a device for allowing them to tolerate a barely compatible husband or wife while still remaining married.

Another expert at the A.P.A. meeting pointed out that the way of the unfaithful is smoothed by the diminishing presence of jealousy in marriage. Sociologist Jessie Bernard, professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University, noted that some wives are relieved to find that their marriage is suffering from "nothing more serious" than infidelity. In addition, women are having more affairs of their own, partly because of the liberating influence of the pill and partly because of their growing economic independence.

Measure of Promise. "Much of the terror that once gripped women whose husbands were unfaithful to them stemmed from the threat it posed to their economic security," Dr. Bernard said. "Just a few years ago, I believed that a woman could not be casual about her own extramarital relations. Now a new kind of woman is emerging who can accept the sex-as-fun point of view without conflict." Although not necessarily endorsing the idea, she observed that married couples have become increasingly willing to accept a new kind of marriage that preserves "permanence at the expense of exclusivity."

Dr. Bernard also found a measure of mature promise in the sexual patterns of young unmarrieds. She noted that growing numbers of young men and women approve semipermanent liaisons with a loved one that may or may not lead to marriage. For as long as these relationships last, she said, young people are now apt to insist more strictly than their elders upon "fidelity based on authentic emotion." Such liaisons may ultimately prove healthier emotionally than an adulterous affair. Adulterers, Salzman continued, are usually individuals who fail to commit themselves entirely to a relationship, and therefore are able to reap neither the consequences nor the rewards of passion. In his view, fidelity is not simply a virtue but a way of life that can add to the fullness of creative living.

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