When love goes missing

"I TAKE YOU to be my wife/husband. I promise to be true to you in good times and bad, in sickness and in health. I will love and honor you all the days of my life." Marriage is a contract with a fairly short list of deal-breakers. Finances, addictions, and differences in life goals frequently are cited reasons to end a union, but adultery is at the top of most people's fist. While many claim that an affair caught them by surprise, or that they did not intend to have "this" happen, marriage counselors point out that infidelity does not spring to life in a vacuum. Except for those with deep-seated character defects, individuals do not decide randomly to be unfaithful. In actuality, there is a continuum of distress that starts with small acts of selfishness and competitiveness, builds through hostility, and can culminate in infidelity and, perhaps worse, indifference.

Infidelity gets a lot of media attention--for good and bad reasons. In a culture of relativity, the assertion often is made that infidelity strictly is a personal choice. Entertainment either glamorizes it as self-fulfillment, or as a final shot of comeuppance. Sexual politics complicates the discussion, with some experts saying that the increasing rate of women's admitted infidelity is a positive development of their sexual liberation and search for parity with men. This, of course, assumes that infidelity is about sexual activity only, when research, as well as couples' admissions to each other, clergy, or counselors, shows that it primarily is driven by a need to feel connected, appreciated, and wanted. Perhaps a better discussion would focus on the apparently deliberate avoidance of self-reflection endemic in our culture. More daily reflection on our actions and the status of relationships with the most important people in our lives might contribute to a more fruitful search for meaning than merely through sensation.

Still, whoever is cheating, for whatever reason, infidelity is a violation of marriage vows. It breaks trust in a way that affects us to our bones; we genetically are programmed to fear--and try to avoid--infidelity's effects on our relationships. Sexual straying brings the risk of disease into the marriage. It involves others in the community in ways the participants often try their best to ignore. A colleague recently treated a case of selective mutism (a deliberate cessation of speech in a child who previously was verbal) in a five-year-old with onset at the time of a parent's imperfectly clandestine extramarital affair. Infidelity damages the families of both parties involved, as well as friends who are suspicious or, worse yet, burdened with guilty confessions.

Therefore, it is inadequate to view infidelity as a solitary incident of marital trouble. If it merely were sexual, as it may be with those having addictions or deep-seated character flaws, it could be a single-issue discussion. For most couples, a more useful examination of faithlessness in marriage would be to look at the small steps along the continuum of marital difficulties to see how research and practice indicate couples can intervene, anywhere along that continuum, to shortcircuit their marriage's downward spiral towards infidelity.

Psychologist John Gottman, co-founder and -director of the Seattle Marital and Family Institute, has researched couples for many years, and cites criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling--a relationship's "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse"--as markers as well as causes of trouble. These attitudes, often revealed through subtle behaviors, have the effect of eroding a climate of mutual respect, but couples often become so immersed in the minutiae of life that they fail to see how these behaviors erode the relationship. Each feels dissatisfied, but modern culture does not encourage the personal reflexivity that would lead to consideration of what is going well, what is going wrong, and what can be done to help matters. Each feels unappreciated, taken for granted, and increasingly resentful. He responds to her criticism with anger or by shutting down and stonewalling; she feels shut out and that he no longer is interested in her. This pattern exacerbates the problem of a man feeling disrespected; his wife talks to him as if he were five years old. She, for her part, feels lonely and undesired; he either is hostile or seems to be ignoring her distress. The level of dissatisfaction increases. The groundwork is set for finding a set of sympathetic ears and the road to emotional and, possibly, physical infidelity.

Many couples exist in the unhappy state of low-level selfishness and competition without understanding how much better things could be if they would decide that it is better to be in love than to win. Often, couples wait until this state has developed into a much deeper darkness before they seek professional help. According to research by Brian D. Doss, Lorelei E. Simpson, and Andrew Christensen, psychologists at the University of California, Los Angeles, men's first-ranked reason to seek marital therapy is a lack of affection while women's first reason is communication difficulties. With categories of trouble such as arguments, desire to improve the relationship, sex, parenting, and fear of divorce or separation rounding out much of the top 10 for both men and women, it is clear that many people seek counseling with specific issues in mind. Frequently, simply addressing the primary complaint is insufficient. Freud was right: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and sometimes a small, passing problem is just that. Other times, however, the troubles that bring couples into therapy are surface issues. Pervasive challenges of selfishness, competitiveness, hostility, indifference, and, sometimes, infidelity, often are the real dilemmas.