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The Lutheran Pastor Calling for a Sexual Reformation

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In her new book, "Shameless," Nadia Bolz-Weber sets out to build a sexual ethic around human flourishing rather than around rules encoded by men centuries ago.

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"TRIGGER WARNING: The interview with Christopher West in Part 2 could be triggering to members of the LGBTQIA+ community. It's included so people with non-affirming viewpoints on LGBTQIA+ on sexuality are prompted to examine the implications of that worldview, but we encourage our listeners to use discretion before listening to that segment.

In this episode, we’re talking about how to discern what is right and healthy for people in sexual activity.

We’d like to thank our guests on this episode, and we encourage you to check out their work.

Bromliegh McCleneghan, Author of Good Christian Sex

Darren Calhoun, Artist and Speaker

Christopher West, Author, Speaker, Teacher and Expert in John Paul II’s

Theology of the Body

Caroline Lee, Artist and Photographer

Jamie Lee Finch, Relationship Guide, Intuitive Healer

Lisa Gungor, Artist and Author"

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TRIGGER WARNING: The interview with Christopher West in Part 2 could be triggering to members of the LGBTQIA+ community. It's included so people with non-affiriming viewpoints on LGBTQIA+ on sexuality are prompted to examine the implications of that worldview, but we encourge our listners to use dis

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Matthew Vines on "God and the Gay Christian"

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Matthew Vines on "God and the Gay Christian"

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Matthew Vines on God and the Gay Christian

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"Hey guys, this is B.T. Harman, and I'm the creator of Blue Babies Pink, a 44-Episode Southern Coming Out Story.

Awhile back, I told my story of growing up gay in the Christian south, one post per day for 44 days. Nearly 100,000 people have either read along (or listened) since then. It was an exciting, scary, healing, exhausting process, but I couldn't be more happy with how it turned out.

I've learned there are things that don't define us, but that are definitely in the definition of us. That's kind of how I view the gay thing. It's just a part.

There's a lot more to the story . . ."

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B.T. Harman shares his journey of being a gay Christian in the American south. The story has resonated deeply with parents of gay kids trying to understand their child's struggle.

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What are some good resources for thinking through covenantal relationships as LGBTQ+

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What are some good resources for thinking through covenantal relationships as LGBTQ+

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"For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven." -Matthew 22:30 (KJV)

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"For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven." -Matthew 22:30 (KJV)

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Porn: Is it adultery? Jesus, Matthew 5, and adultery in an age of technology. 

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Porn: Is it adultery? Jesus, Matthew 5, and adultery in an age of technology. 

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"27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ 28 But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29 If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one of your members than for your whole body to go into hell." -Matthew 5:27-30

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31 “It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ 32 But I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery." -Matthew 5:31-32

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How do we define affairs? What are lines that should not be crossed? Is the 'Billy-Graham' rule an appropriate? Are strict rules of gendered friendship hurtful to genuine human flourishing? It seems that 'work-spouses' are helpful. What relationships would be out of bounds? What constitutes 'cheating'?

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How do we define affairs? What are lines that should not be crossed? Is the 'Billy-Graham' rule an appropriate? Are strict rules of gendered friendship hurtful to genuine human flourishing? It seems that 'work-spouses' are helpful. What relationships would be out of bounds? What constitutes 'cheating'?

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How ought we treat those caught in adultery today? How does context change things?

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How ought we treat those caught in adultery today? How does context change things?

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*What role do power dynamics play in the following cases?
*What role does estrangement and/or abandonment play in adultery?
*How does understanding someone's reasons help us better love them as Christ did?
*Is it ever acceptable to do as these persons did?

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"3 The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them, 4 they said to him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. 5 Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” 6 They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. 7 When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” 8 And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground. 9 When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. 10 Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” 11 She said, “No one, sir.”And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.” John 8:3-11

*How ought this story change our perception of adultery?
*How do the following pieces of art illumine the text?
*Do you resonate with one of them more than others?
*Does Jesus' example negate the law?
*What does it look like to emulate Jesus' example in this case?

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How do these art works portray adultery?

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How do these art works portray adultery?

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*What is their message?
*Where do you agree with their sentiment?
*Where do you differ? Why?

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Art, the Bible, and punishment: How have historic and biblical laws drawn the line?

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Art, the Bible, and punishment: How have historic and biblical laws drawn the line?

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"You shall bring both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death, the young woman because she did not cry for help in the town and the man because he violated his neighbor’s wife. So you shall purge the evil from your midst." Deuteronomy 22:24

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If we agree that upholding the covenantal relationship of marriage is good, should adultery be illegal?
*Are we obligated to only positively uphold marriage, or should there be negative consequences beyond the sin itself?
*What has happened when adultery has been illegal in states?
*Who benefits most from adultery being illegal?
*If the law ought to be about protecting the marginalized, weak, and poor, then in what ways have adultery laws favored men over women?
*Should the state be concerned with adultery?
*Should the church be concerned with adultery? If so, in what ways? Should they be barred from communion, leadership, or membership?

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If the heart of the 7th commandment is about promoting marriages, then how do we weddings should matter.

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If the heart of the 7th commandment is about promoting marriages, then how do we weddings should matter.

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What do we do well?
What are the economics of weddings?
When should we encourage people to get married?
What is the role of single persons in promoting covenental relationships?

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"The ideal of love as a primary reason for marriage began to spread in the late 18th century and early 19th century, partly due to the French and American revolutions.

Enlightenment thinkers in this era were promoting the “right to personal happiness,” Coontz said.

Eventually, the development of a wage labor economy moved coupling away from economics. Women didn’t have to depend on their parents’ ability to put up a dowry, and men didn’t have to wait for their inheritance. Families moved away from farms into urban settings, so they didn’t need so many children. More options opened up.

That created a sea change for marriage in the mid-19th century, including the possibility of unions founded on love, Coontz said. “We convinced ourselves that was the traditional ideal.”

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On Valentine's Day, American husbands and wives of every age, faith and region will shower their beloveds with symbols of undying affection - flowers, chocolates, moonlit dinners, kisses.

The annual Feb. 14 lovefest is also a popular time for elaborate engagements, with picturesque proposals and pricey jewelry.

But any link between love and matrimony is relatively recent, said Stephanie Coontz, who teaches history and family studies at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.

And a radical one at that.

"Through most of human history, love was not at all the point of marriage," Coontz said. "Marriage was about getting families together, which was why there were so many controls."

The notion that a couple would marry for love was considered almost anti-social, even subversive; parents could disown their kids for doing it.

"The Greeks thought lovesickness was a type of insanity, a view that was adopted by medieval commentators in Europe. In the Middle Ages, the French defined love as a 'derangement of the mind' that could be cured by sexual intercourse, either with the loved one or with a different partner," Coontz writes in her 2005 book, "Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage."

Couples wed to make political alliances, to raise capital, to expand the workforce and for a whole array of practical purposes.

"Too much love was thought to be a real threat to the institution of marriage," she said in an interview. "Earlier proponents of marriage were as horrified by the idea of a love match as late 20th-century people were by (the) idea of same-sex marriage."

Physical attraction between two people has existed as long as marriage, explained Don Herrin, who teaches a course on family belief systems at the University of Utah, but how that is expressed - or controlled - varies from culture to culture. So does the relationship of parents to children.

The women of the Tibetan Na people have sex with men from a neighboring village to get pregnant, but rear the children themselves with the help of their brothers, he said. There are no active fathers.

And there are tribal societies in which the kids belong to the whole community, not to a set of parents, Herrin said.

Love is inherent in being human and these groups have that, he said. It just takes a different form.

Polygamy is the planet's most enduring form of marriage, even today.

"If you really want to go traditional," he said, "let's legalize polygamy."

You could say that the biblical Adam and Eve had an arranged marriage - that is, a spouse they didn't choose for themselves.

The Bible does speak of love matches, of course, but those are not all monogamous. Think Jacob and Rachel, and her older sister, Leah. Kings David and Solomon were said to have scores of wives.

The ideal of love as a primary reason for marriage began to spread in the late 18th century and early 19th century, partly due to the French and American revolutions.

Enlightenment thinkers in this era were promoting the "right to personal happiness," Coontz said.

Eventually, the development of a wage labor economy moved coupling away from economics. Women didn't have to depend on their parents' ability to put up a dowry, and men didn't have to wait for their inheritance. Families moved away from farms into urban settings, so they didn't need so many children. More options opened up.

That created a sea change for marriage in the mid-19th century, including the possibility of unions founded on love, Coontz said. "We convinced ourselves that was the traditional ideal."

The most "marrying time in American history" was just after World War II, she said. "More women could stay at home full time, while their husbands supported them."

That was built on a combination of rising wages for men, Coontz said, and repressive laws and economics for women.

That era lasted only until the late 1960s and early '70s, when women began flocking back to the workforce.

If these "Father Knows Best" marriages represented the ideal, said Herrin, why did so many women flee them in the late 1970s, when no-fault divorce became available?

"Our peak years for divorce were between 1978 and 1980," he said. "Even now 67 percent of divorces are filed by women. I am sobered by that. For a lot of folks, marriage is a better relationship for guys than women."

Today, Herrin said, romantic unions have become the ideal, but not all of them are between heterosexual, married couples with children. Many prefer cohabiting to marriage and do not plan to produce offspring.

Unlike in earlier eras, these days Cupid's arrow - the ineffable nature of attraction - is considered essential to finding a partner. You don't have to have the approval of family, faith or society. You can write your own promises, make your own money and chart your own future.

That's the easier part, Herrin said. Making it last as a satisfying partnership is tougher.

Contemporary families are, indeed, falling apart, said the professor, who teaches a class on strengthening the family. And it's not because women work outside the home or gays are getting married.

It's because young lovers don't have the skills - the will and commitment to clean up the wife's vomit, listen to the husband's endless fascination with football, stay by her side when she gets fired, when he has Alzheimer's, when they lose a child - to turn the initial spark into a deeper burning.

Love, he said, has a lot to do with that.

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Marriage: What's Love Got To Do With It?

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On Valentine's Day, American husbands and wives of every age, faith and region will shower their beloveds with symbols of undying affection - flowers, chocolates, moonlit dinners, kisses. The annual Feb. 14 lovefest is also a popular time for elaborate engagements, with picturesque proposals and pricey jewelry.

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If not, what about love outside marriage?
What is it about the marriage relationship that makes intimate love uniquely integrated to it?

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How is marriage related to social justice? Does state mass incarceration qualify as adultery by our government? In what ways are we complicit? How can we contribute to change? 

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How is marriage related to social justice? Does state mass incarceration qualify as adultery by our government? In what ways are we complicit? How can we contribute to change? 

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The 7th Commandment as protecting covenantal and sacramental relationships. 

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The 7th Commandment as protecting covenantal and sacramental relationships. 

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If we broaden our thinking of the 7th commandment from simply not having sexual relationships outside of marriage, then what becomes important for uplifting and protecting these relationships?

*Beginning with the extreme of divorce--or irreparably ruptured marriage--what are factors that lead to divorce? Consider the following articles on divorce:
*What did you find intriguing?
*What were you surprised by?
*What are factors under our control as individuals?
*What are factors under our control as communities?
*What are some practical changes your community could make to uplift and uphold covenantal relationships?

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Best friends who work together make bank together.

That's the case e-retail founders Erica Cerulo and Claire Mazur make in their new book, Work Wife: The Power of Female Friendship to Drive Successful Businesses.

Mazur and Cerulo have been close friends 17 years, nine of them as business partners at Of a Kind, a retail site that introduces new designers by sharing their stories and selling their goods. After five years of steady growth, Mazur and Cerulo sold the site to Bed Bath & Beyond, but they continue to run the brand.

While building their business, the co-founders noticed a trend among the working women they knew: Many of their successful peers had paired up to get the job done, whether it was pooling their talents to launch a startup, or developing informal work partnerships in corporate offices.

These "work wife" arrangements work so well for a big reason, they say. Having someone to support you leads to more productivity and a better, more encouraging work environment overall, especially in startups and companies where long hours and around-the-clock commitment to the job are expected.

"A work marriage is about more than just business - it's about being there for the whole person," Cerulo told HuffPost. " Not only do you have someone's back when it comes to a big presentation or a tense negotiation, but you also step up for them when they need support more broadly ― and they do the same for you."

At the core of a strong co-working relationship, "there's love," Cerulo explained.

Research backs up this theory. According to Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements, a New York Times best-seller drawn from Gallup studies that span 150 countries, those who have a best friend at work are seven times more likely to be engaged in their jobs, are better at relating to customers, produce higher-quality work, have greater well-being and are less likely to get injured on the job.

We see these work wife arrangements in high places: Tina Fey and Amy Poehler in their "Saturday Night Live" days, Anne Wojcicki and Linda Avey in the tech world with 23andMe. The book holds up Olympic volleyball champions Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh Jennings as a prime example of work wives at play.

While the two admit they're not BFFs, the athletes' closeness was cemented after a personal struggle: May-Treanor's mom died during the second year of their work partnership, which led Walsh Jennings to see her in a new light.

"Going through something like that with someone that you love and care about really expedites a friendship. My heart broke for Misty every single day, and I just wanted to be there for her," Walsh Jennings told the authors. "Misty never cries ― I probably saw her cry maybe five times in our entire career together."

Visionhaus via Getty Images

As that example shows, work spouses put a premium on emotional intimacy on the job. And in a corporate setting, it's reassuring to know there's someone in your office who knows the real "you," not just the person you project at work. If you're going through a personal problem ― or cry in the office ― you automatically have someone in your corner.

In a startup setting, this kind of work wife relationship is even more beneficial, Mazur said.

"A good friend makes a great co-founder because you're willing to be vulnerable and transparent with that person, and that leads to much stronger collaboration and a better ability to navigate the dramatic ups and downs of starting a business together," she told HuffPost.

It's worth noting that, while work marriages are great to cultivate for your own well-being, in a corporate setting, your employers may be a little hesitant to recognize pair productivity. Most industries tend to focus on the individual when it comes time to give raises or promotions, said Laurie Ruettimann, a human resources expert and the host of the podcast "Let's Fix Work."

"It's really up to the work-unit ― work-wives or partners ― to be brave, raise their hands, and recognize the other partner as a collaborator and co-equal," Ruettimann told HuffPost. "While employers don't necessarily recognize the power of a unit, most employers who want to retain talent will recognize accomplishments and results."

In other words, the onus is on you and your work BFF to shout when you nailed a Q1 project as a team ― don't just let one person get the credit. (That sounds like grounds for a work-wife divorce to us.)

Ultimately, Ruettimann, who's unaffiliated with the book, thinks "the power of a work spouse is the power of having someone in the office who has your back and looks out for you as a human being when your employer simply sees you as a line item on a budget."

Not every friendship has what it takes to withstand a working relationship. You need to have a work ethic similar to your pal, as well as compatible standards in life.

"Your standards don't have to be about the same thing," Mazur explained. "Erica is a grammar nut, and I'm really picky about visual things ― but because we both respect one another and feel very accountable to one another's high standards, we rise to meet each other."

Although the title of the book is gendered, the authors' message is not. This same work-spouse arrangement can work for men, too.

"We're not suggesting that the office become a full-on social den or therapy session. There should be boundaries, of course," Mazur said. "But things happening in your personal life have implications for your professional life. Whether it's an illness, a family issue, or even something positive like an upcoming wedding, there are things that can fundamentally shift your attitude, your ability to focus, or your levels of anxiety."

When you have a work spouse or office friends in general, you can relax a little, knowing that these folks will interpret your reactions and behavior through a more holistic and human lens.

"All of which is all to say that these partnerships aren't just good for the people working together, they're good for the organizations they work for, too," Cerulo said.

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business co-worker work spouse work wife office relationships

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Want To Succeed At Work? Find A Work Spouse.

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Best friends who work together make bank together. That's the case e-retail founders Erica Cerulo and Claire Mazur make in their new book, Work Wife: The Power of Female Friendship to Drive Successful Businesses.

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"In The Waiting Room Of Estranged Spouses"

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"In The Waiting Room Of Estranged Spouses"

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Modern Love: NPR
Oct. 24, 2018

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In The Waiting Room Of Estranged Spouses | Encore

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In The Waiting Room Of Estranged Spouses | Encore

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Rethinking infidelity ... a talk for anyone who has ever loved | Esther Perel | TED

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How do we think through the harm of sexual harassment in light of adultery and right relationships? How do we protect those at risk and seek greater justice in the workplace?

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How do we think through the harm of sexual harassment in light of adultery and right relationships? How do we protect those at risk and seek greater justice in the workplace?

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The first big New York Times story about the allegations against Harvey Weinstein, by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, went live on Oct. 5. Nearly every day since has brought another horror story. For those of us caught up in the monthslong collective catharsis, one significant silver lining has been the writing: thousands of strong, clear words produced (mostly) by women, examining their own experiences, reporting on the stories of others, and trying to pinpoint exactly what this moment means. Here is some of the best of that work, recommended by Slate writers and editors. -Rebecca Onion

I read Jia Tolentino's " How Men Like Harvey Weinstein Implicate Their Victims in Their Acts" (NewYorker.com, Oct. 11) as I commuted home. As I was standing on the Metro, Tolentino's words cut me to the bone. This article's power comes from how precisely Tolentino dissects the ways sexual harassment damages the self-concept of its victims; every taut sentence rang true. "This is a basic and familiar pattern," Tolentino writes. "A powerful man sees you, a woman who is young and who thinks she might be talented, a person who conveniently exists in a female body, and he understands that he can tie your potential to your female body, and threaten the latter, and you will never be quite as sure of the former again." - Lila Thulin, intern

This fall it became normal to lose afternoons or whole days to reading the latest sexual harassment and assault investigation. I found all the stories gripping and important and tragic, but the story I became most obsessed with was that of the "shitty media men" spreadsheet. As I struggled to make sense of what to think about the list, Katie McDonough's Oct. 13 piece in Splinter, "This Was Always Going to Hurt," is the one that did the best job of explaining it. McDonough writes that, yes, the document was messed up ("Something must be done, just not this"), but that a perfect, painless way to address these issues in our industry, one that won't touch or reframe any of our personal relationships, is simply never going to exist. I appreciate that McDonough included her own story of sexual assault in the piece; it informed her thinking, and it should inform all of ours. - Heather Schwedel, staff writer

To state the resplendently obvious, this is Rebecca Traister's rodeo. The clear-eyed author of All the Single Ladiesbrings enormous amounts of nuance, fire, and expertise to issues that are easy to simplify, downplay, and mischaracterize: What are the actionable lessons of the post-Weinstein moment? How are we all implicated? How do power, gender, and sex really interact in the workplace, and how did we think they did? Along with an impressive ability to tease out ripple effects, synthesize narratives, and articulate ambient moods, Traister possesses a moral wisdom that feels bracing, restorative, sanity-saving. Just go to her New York magazine author page and read everything she's published since Oct. 5. - Katy Waldman, staff writer

In her Oct. 19 piece in the New York Times, Lupita Nyong'o describes her encounters with Harvey Weinstein with such extraordinary clarity and precision, as though she's documenting the operation of a machine-which in a way she is. Of everything I've read about Weinstein, this piece gave me the clearest understanding of how his manipulations worked, both socially and psychologically. - Gabriel Roth, senior editor and editorial director of Slate Plus

Lili Loofbourow's "The Myth of the Male Bumbler" (the Week, Nov. 15) is an extremely forceful and persuasive application of rhetorical and cultural analysis to a wide array of know-nothing statements made by male public figures in 2017. There is an intuitive rightness to Loofbourow's argument-yes, it is true that "the bumbler's perpetual amazement exonerates him"; yes, the supposed cluelessness of men has indeed been "weaponized into an alibi"-but the piece also does a great job tying sexual harassment together with other antisocial actions men like to excuse by claiming incompetence. Jeff Sessions, Mike Pence, and Donald Trump Jr. don't stand accused of harassment, but they are hiding behind this myth, just the same. Once you read Loofbourow's piece, you start seeing bumblers everywhere. - Rebecca Onion, staff writer

Josephine Livingstone's Nov. 17 assessment of the #MeToo moment, on the New Republic's website, shines some much-needed skepticism on the biggest exhuming of sexual misconduct the country has ever seen. Where other writers have scolded women for ruining innocent men's careers and fomenting a " sex panic"-worries I believe to be way out of scale with the enormity of the abuses and cover-ups coming to light-Livingstone puts forth a forward-thinking argument about the movement's flattening of gender-politics discourse. In our efforts to convey the ubiquity of sexual violence, she argues, writers and activists have forgotten the dictates of intersectionality, one of the most essential pillars of feminist thought. Livingstone points out that the #MeToo conversation has reduced gender to a clear binary and women to a monolith, eliding crucial nuances shaped by race, class, age, and sexuality. The article offers a clarifying step back from a movement that has the potential to propel progressive change in how society conceives of sexual violation, but only if its proponents apply a critical feminist lens to the process. - Christina Cauterucci, staff writer

Nothing has highlighted the routine sexual harassment in America's least glamorous workplaces quite as powerfully as the open letter from Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, an organization representing female farmworkers, first published in Time magazine on Nov. 10. The letter, written "on behalf of the 700,000 women" who serve as agricultural workers across the U.S. to draw attention to abuses "in the isolated fields and packinghouses," is directed to the "Sisters" from Hollywood and other high-profile industries who've said #MeToo. "Your job feeds souls, fills hearts and spreads joy. Our job nourishes the nation with the fruits, vegetables and other crops that we plant, pick and pack," the workers write. The letter strikes a remarkable balance between acknowledging the stark differences between their work environments and, with immense compassion, emphasizing the very similar hazards both sets of women face on the job. It's a master class in feminist solidarity that doesn't ignore differences. - Haley Swenson, editor, the Better Life Lab

"They can have their money or they can have their redemption. IMO they can't have both": I sent that to a group text on Nov. 30 after I read Amber Tamblyn's op-ed in the New York Timeson the impending redemption of men. Three weeks of distance from the date of publication has only strengthened my resolve on the matter. Tamblyn rattles off all the notes of caution floated in the past 2½ months and shuts them down firmly: "The punishment for harassment is you disappear. The punishment for rape is you disappear. The punishment for masturbation in front of us is you disappear. The punishment for coercion is you disappear." Harvey Weinstein, Louis C.K., Jeremy Piven, Mario Batali can all disappear. Because when the time came for them to choose power over decency, they chose the former. Every choice has consequences, and women have had to live with the consequences of men's choices for far too long. - Aria Velasquez, audience engagement editor

Rebecca Carroll's Dec. 4 essay on her time working at the Charlie Rose Show, written for Esquire.com, was a story of personal experience, but also a corrective. Carroll wrote about the toxic effects of witnessing the host's "lecherous behavior" toward female staff and guests, but she also meditated on the fact that the harassment Rose directed toward her was racial, rather than sexual. Carroll's experience shows how these forms of degradation dovetail neatly. "To be clear," she writes, "I'm not suggesting it would have been preferable for Charlie to have preyed upon me, too-but his sexualization of white women was a manifestation of gendered power dynamics in the same way that his not sexualizing me was an expression of racialized power dynamics." There's also an excellent interview with Carroll on the podcast With Friends Like These. -Rebecca Onion, staff writer

My favorite piece on this topic was not actually a written article but a radio segment. Kristen Meinzer was one of five women who went on the record in a Dec. 1 New York magazine story, about the former host of WNYC's The Takeaway, John Hockenberry, who stands accused of workplace harassment. On Dec. 6, Meinzer (now director of nonfiction programming at our sister company Panoply) spoke to The Takeaway in a live interview about her experience. As I listened, I was bowled over by Meinzer's forthrightness and poise-as she called for managers to be fired, as she noted the occurrence of sexual relationships between WNYC bosses and subordinates, and as she calmly accepted the apology of Todd Zwillich, her former colleague, who was conducting the interview. I kept thinking to myself, "This is live?" - Mary Wilson, producer, The Gist

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The Best, Most Searing Writing on Sexual Harassment This Year

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The first big New York Times story about the allegations against Harvey Weinstein, by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, went live on Oct. 5. Nearly every day since has brought another horror story.

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"NEARLY everyone talks about it and reads about it. More than half of all married men and more than one-third of married women in America claim they are guilty of it.

Adultery.

For all the nattering about a promiscuous society, when it comes to adultery, most Americans are old-fashioned in their judgments: extramarital sex is always wrong, say studies dating back to the 1970's.

But a growing number of people now say they are finding it in their hearts to forgive the sinner, if not the sin. Although it is hard to find anyone who praises adultery, it is no longer an automatic source of irredeemable shame and ostracism, nor an automatic reason for divorce.

When the Princess of Wales acknowledged in her November television interview that she had committed adultery as solace from her marital misery, she was besieged by letters from a sympathetic public. And even though Melanie Griffith, the actress, was accused by the wife of her lover, the actor Antonio Banderas, of "stealing" her husband, the public seems more fascinated than repelled by the romance. Compare that with the ordeal of the actress Ingrid Bergman in 1950 after she and Roberto Rossellini, the director, had an affair that led to an out-of-wedlock birth. They were denounced by Congress, and Ms. Bergman fled Hollywood."

-A New Level of Tolerance by Lena Williams, NYT 4 Jan. 1996

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How to treat those who have committed adultery?

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How to treat those who have committed adultery?

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"After the famously adulterous theologian Paul Tillich died, someone said about him, ''He wanted to be counted in on every human failing.'' What I love about the eulogy is that it manages empathy and morality at once. Adultery is a very human desire, as well as an all too human failing....

But publicly humiliating anyone for consensual adultery is draconian, and wrong. It teaches children cynicism. What they see is how little respect there is for privacy, and how gratuitously and harshly adults will harm one another to gain a little power. And using adultery or any aspect of consensual adult sexuality as a weapon in political battles is more abhorrent than the act itself.

You might say that how and why we disapprove of adultery is as important as whether we do."

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Certainly, when cynicism about virtue in high places becomes so abundant, we need to be concerned. But what do we do? Some people would say that because these public figures and supposed ''role models'' have committed adultery, they deserve to be outed, and that if they don't suffer some consequences, our young people won't know right from wrong.

I suppose we could try going this route again: teaching values to the young by conducting sexual witch hunts. But what will they really learn? That adults are nasty and unforgiving. That, as Nathaniel Hawthorne demonstrated, it is often too easy to get people enthused about hurting people who behave differently.

Adultery is a private choice. The important rejection of it comes from love, not intimidation. The reason not to commit it is that it is likely to devastate someone you love if he or she learns about it. And the only way that person won't learn about it is if you tell a lot of lies. Telling a lot of lies eventually harms your ability to maintain a trusting relationship; secretiveness undermines intimacy. And tending a committed, intimate relationship is a deeply meaningful part of life, though we all know it has its share of bad days.

While biographers have described people who are exceptions and seem able to countenance adultery and marital intimacy at the same time, by and large the reason not to choose adultery is that the pleasure it offers is taken in trade for harming more enduring love and more important loved ones.

But publicly humiliating anyone for consensual adultery is draconian, and wrong. It teaches children cynicism. What they see is how little respect there is for privacy, and how gratuitously and harshly adults will harm one another to gain a little power. And using adultery or any aspect of consensual adult sexuality as a weapon in political battles is more abhorrent than the act itself.

You might say that how and why we disapprove of adultery is as important as whether we do.

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Janna Malamud Smith Op-Ed article says the 'outing' of adulterers in Government shows why it is a bad idea to turn consensual sex between adults into political fodder; says people should avoid adultery not because it will expose them to public humiliation but because it diminishes their capacity for marital intimacy (M)

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"When David H. Petraeus resigned as director of the C.I.A. because of adultery he was widely understood to be acknowledging a misdeed, not a crime. Yet in his state of residence, Virginia, as in 22 others, adultery remains a criminal act, a vestige of the way American law has anchored legitimate sexual activity within marriage.

In most of those states, including New York, adultery is a misdemeanor. But in others — Idaho, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oklahoma and Wisconsin — it is a felony, though rarely prosecuted. In the armed forces, it can be punished severely although usually in combination with a greater wrongdoing.

This is yet another example of American exceptionalism: in nearly the entire rest of the industrialized world, adultery is not covered by the criminal code."

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In the 1992 ruling, in a civil case, the court said, "Adultery exists when one spouse rejects the other by entering into a personal intimate sexual relationship with any other person." It said it was "the rejection of the spouse coupled with out-of-marriage intimacy that constitutes adultery."

Most states have purged their codes of laws regulating cohabitation, homosexual sodomy and fornication - sex between unmarried adults - especially after a 2003 Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which made sexual activity by consenting adults in private legal across the country. But the question of how that ruling affects adultery remains unanswered because others may be harmed by adultery - a spouse and children. Several courts have alluded to the constitutionality of adultery laws since the Lawrence decision.

But Melissa Murray, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, said she thought "most courts in light of Lawrence are going to give adultery a wide berth."

Professor Murray added: "It is an open question whether adultery continues to be viable as criminal law even though it remains on the books in 24 states and territories. Nobody is going to be going to jail for it. But it is used in divorce and custody cases and even in some employment cases."

A number of law professors, including Joanna L. Grossman of Hofstra University, said one reason that adultery laws remain on the books is that getting rid of them would require politicians to declare their opposition to them, something few would do. In addition, many like the idea of the criminal code serving as a kind of moral guide even if certain laws are almost never applied.

Mr. Petraeus is a retired four-star general who collects a military pension and remains subject to military codes of conduct that prohibit adultery. But Diane H. Mazur, a professor of law at the University of Florida and a former Air Force officer, said that the chances of the Army's calling Mr. Petraeus back to active service in order to court-martial him over adultery are zero, as are any chances of state criminal charges' being brought.

"That would be reserved for the most unimaginably serious circumstances," Professor Mazur said. Even within the military code, she added, adultery is charged as a criminal offense only when "the conduct of the accused was to the prejudice of good order and discipline in the armed forces," she read from the manual for courts-martial. That meant something larger than seemed at stake here.

Professor Murray said her research had led her to conclude that laws regulating sex emanated from a notion that sex should occur only within marriage. Criminal law, she said, was there to reinforce marriage as the legal locus for sex. So any other circumstance - sex in public or with a member of the same sex, or adultery - was a violation of marriage. "Now we live in an age when sex is not limited to marriage and laws are slowly responding to that," she said. "But we still love marriage. Nobody is going to say adultery is O.K."

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united states defense and military forces

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Adultery, an Ancient Crime Still on Many Books

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In the 1992 ruling, in a civil case, the court said, "Adultery exists when one spouse rejects the other by entering into a personal intimate sexual relationship with any other person." It said it was "the rejection of the spouse coupled with out-of-marriage intimacy that constitutes adultery."

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"The Temporary Gift of Marriage" - M. Craig Barnes

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"The Temporary Gift of Marriage" - M. Craig Barnes

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"He looked at me with big, puppy dog eyes. I knew he wanted me to say, “Oh Mike, don’t worry about that. You’re both young and there are so many wonderful years ahead for both of you.” But I’ve buried too many young people to say that.

So, as compassionately as possible, I said, “Mike, in my experience 100 percent of marriages come to an end, and you’ll never beat those odds.”

There was a pause before Mike stammered out, “What?” I tried again. “Well, your marriage will end in either death or divorce. There are no alternatives.” This time his face was blank."

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It was supposed to be my last premarital counseling appointment with Sue and Mike. Like most pastors I've never enjoyed weddings that much, but I've always loved the conversations with couples who are about to enter into this covenant. Usually it's only a matter of time before they reveal the most tender of anxieties.

I thought we had already worked through the biblical and theological perspectives on the apparent issues in Mike and Sue's upcoming marriage. At this meeting we were just supposed to edit the wedding ceremony. We were sitting at the table in my study with copies of the proposed liturgy in front of us. As I was about to pass out the red ink pens, Mike said, "Before we get into this I have to say I'm really scared."

He now had Sue's attention. As he saw her stunned look he quickly added, "Oh, I'm not afraid of marrying you. I'm terrified of losing you." Then he looked back at me and explained, "Several years ago my mother died, and it almost killed me." Turning again to Sue he continued, "What if something happens to you too? I can't imagine how I would survive."

He looked at me with big, puppy dog eyes. I knew he wanted me to say, "Oh Mike, don't worry about that. You're both young and there are so many wonderful years ahead for both of you." But I've buried too many young people to say that.

So, as compassionately as possible, I said, "Mike, in my experience 100 percent of marriages come to an end, and you'll never beat those odds."

There was a pause before Mike stammered out, "What?" I tried again. "Well, your marriage will end in either death or divorce. There are no alternatives." This time his face was blank.

I sat back in my chair. "Let's say you have a fabulous marriage that lasts as long as we can imagine. How about 60 years? Or 70? There are few of those, but let's assume you have 70 years, and that each of those years is an experience in deeper intimacy. Still, one of you is eventually going to have to lay the other into the arms of God. That day will tear you apart."

Young people often assume that the funerals for old lovers are not so difficult, as if the weeping person in the first pew is thinking, "Well, we had a good run." To the contrary, the better the marriage the harder it is at the end. A great marriage concludes with two souls that have become so intertwined the survivor has no idea what survive means without the one in a grave.

So I looked at Mike and continued, "That's the best possible scenario for your marriage-to share a love so incredible and so long with Sue that it almost kills you to give her up at the end." He was not encouraged.

"So why do you want to go through all of that?" I asked. "I say give her up today. Give her back to the Creator who made her, sustains her, and to whom she will always belong. Get the grieving over with before it becomes unbearable. Let God hold her. That way, every morning when you find her next to you, you can rejoice in the temporary gift you can still enjoy."

It has been about 20 years since I officiated at Sue and Mike's wedding. I lost track of them after we both made a couple of moves. But I've often told this story when giving sermons about living with open hands. Recently I used the illustration at a church where a friend of Mike and Sue attends. I was surprised to receive an email shortly afterward indicating he knew whom I was talking about. And I was devastated to read that Mike died last November of a heart attack at the age of 50. So it was Sue who was left behind. Way too soon.

After finding Sue's email address I contacted her to offer my condolences. Her response included a photograph of Mike wearing a "Best Dad Ever" T-shirt, surrounded by their two kids on Father's Day. It made me tear up. But I knew that Sue was going to be OK when I read, "His death is inexplicable in any logical sense, but I very much feel this is part of the mystery of life. In the six months that have passed, I can say I revere this mystery. I don't want or need to understand everything about our lives on this earth."

She concluded with "I would think one of the pleasures of marrying young couples who are deeply in love is to see the product of that love decades later." She's certainly right about that. When I read such words about revering mystery from a new widow, I'm pleased to know that she understands what can never be understood. It's the only way she can carry on without Mike.
A version of this article appears in the June 21 print edition under the title "The temporary gift of marriage"

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Getting married? You'll never beat the odds.

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It was supposed to be my last premarital counseling appointment with Sue and Mike. Like most pastors I've never enjoyed weddings that much, but I've always loved the conversations with couples who are about to enter into this covenant. Usually it's only a matter of time before they reveal the most tender of anxieties.

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"The Woman Taken in Adultery" by Il Guercino circa 1621 (John 8:3)

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"The Woman Taken in Adultery" by Il Guercino circa 1621 (John 8:3)

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"Christ and the Adulteress" by Arent de Gelder circa 1683 (John 8:3) 

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"Christ and the Adulteress" by Arent de Gelder circa 1683 (John 8:3) 

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Christ and the Adulteress Arent de Gelder

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"Christ and the Adulteress" by Pieter Aertsen 1559 (John 8:9)

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"Christ and the Adulteress" by Pieter Aertsen 1559 (John 8:9)

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Pieter Aertsen Christ and the Adulteress 1559

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"Jesus and the Adulteress" by Lucas Cranach the Elder circa 1532 (John 8:7)

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"Jesus and the Adulteress" by Lucas Cranach the Elder circa 1532 (John 8:7)

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"Jesus and the Sinner Woman" by Vasily Polenov circa 1887 (John 8:3)

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"Jesus and the Sinner Woman" by Vasily Polenov circa 1887 (John 8:3)

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Jesus and the Sinner Woman Vasily Polenov 1887

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Rembrandt, "Woman Taken in Adultery" circa 1644

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Rembrandt, "Woman Taken in Adultery" circa 1644

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13th Century Italian Illumination of Adultery

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13th Century Italian Illumination of Adultery

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From Index of Medieval Art: System Number 149365

Description: "Column Miniature: 1) Gratian, Decretum: Causa 31, Adultery -- Bishop (as Judge), wearing miter, seated on cushion, holds book with two straps in left hand and extends right hand toward three men, one with right hand pointing to couple embracing. Scene in arcade of three arches."

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From Index of Medieval Art:
System Number 67654

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12th Century Byzantine Illuminated Manuscript of Deuteronomy 22:24

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12th Century Byzantine Illuminated Manuscript of Deuteronomy 22:24

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From Index of Medieval Art: System Number 86883

Hesseling, D., Miniatures de l'octateuque grec de Smyrne (1909) , pl. 78 (261)

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How An App Is Saving Marriages And Changing Families

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Want a super practical way to support relationships? Have a smartphone? Check out GetLasting! GetLasting is an downloadable App applying research and accessible marriage counseling into your smartphone.

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Counterpoint: Can Porn be Good? "The sex can stay dirty, but the values had to be clean" (WARNING: Vulgar Language, but no images)

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Counterpoint: Can Porn be Good? "The sex can stay dirty, but the values had to be clean" (WARNING: Vulgar Language, but no images)

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"What makes her porn feminist? "I treat women as people, not mere objects of pleasure. They have their own lives, opinions and an active idea of what they want sexually. And the way I describe sexuality is not only from a masculine point of view. That doesn't mean you treat the man as an object: both of them are people."
- Urwin, Rosamund. "Why are My Sex Films Feminist? Evening Standard, 2015.

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It's time for porn to change | Erika Lust | TEDxVienna

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"Live with it we almost certainly will. But it’s worth being clear about what we’re accepting. Yes, adultery is inevitable, but it’s never been universal in the way that pornography has the potential to become—at least if we approach the use of hard-core porn as a normal outlet from the rigors of monogamy, and invest ourselves in a cultural paradigm that understands this as something all men do and all women need to live with. In the name of providing a low-risk alternative for males who would otherwise be tempted by “real” prostitutes and “real” affairs, we’re ultimately universalizing, in a milder but not all that much milder form, the sort of degradation and betrayal that only a minority of men have traditionally been involved in."

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Illustration by John Cuneo

The marriage of Christie Brinkley and Peter Cook collapsed the old-fashioned way in 2006, when she discovered that he was sleeping with his 18-year-old assistant. But their divorce trial this summer was a distinctly Internet-age affair. Having insisted on keeping the proceedings open to the media, Brinkley and her lawyers served up a long list of juicy allegations about Cook's taste in online porn: the $3,000 a month he dropped on adult Web sites, the nude photos he posted online, the user names he favored ("happyladdie2002," for instance, and "wannaseeall") while surfing swinger sites, even the videos he supposedly made of himself masturbating.

Also see:

Interview: "Virtual Adultery"
Ross Douthat answers questions about pornography, prostitution, the pixel-versus-flesh binary, and the strange dynamics of a national addiction.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the porn-related revelations, though, was the ambiguity about what line, precisely, Cook was accused of having crossed. Was the porn habit a betrayal in and of itself? Was it the financial irresponsibility that mattered most, or the addictive behavior it suggested? Was it the way his habit had segued into other online activities? Or was it about Cook's fitness as a parent, and the possibility that their son had stumbled upon his porn cache? Clearly, the court and the public were supposed to think that Cook was an even lousier husband than his affair with a teenager might have indicated. But it was considerably less clear whether the porn habit itself was supposed to prove this, or whether it was the particulars-the monthly bill, the swinger sites, the webcam, the danger to the kids-that made the difference.

The notion that pornography, and especially hard-core pornography, has something to do with marital infidelity has been floating around the edges of the American conversation for a while now, even as the porn industry, by some estimates, has swollen to rival professional sports and the major broadcast networks as a revenue-generating source of entertainment. A 2002 survey of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers suggests that Internet porn plays a part in an increasing number of divorce cases, and the Brinkley-Cook divorce wasn't the first celebrity split to feature porn-related revelations. In 2005, at the start of their messy divorce, Denise Richards accused Charlie Sheen of posting shots of his genitalia online and cultivating a taste for "barely legal" porn sites. Two years later, Anne Heche, Ellen DeGeneres's ex, accused her non-celeb husband of surfing porn sites when he was supposed to be taking care of their 5-year-old son. The country singer Sara Evans's 2006 divorce involved similar allegations, including the claim that her husband had collected 100 nude photographs of himself and solicited sex online.

But the attention paid to the connection between porn and infidelity doesn't translate into anything like a consensus on what that connection is. Polls show that Americans are almost evenly divided on questions like whether porn is bad for relationships, whether it's an inevitable feature of male existence, and whether it's demeaning to women. This divide tends to cut along gender lines, inevitably: women are more likely to look at pornography than in the past, but they remain considerably more hostile to porn than men are, and considerably less likely to make use of it. (Even among the Internet generation, the split between the sexes remains stark. A survey of American college students last year found that 70 percent of the women in the sample never looked at pornography, compared with just 14 percent of their male peers; almost half of the men surveyed looked at porn at least once a week, versus just 3 percent of the women.)

One perspective, broadly construed, treats porn as a harmless habit, near-universal among men, and at worst a little silly. This is the viewpoint that's transformed adult-industry icons like Jenna Jameson and Ron Jeremy from targets of opprobrium into C-list celebrities. It's what inspires fledgling stars to gin up sex tapes in the hope of boosting their careers. And it's made smut a staple of gross-out comedy: rising-star funnyman Seth Rogen has gone from headlining Judd Apatow's Knocked Up, in which his character's aspiration to run a pornographic Web site was somewhat incidental to the plot, to starring in Kevin Smith's forthcoming Zack and Miri Make a Porno, in which the porn business promises to be rather more central.

A second perspective treats porn as a kind of gateway drug-a vice that paves the way for more-serious betrayals. A 2004 study found that married individuals who cheated on their spouses were three times as likely to have used Internet pornography as married people who hadn't committed adultery. In Tom Perrotta's bestselling Little Children, the female protagonist's husband-who is himself being cuckolded-progresses from obsessing over an online porn star named "Slutty Kay" to sending away for her panties to joining a club of fans who pay to vacation with her in person. Brinkley's husband may have followed a similar trajectory, along with many of the other porn-happy celebrity spouses who've featured in the gossip pages and divorce courts lately.

Maybe it's worth sharpening the debate. Over the past three decades, the VCR, on-demand cable service, and the Internet have completely overhauled the ways in which people interact with porn. Innovation has piled on innovation, making modern pornography a more immediate, visceral, and personalized experience. Nothing in the long history of erotica compares with the way millions of Americans experience porn today, and our moral intuitions are struggling to catch up. As we try to make sense of the brave new world that VHS and streaming video have built, we might start by asking a radical question: Is pornography use a form of adultery?

The most stringent take on this matter comes, of course, from Jesus of Nazareth: "I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart." But even among Christians, this teaching tends to be grouped with the Gospel injunctions about turning the other cheek and giving would-be robbers your possessions-as a guideline for saintliness, useful to Francis of Assisi and the Desert Fathers but less helpful to ordinary sinners trying to figure out what counts as a breach of marital trust. Jimmy Carter's confession to Playboy that he had "lusted in [his] heart" still inspires giggles three decades later. Most Americans, devout or secular, are inclined to distinguish lustful thoughts from lustful actions, and hew to the Merriam-Webster definition of adultery as "voluntary sexual intercourse between a married man and someone other than his wife or between a married woman and someone other than her husband."

On the face of things, this definition would seem to let porn users off the hook. Intercourse, after all, involves physicality, a flesh-and-blood encounter that Internet Explorer and the DVD player can't provide, no matter what sort of adultery the user happens to be committing in his heart.

But there's another way to look at it. During the long, late-winter week that transformed the governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer, into an alleged john, a late-night punch line, and finally an ex-governor, there was a lively debate on blogs and radio shows and op-ed pages about whether prostitution ought to be illegal at all. Yet amid all the chatter about whether the FBI should have cared about Spitzer's habit of paying for extramarital sex, next to nobody suggested, publicly at least, that his wife ought not to care-that Silda Spitzer ought to have been grateful he was seeking only sexual gratification elsewhere, and that so long as he was loyal to her in his mind and heart, it shouldn't matter what he did with his penis.

Start with the near-universal assumption that what Spitzer did in his hotel room constituted adultery, and then ponder whether Silda Spitzer would have had cause to feel betrayed if the FBI probe had revealed that her husband had paid merely to watch a prostitute perform sexual acts while he folded himself into a hotel armchair to masturbate. My suspicion is that an awful lot of people would say yes-not because there isn't some distinction between the two acts, but because the distinction isn't morally significant enough to prevent both from belonging to the zone, broadly defined, of cheating on your wife.

You can see where I'm going with this. If it's cheating on your wife to watch while another woman performs sexually in front of you, then why isn't it cheating to watch while the same sort of spectacle unfolds on your laptop or TV? Isn't the man who uses hard-core pornography already betraying his wife, whether or not the habit leads to anything worse? (The same goes, of course, for a wife betraying her husband-the arguments in this essay should be assumed to apply as well to the small minority of women who use porn.)

Fine, you might respond, but there are betrayals and then there are betrayals. The man who lets his eyes stray across the photo of Gisele Bündchen, bare-assed and beguiling on the cover of GQ, has betrayed his wife in some sense, but only a 21st-century Savonarola would describe that sort of thing as adultery. The line that matters is the one between fantasy and reality-between the call girl who's really there having sex with you, and the porn star who's selling the image of herself having sex to a host of men she'll never even meet. In this reading, porn is "a fictional, fantastical, even allegorical realm," as the cultural critic Laura Kipnis described it in the mid-1990s-"mythological and hyperbolic" rather than realistic, and experienced not as a form of intercourse but as a "popular-culture genre," like true crime or science fiction.

This seems like a potentially reasonable distinction to draw. But the fantasy-versus-reality, pixels-versus-flesh binary feels more appropriate to the pre-Internet landscape than to one where people spend hours every day in entirely virtual worlds, whether they're accumulating "friends" on Facebook, acting out Tolkienesque fantasies in World of Warcraft, or flirting with a sexy avatar in Second Life. And it feels much more appropriate to the tamer sorts of pornography, from the increasingly archaic (dirty playing cards and pinups, smutty books and the Penthouse letters section) to the of-the-moment (the topless photos and sex-scene stills in the more restrained precincts of the online pornosphere), than it does to the harder-core material at the heart of the porn economy. Masturbating to a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model (like Christie Brinkley, once upon a time) or a Playboy centerfold is a one-way street: the images are intended to provoke fantasies, not to embody reality, since the women pictured aren't having sex for the viewer's gratification. Even strippers, for all their flesh-and-blood appeal, are essentially fantasy objects-depending on how you respond to a lap dance, of course. But hard-core pornography is real sex by definition, and the two sexual acts involved-the on-camera copulation, and the masturbation it enables-are interdependent: neither would happen without the other. The whole point of a centerfold is her unattainability, but with hard-core porn, it's precisely the reverse: the star isn't just attainable, she's already being attained, and the user gets to be in on the action.

Moreover, the way the porn industry is evolving reflects the extent to which the Internet subverts the fantasy-reality dichotomy. After years of booming profits, the "mainstream" porn studios are increasingly losing ground to start-ups and freelancers-people making sex videos on their beds and sofas and shag carpeting and uploading them on the cheap. It turns out that, increasingly, Americans don't want porn as a "kind of science fiction," as Kipnis put it-they want realistic porn, porn that resembles the sex they might be having, and porn that at every moment holds out the promise that they can join in, like Peter Cook masturbating in front of his webcam.

So yes, there's an obvious line between leafing through a Playboy and pulling a Spitzer on your wife. But the line between Spitzer and the suburban husband who pays $29.95 a month to stream hard-core sex onto his laptop is considerably blurrier. The suburbanite with the hard-core porn hookup is masturbating to real sex, albeit at a DSL-enabled remove. He's experiencing it in an intimate setting, rather than in a grind house alongside other huddled masturbators in raincoats, and in a form that's customized to his tastes in a way that mass-market porn like Deep Throat and Debbie Does Dallas never was. There's no emotional connection, true-but there presumably wasn't one on Spitzer's part, either.

This isn't to say the distinction between hiring a prostitute and shelling out for online porn doesn't matter; in moral issues, every distinction matters. But if you approach infidelity as a continuum of betrayal rather than an either/or proposition, then the Internet era has ratcheted the experience of pornography much closer to adultery than I suspect most porn users would like to admit.

It's possible, of course, to consider hard-core porn use a kind of infidelity and shrug it off even so. After all, human societies have frequently made sweeping accommodations for extramarital dalliances, usually on the assumption that the male libido simply can't be expected to submit to monogamy. When apologists for pornography aren't making Kipnis-style appeals to cultural transgression and sexual imagination, they tend to fall back on the defense that it's pointless to moralize about porn, because men are going to use it anyway.

Here's Dan Savage, the popular Seattle-based sex columnist, responding to a reader who fretted about her boyfriend's porn habit-"not because I'm jealous," she wrote, "but because I'm insecure. I'm sure many of those girls are more attractive than me":

All men look at porn ... The handful of men who claim they don't look at porn are liars or castrates. Tearful discussions about your insecurities or your feminist principles will not stop a man from looking at porn. That's why the best advice for straight women is this: GET OVER IT. If you don't want to be with someone who looks at porn ... get a woman, get a dog, or get a blind guy ... While men shouldn't rub their female partners' noses in the fact that they look at porn-that's just inconsiderate-telling women that the porn "problem" can be resolved through good communication, couples counseling, or a chat with your pastor is neither helpful nor realistic.

Savage's perspective is hardly unique, and is found among women as well as men. In 2003, three psychology professors at Illinois State University surveyed a broad population of women who were, or had been, in a relationship with a man who they knew used pornography. About a third of the women described the porn habit as a form of betrayal and infidelity. But the majority were neutral or even positively disposed to their lover's taste for smut, responding slightly more favorably than not to prompts like "I do not mind my partner's pornography use" or "My partner's pornography use is perfectly normal."

This point of view-that looking at pornography is a "perfectly normal" activity, one that the more-judgmental third of women need to just stop whining about-has been strengthened by the erosion of the second-order arguments against the use of porn, especially the argument that it feeds misogyny and encourages rape. In the great porn debates of the 1980s, arguments linking porn to violence against women were advanced across the ideological spectrum. Feminist crusaders like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon denounced smut as a weapon of the patriarchy; the Christian radio psychologist (and future religious-right fixture) James Dobson induced the serial killer Ted Bundy to confess on death row to a pornography addiction; the Meese Commission on Pornography declared, "In both clinical and experimental settings, exposure to sexually violent materials has indicated an increase in the likelihood of aggression." It all sounded plausible-but between 1980 and 2004, an era in which porn became more available, and in more varieties, the rate of reported sexual violence dropped, and by 85 percent. Correlation isn't necessarily causation, but the sharpness of the decline at least suggests that porn may reduce sexual violence, by providing an outlet for some potential sex offenders. (Indeed, the best way to deter a rapist might be to hook him up with a high-speed Internet connection: in a 2006 study, the Clemson economist Todd Kendall found that a 10 percent increase in Internet access is associated with a 7 percent decline in reported rapes.)

And what's true of rapists could be true of ordinary married men, a porn apologist might argue. For every Peter Cook, using porn and sleeping around, there might be countless men who use porn as a substitute for extramarital dalliances, satisfying their need for sexual variety without hiring a prostitute or kicking off a workplace romance.

Like Philip Weiss's friends, for instance. In the wake of the Spitzer affair, Weiss, a New York-based investigative journalist, came closer than any mainstream writer to endorsing not only the legalization of prostitution but the destigmatization of infidelity, in a rambling essay for New York magazine on the agonies that monogamy imposes on his buddies. Amid nostalgia for the days of courtesans and concubines and the usual plaints about how much more sophisticated things are in Europe, Weiss depicted porn as the modern man's "common answer" to the marital-sex deficit. Here's one of his pals dilating on his online outlets:

"Porn captures these women [its performers] before they get smart," he said in a hot whisper as we sat in Schiller's Liquor Bar on the Lower East Side. Porn exploited the sexual desires, and naïveté, of women in their early twenties, he went on ... He spoke of acts he observed online that his wife wouldn't do. "It's painful to say, but that's your boys' night out, and it takes an enlightened woman to say that."

The use of the term enlightened is telling, since the strongest argument for the acceptance of pornography-and the hard-core variety in particular-is precisely that it represents a form of sexual progress, a more civilized approach to the problem of the male libido than either the toleration of mass prostitution or the attempt, from the Victorian era onward, to simultaneously legislate prostitution away and hold married couples to an unreasonably high standard of fidelity. Porn may be an evil, this argument goes, but it's the least of several evils. The man who uses porn is cheating sexually, but he isn't involving himself in an emotional relationship. He's cheating in a way that carries none of the risks of intercourse, from pregnancy to venereal disease. And he's cheating with women who may be trading sex for money, but are doing so in vastly safer situations than streetwalkers or even high-end escorts.

Indeed, in a significant sense, the porn industry looks like what advocates of legalized prostitution hope to achieve for "sex workers." There are no bullying pimps and no police officers demanding sex in return for not putting the prostitutes in jail. There are regular tests for STDs, at least in the higher-end sectors of the industry. The performers are safely separated from their johns. And freelancers aren't wandering downtown intersections on their own; they're filming from the friendly confines of their homes.

If we would just accept Dan Savage's advice, then, and get over it, everyone would gain something. Weiss and his pals could have their "boys' night out" online and enjoy sexual experiences that their marriages deny them. The majority of wives could rest secure in the knowledge that worse forms of infidelity are being averted; some women could get into the act themselves, either solo or with their spouse, experiencing the thrill of a threesome or a '70s key party with fewer of the consequences. The porn industry's sex workers could earn a steady paycheck without worrying about pimps, police, or HIV. Every society lives with infidelity in one form or another, whether openly or hypocritically. Why shouldn't we learn to live with porn?

Live with it we almost certainly will. But it's worth being clear about what we're accepting. Yes, adultery is inevitable, but it's never been universal in the way that pornography has the potential to become-at least if we approach the use of hard-core porn as a normal outlet from the rigors of monogamy, and invest ourselves in a cultural paradigm that understands this as something all men do and all women need to live with. In the name of providing a low-risk alternative for males who would otherwise be tempted by "real" prostitutes and "real" affairs, we're ultimately universalizing, in a milder but not all that much milder form, the sort of degradation and betrayal that only a minority of men have traditionally been involved in.

Go back to Philip Weiss's pal and listen to him talk: Porn captures these women before they get smart ... It's painful to say, but that's your boys' night out. This is the language of a man who has accepted, not as a temporary lapse but as a permanent and necessary aspect of his married life, a paid sexual relationship with women other than his wife. And it's the language of a man who has internalized a view of marriage as a sexual prison, rendered bearable only by frequent online furloughs with women more easily exploited than his spouse.

Calling porn a form of adultery isn't about pretending that we can make it disappear. The temptation will always be there, and of course people will give in to it. I've looked at porn; if you're male and breathing, chances are so have you. Rather, it's about what sort of people we aspire to be: how we define our ideals, how we draw the lines in our relationships, and how we feel about ourselves if we cross them. And it's about providing a way for everyone involved, men and women alike-whether they're using porn or merely tolerating it-to think about what, precisely, they're involving themselves in, and whether they should reconsider.

The extremes of anti-porn hysteria are unhelpful in this debate. If the turn toward an "everybody does it" approach to pornography and marriage is wrong, it's because that approach is wrong in and of itself, not because porn is going to wreck society, destroy the institution of marriage, and turn thousands of rapists loose to prey on unsuspecting women. Smut isn't going to bring down Western Civilization any more than Nero's orgies actually led to the fall of Rome, and a society that expects near-universal online infidelity may run just as smoothly as a society that doesn't.

Which is precisely why it's so easy to say that the spread of pornography means that we're just taking a turn, where sex and fidelity are concerned, toward realism, toward adulthood, toward sophistication. All we have to give up to get there is our sense of decency.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Ross Douthat is a contributing editor at The Atlantic.

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Illustration by John Cuneo The marriage of Christie Brinkley and Peter Cook collapsed the old-fashioned way in 2006, when she discovered that he was sleeping with his 18-year-old assistant. But their divorce trial this summer was a distinctly Internet-age affair.

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"Why Happy People Cheat:" On the Complexities of Affairs, Limits of Marriage, and Questions for Flourishing Relationships.

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"Why Happy People Cheat:" On the Complexities of Affairs, Limits of Marriage, and Questions for Flourishing Relationships.

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"One of the most uncomfortable truths about an affair is that what for Partner A may be an agonizing betrayal may be transformative for Partner B. Extramarital adventures are painful and destabilizing, but they can also be liberating and empowering. Understanding both sides is crucial, whether a couple chooses to end the relationship or intends to stay together, to rebuild and revitalize.

In taking a dual perspective on such an inflammatory subject, I’m aware that I risk being labeled “pro-affair,” or accused of possessing a compromised moral compass. Let me assure you that I do not approve of deception or take betrayal lightly. I sit with the devastation in my office every day. But the intricacies of love and desire don’t yield to simple categorizations of good and bad, victim and perpetrator. Not condemning does not mean condoning, and there is a world of difference between understanding and justifying. My role as a therapist is to create a space where the diversity of experiences can be explored with compassion. People stray for a multitude of reasons, I have discovered, and every time I think I have heard them all, a new variation emerges.....

The revelation of an affair forces couples to grapple with unsettling questions: What does fidelity mean to us and why is it important? Is it possible to love more than one person at once? Can we learn to trust each other again? How do we negotiate the elusive balance between our emotional needs and our erotic desires? Does passion have a finite shelf life? And are there fulfillments that a marriage, even a happy one, can never provide?

For me, these conversations should be part and parcel of any adult, intimate relationship from the beginning. It’s far better to address these issues before a storm hits. Talking about what draws us outside our fences, in an atmosphere of trust, can actually foster intimacy and commitment. But for many couples, unfortunately, the crisis of an affair is the first time they talk about any of this. Priya and Colin will have to negotiate these questions while also dealing with the ravages of betrayal, dishonesty, and broken trust.

Every affair will redefine a marriage, and every marriage will determine what the legacy of the affair will be. Although infidelity has become one of the prime motives for divorce in the West, I’ve seen many couples stay together after the revelation of an affair. I believe the odds are in favor of Priya and Colin’s marriage surviving, but the quality of their future connection will depend on how they metabolize her transgression. Will they emerge stronger as a result? Or will they bury the affair under a mountain of shame and mistrust? Can Priya step out of her self-absorption and face the pain she caused? Can Colin find solace in knowing that the affair was not meant to be a rejection of him? And will he get to meet the carefree, youthful woman Priya became in her parallel life?

These days, many of us are going to have two or three significant long-term relationships or marriages. Often when a couple comes to me in the wake of an affair, it is clear to me that their first marriage is over. So I ask them: Would you like to create a second one together?"

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A good marriage is no guarantee against infidelity.

Isabel Seliger / Sepia

"Most descriptions of troubled marriages don't seem to fit my situation," Priya insists. "Colin and I have a wonderful relationship. Great kids, no financial stresses, careers we love, great friends. He is a phenom at work, fucking handsome, attentive lover, fit, and generous to everyone, including my parents. My life is good." Yet Priya is having an affair. "Not someone I would ever date-ever, ever, ever. He drives a truck and has tattoos. It's so clichéd, it pains me to say it out loud. It could ruin everything I've built."

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Priya is right. Few events in the life of a couple, except illness and death, carry such devastating force. For years, I have worked as a therapist with hundreds of couples who have been shattered by infidelity. And my conversations about affairs have not been confined within the cloistered walls of my therapy practice; they've happened on airplanes, at dinner parties, at conferences, at the nail salon, with colleagues, with the cable guy, and of course, on social media. From Pittsburgh to Buenos Aires, Delhi to Paris, I have been conducting an open-ended survey about infidelity.

Adultery has existed since marriage was invented, yet this extremely common act remains poorly understood. Around the globe, the responses I get when I mention infidelity range from bitter condemnation to resigned acceptance to cautious compassion to outright enthusiasm. In Paris, the topic brings an immediate frisson to a dinner conversation, and I note how many people have been on both sides of the story. In Bulgaria, a group of women I met seem to view their husbands' philandering as unfortunate but inevitable. In Mexico, women I spoke with proudly see the rise of female affairs as a form of social rebellion against a chauvinistic culture that has long made room for men to have "two homes," la casa grande y la casa chica -one for the family, and one for the mistress. Infidelity may be ubiquitous, but the way we make meaning of it-how we define it, experience it, and talk about it-is ultimately linked to the particular time and place where the drama unfolds.

In contemporary discourse in the United States, affairs are primarily described in terms of the damage caused. Generally, there is much concern for the agony suffered by the betrayed. And agony it is-infidelity today isn't just a violation of trust; it's a shattering of the grand ambition of romantic love. It is a shock that makes us question our past, our future, and even our very identity. Indeed, the maelstrom of emotions unleashed in the wake of an affair can be so overwhelming that many psychologists turn to the field of trauma to explain the symptoms: obsessive rumination, hypervigilance, numbness and dissociation, inexplicable rages, uncontrollable panic.

Intimate betrayal hurts. It hurts badly. If Priya's husband, Colin, were to stumble upon a text, a photo, or an email that revealed his wife's dalliance, he would be devastated. And thanks to modern technology, his pain would likely be magnified by an archive of electronic evidence of her duplicity. (I am using pseudonyms to protect the privacy of my clients and their families.)

The damage that infidelity causes the aggrieved partner is one side of the story. For centuries, when affairs were tacitly condoned for men, this pain was overlooked, since it was mostly experienced by women. Contemporary culture, to its credit, is more compassionate toward the jilted. But if we are to shed new light on one of our oldest behaviors, we need to examine it from all sides. In the focus on trauma and recovery, too little attention is given to the meanings and motives of affairs, to what we can learn from them. Strange as it may seem, affairs have a lot to teach us about marriage-what we expect, what we think we want, and what we feel entitled to. They reveal our personal and cultural attitudes about love, lust, and commitment-attitudes that have changed dramatically over the past 100 years.

Isabel Seliger / Sepia

Affairs are not what they used to be because marriage is not what it used to be. For much of history, and in many parts of the world today, marriage was a pragmatic alliance that ensured economic stability and social cohesion. A child of immigrants, Priya surely has relatives whose marital options were limited at best. For her and Colin, however, as for most modern Western couples, marriage is no longer an economic enterprise but rather a companionate one-a free-choice engagement between two individuals, based not on duty and obligation but on love and affection.

Never before have our expectations of marriage taken on such epic proportions. We still want everything the traditional family was meant to provide-security, respectability, property, and children-but now we also want our partner to love us, to desire us, to be interested in us. We should be best friends and trusted confidants, and passionate lovers to boot.

Contained within the small circle of the wedding band are vastly contradictory ideals. We want our chosen one to offer stability, safety, predictability, and dependability. And we want that very same person to supply awe, mystery, adventure, and risk. We expect comfort and edge, familiarity and novelty, continuity and surprise. We have conjured up a new Olympus, where love will remain unconditional, intimacy enthralling, and sex oh so exciting, with one person, for the long haul. And the long haul keeps getting longer.

We also live in an age of entitlement; personal fulfillment, we believe, is our due. In the West, sex is a right linked to our individuality, our self-actualization, and our freedom. Thus, most of us now arrive at the altar after years of sexual nomadism. By the time we tie the knot, we've hooked up, dated, cohabited, and broken up. We used to get married and have sex for the first time. Now we get married and stop having sex with others. The conscious choice we make to rein in our sexual freedom is a testament to the seriousness of our commitment. By turning our back on other loves, we confirm the uniqueness of our "significant other": "I have found The One. I can stop looking." Our desire for others is supposed to miraculously evaporate, vanquished by the power of this singular attraction.

At so many weddings, starry-eyed dreamers recite a list of vows, swearing to be everything to each other, from soul mate to lover to teacher to therapist. "I promise to be your greatest fan and your toughest adversary, your partner in crime, and your consolation in disappointment," says the groom, with a tremble in his voice. Through her tears, the bride replies, "I promise faithfulness, respect, and self-improvement. I will not only celebrate your triumphs, I will love you all the more for your failures." Smiling, she adds, "And I promise to never wear heels, so you won't feel short."

In such a blissful partnership, why would we ever stray? The evolution of committed relationships has brought us to a place where we believe infidelity shouldn't happen, since all the reasons have been removed; the perfect balance of freedom and security has been achieved.

And yet, it does. Infidelity happens in bad marriages and in good marriages. It happens even in open relationships where extramarital sex is carefully negotiated beforehand. The freedom to leave or divorce has not made cheating obsolete. So why do people cheat? And why do happy people cheat?

Priya can't explain it. She vaunts the merits of her conjugal life, and assures me that Colin is everything she always dreamed of in a husband. Clearly she subscribes to the conventional wisdom when it comes to affairs-that diversions happen only when something is missing in the marriage. If you have everything you need at home-as modern marriage promises-you should have no reason to go elsewhere. Hence, infidelity must be a symptom of a relationship gone awry.

The symptom theory has several problems. First, it reinforces the idea that there is such a thing as a perfect marriage that will inoculate us against wanderlust. But our new marital ideal has not curbed the number of men and women who wander. In fact, in a cruel twist of fate, it is precisely the expectation of domestic bliss that may set us up for infidelity. Once, we strayed because marriage was not supposed to deliver love and passion. Today, we stray because marriage fails to deliver the love and passion it promised. It's not our desires that are different today, but the fact that we feel entitled-even obligated-to pursue them.

Second, infidelity does not always correlate neatly with marital dysfunction. Yes, in plenty of cases an affair compensates for a lack or sets up an exit. Insecure attachment, conflict avoidance, prolonged lack of sex, loneliness, or just years of rehashing the same old arguments-many adulterers are motivated by domestic discord. And then there are the repeat offenders, the narcissists who cheat with impunity simply because they can.

However, therapists are confronted on a daily basis with situations that defy these well-documented reasons. In session after session, I meet people like Priya-people who assure me, "I love my wife/my husband. We are best friends and happy together," and then say: "But I am having an affair."

Isabel Seliger / Sepia

Many of these individuals were faithful for years, sometimes decades. They seem to be well balanced, mature, caring, and deeply invested in their relationship. Yet one day, they crossed a line they never imagined they would cross. For a glimmer of what?

The more I've listened to these tales of improbable transgression-from one-night stands to passionate love affairs-the more I've sought alternate explanations. Once the initial crisis subsides, it's important to make space for exploring the subjective experience of an affair alongside the pain it can inflict. To this end, I've encouraged renegade lovers to tell me their story. I want to understand what the affair means for them. Why did you do it? Why him? Why her? Why now? Was this the first time? Did you initiate? Did you try to resist? How did it feel? Were you looking for something? What did you find?

One of the most uncomfortable truths about an affair is that what for Partner A may be an agonizing betrayal may be transformative for Partner B. Extramarital adventures are painful and destabilizing, but they can also be liberating and empowering. Understanding both sides is crucial, whether a couple chooses to end the relationship or intends to stay together, to rebuild and revitalize.

In taking a dual perspective on such an inflammatory subject, I'm aware that I risk being labeled "pro-affair," or accused of possessing a compromised moral compass. Let me assure you that I do not approve of deception or take betrayal lightly. I sit with the devastation in my office every day. But the intricacies of love and desire don't yield to simple categorizations of good and bad, victim and perpetrator. Not condemning does not mean condoning, and there is a world of difference between understanding and justifying. My role as a therapist is to create a space where the diversity of experiences can be explored with compassion. People stray for a multitude of reasons, I have discovered, and every time I think I have heard them all, a new variation emerges.

Half-fascinated and half-horrified, Priya tells me about her steamy assignations with her lover: "We have nowhere to go, so we are always hiding in his truck or my car, in movie theaters, on park benches-his hands down my pants. I feel like a teenager with a boyfriend." She can't emphasize enough the high-school quality of it all. They have had sex only half a dozen times during the whole relationship; it's more about feeling sexy than having sex. Unaware that she is giving voice to one of the most common experiences of the unfaithful, she tells me, "It makes me feel alive."

As I listen to her, I start to suspect that her affair is about neither her husband nor their relationship. Her story echoes a theme that has come up repeatedly in my work: affairs as a form of self-discovery, a quest for a new (or lost) identity. For these seekers, infidelity is less likely to be a symptom of a problem, and more likely an expansive experience that involves growth, exploration, and transformation.

"Expansive?!," I can hear some people exclaiming. "Self-discovery?! Cheating is cheating, whatever fancy New Age labels you want to put on it. It's cruel, it's selfish, it's dishonest, and it's abusive." Indeed, to the one who has been betrayed, it can be all these things. Intimate betrayal feels intensely personal-a direct attack in the most vulnerable place. And yet I often find myself asking jilted lovers to consider a question that seems ludicrous to them: What if the affair had nothing to do with you?

Sometimes when we seek the gaze of another, it's not our partner we are turning away from, but the person we have become. We are not looking for another lover so much as another version of ourselves. The Mexican essayist Octavio Paz described eroticism as a "thirst for otherness." So often, the most intoxicating "other" that people discover in an affair is not a new partner; it's a new self.

To doggedly look for marital flaws in order to understand cases like Priya's is an example of what's known as the "streetlight effect": A drunk man searches for his missing keys not where he dropped them but where the light is. Human beings have a tendency to look for the truth in the places where it is easiest to search rather than the places where it's likely to be.

Perhaps this explains why so many people subscribe to the symptom theory. Blaming a failed marriage is easier than grappling with our existential conundrums, our longings, our ennui. The problem is that, unlike the drunk, whose search is futile, we can always find problems in a marriage. They just may not be the right keys to unlock the meaning of the affair.

A forensic examination of Priya's marriage would surely yield something-her disempowered position as the partner who earns less; her tendency to repress anger and avoid conflict; the claustrophobia she sometimes feels; the gradual merging of two individuals into a "we," as in, Did we like that restaurant? If she and I had taken that route, we may have had an interesting chat, but not the one we needed to have. The fact that a couple has "issues" doesn't mean that those issues led to the affair.

"I think this is about you, not your marriage," I suggest to Priya. "So tell me about yourself."

"I've always been good. Good daughter, good wife, good mother. Dutiful. Straight A's." Coming from a traditional family of modest means, for Priya, What do I want? has never been separated from What do they want from me? She never partied, drank, or stayed out late, and she smoked her first joint at 22. After college, she married the right guy, and helped to support her family, as so many children of immigrant parents do. Now she is left with a nagging question: If I'm not perfect, will they still love me? A voice in her head wonders what life is like for those who are not so "good." Are they more lonely? More free? Do they have more fun?

Priya's affair is neither a symptom nor a pathology; it's a crisis of identity, an internal rearrangement of her personality. In our sessions, we talk about duty and desire, about age and youth. Her daughters are becoming teenagers and enjoying a freedom she never knew. Priya is at once supportive and envious. As she nears the mid-century mark, she is having her own belated adolescent rebellion.

These explanations may seem superficial-petty First World problems, or rationalizations for immature, selfish, hurtful behavior. Priya has said as much herself. We both agree that her life is enviable. And yet, she is risking it all. That's enough to convince me not to make light of her behavior. If I can help her make sense of her actions, maybe we can figure out how she can end the affair for good-since that's the outcome she says she wants. It's clear this is not a love story that was meant to become a life story (which some affairs truly are). This started as an affair and will end as such-hopefully without destroying Priya's marriage in the process.

Isabel Seliger / Sepia

Secluded from the responsibilities of everyday life, the parallel universe of the affair is often idealized, infused with the promise of transcendence. For some people, like Priya, it is a world of possibility-an alternate reality in which they can reimagine and reinvent themselves. Then again, it is experienced as limitless precisely because it is contained within the limits of its clandestine structure. It is a poetic interlude in a prosaic life.

Forbidden-love stories are utopian by nature, especially in contrast with the mundane constraints of marriage and family. A prime characteristic of this liminal universe-and the key to its irresistible power-is that it is unattainable. Affairs are by definition precarious, elusive, and ambiguous. The indeterminacy, the uncertainty, the not knowing when we'll see each other again-feelings we would never tolerate in our primary relationship-become kindling for anticipation in a hidden romance. Because we cannot have our lover, we keep wanting. It is this just-out-of-reach quality that lends affairs their erotic mystique and keeps the flame of desire burning. Reinforcing this segregation of the affair from reality is the fact that many, like Priya, choose lovers who either could not or would not become a life partner. By falling for someone from a very different class, culture, or generation, we play with possibilities that we would not entertain as actualities.

Few of these types of affairs withstand discovery. One would think that a relationship for which so much was risked would survive the transition into daylight. Under the spell of passion, lovers speak longingly of all the things they will be able to do when they are finally together. Yet when the prohibition is lifted, when the divorce comes through, when the sublime mixes with the ordinary and the affair enters the real world, what then? Some settle into happy legitimacy, but many more do not. In my experience, most affairs end, even if the marriage ends as well. However authentic the feelings of love, the dalliance was only ever meant to be a beautiful fiction.

The affair lives in the shadow of the marriage, but the marriage also lives in the center of the affair. Without its delicious illegitimacy, can the relationship with the lover remain enticing? If Priya and her tattooed beau had their own bedroom, would they be as giddy as they are in the back of his truck?

The quest for the unexplored self is a powerful theme of the adulterous narrative, with many variations. Priya's parallel universe has transported her to the teenager she never was. Others find themselves drawn by the memory of the person they once were. And then there are those whose reveries take them back to the missed opportunity, the one that got away, and the person they could have been. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote that in modern life,

there is always a suspicion ... that one is living a lie or a mistake; that something crucially important has been overlooked, missed, neglected, left untried and unexplored; that a vital obligation to one's own authentic self has not been met, or that some chances of unknown happiness completely different from any happiness experienced before have not been taken up in time and are bound to be lost forever.

Bauman speaks to our nostalgia for unlived lives, unexplored identities, and roads not taken. As children, we have the opportunity to play at other roles; as adults, we often find ourselves confined by the ones we've been assigned or the ones we have chosen. When we select a partner, we commit to a story. Yet we remain forever curious: What other stories could we have been part of? Affairs offer us a view of those other lives, a peek at the stranger within. Adultery is the revenge of the deserted possibilities.

Dwayne had always cherished memories of his college sweetheart, Keisha. She was the best sex he'd ever had, and she still featured prominently in his fantasy life. They'd both known they were too young to commit, and parted reluctantly. Over the years, he had often asked himself what would have happened had their timing been different.

Enter Facebook. The digital universe offers unprecedented opportunities to reconnect with people who exited our lives long ago. Never before have we had so much access to our exes, and so much fodder for our curiosity. "Whatever happened to so-and-so?" "I wonder if she ever got married?" "Is it true he's having difficulties in his relationship?" "Is she still as cute as I remember?" The answers are a click away. One day, Dwayne searched for Keisha's profile. Lo and behold, they were both in the same city. She, still hot, was divorced. He, on the other hand, was happily married, but his curiosity got the better of him and "Add Friend" soon turned into a secret girlfriend.

It seems to me that in the past decade, affairs with exes have proliferated, thanks to social media. These retrospective encounters occur somewhere between the known and the unknown-bringing together the familiarity of someone you once knew with the freshness created by the passage of time. The flicker with an old flame offers a unique combination of built-in trust, risk taking, and vulnerability. In addition, it is a magnet for our lingering nostalgia. The person I once was, but lost, is the person you once knew.

Isabel Seliger / Sepia

Priya is mystified and mortified by how she is putting her marriage on the line. The constraints she is defying are also the commitments she cherishes. But that's precisely where the power of transgression lies: in risking the very things that are most dear to us. No conversation about relationships can avoid the thorny topic of rules and our all-too-human desire to break them. Our relationship to the forbidden sheds a light on the darker and less straightforward aspects of our humanity. Bucking the rules is an assertion of freedom over convention, and of self over society. Acutely aware of the law of gravity, we dream of flying.

Priya often feels like she's a walking contradiction-alternately dismayed by her reckless behavior and enchanted by her daredevil attitude; tormented by fear of discovery and unable (or unwilling) to put a stop to the affair. She is bewitched by this thought: What if just this once, I act as if the rules don't apply to me?

Our conversations help Priya bring clarity to her confusing picture. She is relieved that we don't have to pick apart her relationship with Colin. But having to assume full responsibility leaves her heavy with guilt: "The last thing I've ever wanted to do is hurt him. If he knew, he would be crushed. And knowing that it had nothing to do with him wouldn't make a difference. He would never believe it."

She may be right. Perhaps knowing what motivated his wife's duplicity would do nothing to alleviate Colin's pain. Or perhaps it would. Even after decades of this work, I still cannot predict what people will do when they discover a partner's infidelity. Some relationships collapse upon the discovery of a fleeting hookup. Others exhibit a surprisingly robust capacity to bounce back even after extensive treachery.

Priya has tried to end her affair several times. She deletes her lover's phone number, drives a different route home from dropping the kids off at school, tells herself how wrong this entire thing is. But the self-imposed cutoffs become new and electrifying rules to break. Three days later, the fake name is back in her phone. Yet her torment is mounting in proportion to the risks she is taking. She's beginning to feel the corroding effects of the secret, and getting sloppier by the day. Danger follows her to every movie theater and secluded parking lot.

It is not my place to tell Priya what she should do. Besides, she has already made it clear that for her, the right thing is to end the affair. She's also telling me, however, that she doesn't really want to. What I can see, and what she has not yet grasped, is that the thing she is really afraid to lose is not her lover-it's the part of herself that he awakened. This distinction between the person and the experience is crucial. She needs to know that if she lets Truck Man go, she isn't doomed to lose herself as well.

"You think you had a relationship with Truck Man," I tell her. "Actually, you had an intimate encounter with yourself, mediated by him. I don't expect you to believe me right now, but you can terminate your relationship and keep some of what it gave you. You reconnected with an energy, a youthfulness. I know that it feels as if, in leaving him, you are severing a lifeline to all of that, but I want you to know that over time you will find that the otherness you crave also lives inside you."

I often say to my patients that if they could bring into their marriage even one-tenth of the boldness, the playfulness, and the verve that they bring to their affair, their home life would feel quite different. Our creative imagination seems to be richer when it comes to our transgressions than to our commitments. Yet while I say this, I also think back to a poignant scene in the movie A Walk on the Moon. Diane Lane's character has been having an affair with a free-spirited blouse salesman. Her teenage daughter asks, "You love [him] more than all of us?" "No," the mother replies, but "sometimes it's easier to be different with a different person."

If Priya succeeds in ending the affair, and doing so with finality, a new dilemma will arise: Should she tell her husband, or should she keep her secret to herself? Could her marriage survive the pain of revelation? Could it continue with a lie undisclosed? I have no tidy answer to offer. I don't condone deception, but I've also seen too many carelessly divulged secrets leave unfading scars. In many instances, however, I have helped couples work toward revelation, hopeful that it will open up new channels of communication for them.

Catastrophe has a way of propelling us into the essence of things. In the wake of devastating betrayals, so many couples tell me that they are having some of the deepest, most honest conversations of their entire relationship. Their history is laid bare-unfulfilled expectations, unspoken resentments, and unmet longings. Love is messy; infidelity, more so. But it is also a window, like none other, into the crevices of the human heart.

The revelation of an affair forces couples to grapple with unsettling questions: What does fidelity mean to us and why is it important? Is it possible to love more than one person at once? Can we learn to trust each other again? How do we negotiate the elusive balance between our emotional needs and our erotic desires? Does passion have a finite shelf life? And are there fulfillments that a marriage, even a happy one, can never provide?

For me, these conversations should be part and parcel of any adult, intimate relationship from the beginning. It's far better to address these issues before a storm hits. Talking about what draws us outside our fences, in an atmosphere of trust, can actually foster intimacy and commitment. But for many couples, unfortunately, the crisis of an affair is the first time they talk about any of this. Priya and Colin will have to negotiate these questions while also dealing with the ravages of betrayal, dishonesty, and broken trust.

Related Stories

Every affair will redefine a marriage, and every marriage will determine what the legacy of the affair will be. Although infidelity has become one of the prime motives for divorce in the West, I've seen many couples stay together after the revelation of an affair. I believe the odds are in favor of Priya and Colin's marriage surviving, but the quality of their future connection will depend on how they metabolize her transgression. Will they emerge stronger as a result? Or will they bury the affair under a mountain of shame and mistrust? Can Priya step out of her self-absorption and face the pain she caused? Can Colin find solace in knowing that the affair was not meant to be a rejection of him? And will he get to meet the carefree, youthful woman Priya became in her parallel life?
This article is adapted from Esther Perel's book The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity, which is being published this month by Harper.
These days, many of us are going to have two or three significant long-term relationships or marriages. Often when a couple comes to me in the wake of an affair, it is clear to me that their first marriage is over. So I ask them: Would you like to create a second one together?

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A good marriage is no guarantee against infidelity. "Most descriptions of troubled marriages don't seem to fit my situation," Priya insists. "Colin and I have a wonderful relationship. Great kids, no financial stresses, careers we love, great friends. He is a phenom at work, fucking handsome, attentive lover, fit, and generous to everyone, including my parents.

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On the Horror of Punishment: When the Taliban Prosecuted Adultery by Execution

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On the Horror of Punishment: When the Taliban Prosecuted Adultery by Execution

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"He fires twice and misses, connects on the third shot from no more than a few feet away. She collapses to the ground. He continues shooting. Her body flinches with every bullet that connects.

The Telegraph has the background on the 22-year-old woman in the video, and why she's being persecuted by the Taliban for adultery. Her name is reportedly Najiba:

Najiba had been married to one Taliban member and was accused of adultery with a Taliban commander, according to Roshna Khalid, Parwan’s provincial spokesman.

“Within one hour they decided that she was guilty and sentenced her to death. They shot her in front of villagers in her village,” she told the agency.

Provincial Governor Basir Salangi has already condemned the crime. "When I saw this video, I closed my eyes ... The woman was not guilty; the Taliban are guilty," he told Reuters. "

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This article is from the archive of our partner .
There's a disturbing new video of Taliban forces in Afghanistan shooting and killing a woman at point blank range for allegedly committing adultery with two Taliban commanders.

Reuters obtained the video on Saturday. Afghan officials say the man with the gun is a member of the Taliban. The video was supposedly shot last week outside of Kabul.

"Allah warns us not to get close to adultery because it's the wrong way," a man says as the gunman approaches the woman, according to Reuters. "It is the order of Allah that she be executed." The woman is sitting in the dirt with her back to the camera as the gunman approaches her. There's a crowd of other men surrounding them.

He fires twice and misses, connects on the third shot from no more than a few feet away. She collapses to the ground. He continues shooting. Her body flinches with every bullet that connects.

The Telegraph has the background on the 22-year-old woman in the video, and why she's being persecuted by the Taliban for adultery. Her name is reportedly Najiba:

Najiba had been married to one Taliban member and was accused of adultery with a Taliban commander, according to Roshna Khalid, Parwan's provincial spokesman.

"Within one hour they decided that she was guilty and sentenced her to death. They shot her in front of villagers in her village," she told the agency.

Provincial Governor Basir Salangi has already condemned the crime. "When I saw this video, I closed my eyes ... The woman was not guilty; the Taliban are guilty," he told Reuters.

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Taliban Member Reportedly Executes Woman for Adultery

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This article is from the archive of our partner . There's a disturbing new video of Taliban forces in Afghanistan shooting and killing a woman at point blank range for allegedly committing adultery with two Taliban commanders. Reuters obtained the video on Saturday. Afghan officials say the man with the gun is a member of the Taliban.

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Technology: Making it Easier and Harder to Cheat

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Technology: Making it Easier and Harder to Cheat

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"Right or wrong, cheating apps tap into a potentially lucrative market: While the national infidelity rate is hard to pin down (because, well, people lie), reputable research puts the proportion of unfaithful spouses at about 15 percent of women and 20 percent of men—with the gender gap closing fast. And while the roots of infidelity remain more or less constant (the desire for novelty, attention, affirmation, a lover with tighter glutes … ), technology is radically altering how we enter into, conduct, and even define it."

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Technology has made cheating on your spouse, or catching a cheater, easier than ever. How digital tools are aiding the unfaithful and the untrusting-and may be mending some broken marriages.

All illustrations by Kristian Hammerstad

Jay's wife, Ann, was supposed to be out of town on business. It was a Tuesday evening in August 2013, and Jay, a 36-year-old IT manager, was at home in Indiana with their 5-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son when he made a jarring discovery. Their daughter had misplaced her iPad, so Jay used the app Find My iPhone to search for it. The app found the missing tablet right away, but it also located all the other devices on the family's plan. What was Ann's phone doing at a hotel five miles from their home?

His suspicions raised, Jay, who knew Ann's passwords, read through her e-mails and Facebook messages. (Like others in this story, Jay asked that his and Ann's names be changed.) He didn't find anything incriminating, but neither could he imagine a good reason for Ann to be at that hotel. So Jay started using Find My iPhone for an altogether different purpose: to monitor his wife's whereabouts.

Two nights later, when Ann said she was working late, Jay tracked her phone to the same spot. This time, he drove to the hotel, called her down to the parking lot, and demanded to know what was going on. Ann told him she was there posing for boudoir photos, with which she planned to surprise him for his upcoming birthday. She said the photographer was up in the room waiting for her.

Jay wanted to believe Ann. They'd been married for 12 years, and she had never given him cause to distrust her. So instead of demanding to meet the photographer or storming up to the room, Jay got in his car and drove home.

Still, something gnawed at him. According to Ann's e-mails, the boudoir photo shoot had indeed taken place-but on the previous day, Wednesday. So her being at the hotel on Tuesday and again on Thursday didn't make sense. Unless ...

In an earlier era, a suspicious husband like Jay might have rifled through Ann's pockets or hired a private investigator. But having stumbled upon Find My iPhone's utility as a surveillance tool, Jay wondered what other apps might help him keep tabs on his wife. He didn't have to look far. Spouses now have easy access to an array of sophisticated spy software that would give Edward Snowden night sweats: programs that record every keystroke; that compile detailed logs of our calls, texts, and video chats; that track a phone's location in real time; that recover deleted messages from all manner of devices (without having to touch said devices); that turn phones into wiretapping equipment; and on and on.

Jay spent a few days researching surveillance tools before buying a program called Dr. Fone, which enabled him to remotely recover text messages from Ann's phone. Late one night, he downloaded her texts onto his work laptop. He spent the next day reading through them at the office. Turns out, his wife had become involved with a co-worker. There were thousands of text messages between them, many X‑rated-an excruciatingly detailed record of Ann's betrayal laid out on Jay's computer screen. "I could literally watch her affair progress," Jay told me, "and that in itself was painful."

One might assume that the proliferation of such spyware would have a chilling effect on extramarital activities. Aspiring cheaters, however, need not despair: software developers are also rolling out ever stealthier technology to help people conceal their affairs. Married folk who enjoy a little side action can choose from such specialized tools as Vaulty Stocks, which hides photos and videos inside a virtual vault within one's phone that's disguised to look like a stock-market app, and Nosy Trap, which displays a fake iPhone home screen and takes a picture of anyone who tries to snoop on the phone. CATE (the Call and Text Eraser) hides texts and calls from certain contacts and boasts tricky features such as the ability to "quick clean" incriminating evidence by shaking your smartphone. CoverMe does much of the above, plus offers "military-grade encrypted phone calls." And in the event of an emergency, there's the nuclear option: apps that let users remotely wipe a phone completely clean, removing all traces of infidelity.

But every new app that promises to make playing around safer and easier just increases the appetite for a cleverer way to expose such deception. Some products even court both sides: a partner at CATE walked me through how a wife could install the app on her husband's phone to create a secret record of calls and texts to be perused at her leisure. Which may be great from a market-demand standpoint, but is probably not so healthy for the broader culture, as an accelerating spiral of paranoia drives an arms race of infidelity-themed weapons aimed straight at the consumer's heart.

Every tech trend has its early adopters. Justin, a 30-year-old computer programmer from Ohio, is at the vanguard of this one.

Justin first discovered CATE on the September 21, 2012, episode of Shark Tank, ABC's venture-capital reality show. The Call and Text Eraser, pitched specifically as a "cheating app," won $70,000 in seed money on the program. Justin knew he had to have it.

His girlfriend at the time-we'll call her Scarlett-was "the jealous type," forever poking through his smartphone and computer. Not that he could blame her, given that she'd already busted him once for having sex with another woman. "It took a lot of talking and a lot of promising that it wouldn't happen again," he told me over e-mail. (I found Justin through a user review of CATE.) "So her wanting to check up on me was understandable," he allowed. "But at the same time, it was my business and if I wanted to share I would have."

Even a not-so-jealous girlfriend might have taken exception to many of the messages on Justin's phone: "casual texting" (that is, flirting) with other women, "hard core" (explicitly sexual) texting, texts arranging "hookups." In the past, he'd been busted repeatedly for such communiqués. (Scarlett is not the only girlfriend with whom Justin has found monogamy to be a challenge.) With CATE, all Justin had to do was create a list of contacts he didn't want Scarlett to know about, and any incriminating texts and phone calls with those contacts got channeled directly into a pass-code-protected vault.

CATE is just one of many tools Justin uses to, as he puts it, "stay one step ahead." His go-to method for exchanging explicit photos is Snapchat, the popular app that causes pics and videos to self-destruct seconds after they are received. (Of course, as savvy users know, expired "snaps" aren't really deleted, but merely hidden in the bowels of the recipient's phone, so Justin periodically goes in and permanently scrubs them.) And for visuals so appealing that he cannot bear to see them vanish into the ether, he has Gallery Lock, which secretes pics and videos inside a private "gallery" within his phone.

Justin wound up cheating on Scarlett "several more times" before they finally broke up-a pattern he's repeated with other girlfriends. Oh, sure, he enjoys the social and domestic comforts of a relationship ("It's always nice to have someone to call your girl"). He understands the suffering that infidelity can cause ("I have been cheated on so I know how much it hurts"). He even feels guilty about playing around. But for him, the adrenaline kick is irresistible. "Not to mention," he adds, "no woman is the same [and] there is always going to be someone out there who can do something sexually that you have never tried." Then, of course, there's "the thrill of never knowing if you are going to get caught."

All of which makes it more than a little troubling that, while laboring to keep one semiserious girlfriend after another in the dark with privacy-enhancing apps, Justin has been equally aggressive about using spy apps to keep a virtual eye on said girlfriends.

Justin has tried it all: keystroke loggers, phone trackers, software enabling him to "see text messages, pictures, and all the juicy stuff ... even the folder to where your deleted stuff would go." He figures he's tried nearly every spy and cheater app on the market, and estimates that since 2007, he has "kept tabs," serially, on at least half a dozen girlfriends. "The monitoring is really just for my peace of mind," he says. Plus, if he catches a girlfriend straying, "it kind of balances it out and makes it fair." That way, he explains, if she ever busts him, "I have proof she was cheating so therefore she would have no reason to be mad."

Not that Justin is immune to the occasional flash of jealousy. More than once, he has gone out to confront a girlfriend whose phone revealed her to be somewhere other than where she'd claimed to be. One relationship ended with particularly dramatic flair: "The phone went to the location off of a country road in the middle of nowhere and there she was having sex in the backseat of the car with another man." A fistfight ensued (with the guy, not the girlfriend), followed later by "breakup sex" (vice versa). One year on, Justin says, "I still don't believe that she has figured out how I found out."

Justin knows that many folks may find his playing both sides of the cheating-apps divide "twisted." But, he reasons, "I am doing it for my safety to make sure I don't get hurt. So doesn't that make it right??"

Right or wrong, cheating apps tap into a potentially lucrative market: While the national infidelity rate is hard to pin down (because, well, people lie), reputable research puts the proportion of unfaithful spouses at about 15 percent of women and 20 percent of men-with the gender gap closing fast. And while the roots of infidelity remain more or less constant (the desire for novelty, attention, affirmation, a lover with tighter glutes ... ), technology is radically altering how we enter into, conduct, and even define it. (The affairs in this piece all involved old-school, off-line sex, but there is a growing body of research on the devastation wrought by the proliferation of online-only betrayal.) Researchers regard the Internet as fertile ground for female infidelity in particular. "Men tend to cheat for physical reasons and women for emotional reasons," says Katherine Hertlein, who studies the impact of technology on relationships as the director of the Marriage and Therapy Program at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. "The Internet facilitates a lot of emotional disclosure and connections with someone else."

At the same time, privacy has become a rare commodity. Forget the National Security Agency and Russian mobsters: in a recent survey conducted in the United Kingdom, 62 percent of men in relationships admitted to poking around in a current or ex-partner's mobile phone. (Interestingly, among women, the proportion was only 34 percent. So much for the stereotype of straying guys versus prying gals.) On the flip side, according to the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project, 14 percent of adults have taken steps to hide their online activity from a family member or romantic partner. Therapists say they're seeing more spouses casually tracking each other as well as more clashes over online spying, and lawyers are starting to recommend digital-privacy clauses for prenup and postnup agreements. Such clauses aim to prevent spouses from using personal texts, e‑mails, or photos against each other should they wind up in divorce court.

Tech developers by and large didn't set out looking to get involved. As is so often the case with infidelity, it just sort of happened. Take Find My iPhone. Apple did not create the app with suspicious lovers in mind, but users pretty quickly realized its potential. Dr. Fone is marketed primarily as a way to recover lost data. Likewise, messaging apps such as Snapchat have many more uses than concealing naughty talk or naked photos, but the apps are a hit with cheaters.

The multipurpose nature and off-label use of many tools make it difficult to gauge the size of this vast and varied market. The company mSpy offers one of the top-rated programs for monitoring smartphones and computers; 2 million subscribers pay between $20 and $70 a month for the ability to do everything from review browsing history to listen in on phone calls to track a device's whereabouts. Some 40 percent of customers are parents looking to monitor their kids, according to Andrew Lobanoff, the head of sales at mSpy, who says the company does basic consumer research to see who its customers are and what features they want added. Another 10 to 15 percent are small businesses monitoring employees' use of company devices (another growing trend). The remaining 45 to 50 percent? They could be up to anything.

Apps marketed specifically as tools for privacy and secret-keeping* for the most part aren't seeing the download numbers of a heavy hitter like, say, Grindr, the hookup app for gay men (10 million downloads and more than 5 million monthly users). But plenty have piqued consumer interest: The private-texting-and-calling app CoverMe has more than 2 million users. TigerText, which (among other features) causes messages to self-destruct after a set amount of time, has been downloaded 3.5 million times since its introduction in February 2010. (It hit the market a couple of months after the Tiger Woods sexting scandal, though the company maintains that the app is not named for Woods.)

Once the marketplace identifies a revenue stream, of course, the water has been chummed and everyone rushes in for a taste. By now, new offerings are constantly popping up from purveyors large and small. Ashley Madison, the online-dating giant for married people (company slogan: "Life is short. Have an affair."), has a mobile app that provides some 30 million members "on the go" access to its services. Last year, the company introduced an add-on app called BlackBook, which allows users to purchase disposable phone numbers with which to conduct their illicit business. Calls and texts are placed through the app much as they are through Skype, explains the company's chief operating officer, Rizwan Jiwan. "One of the leading ways people get caught in affairs is by their cellphone bill," he observes. But with the disposable numbers, all calls are routed through a user's Ashley Madison account, which appears on his or her credit-card statements under a series of business aliases. "The phone number isn't tied to you in any way."

Both sides of the arms race have ego invested in not getting outgunned. Stressing Ashley Madison's obsession with customer privacy, Jiwan boasts that the shift from computers to mobile devices makes it harder for members to get busted. "It's much more difficult to get spyware on phones," he told me. But mSpy's Lobanoff pushed back: "All applications can be monitored. Let me make it clear for you. If you provide us what application you would like to track, within two weeks we can develop a feature to do that." It all boils down to demand. For instance, he notes, after receiving some 300 calls from customers looking to monitor Snapchat, the company rolled out just such a feature.

Lobanoff admits that iPhones are tougher to monitor than phones from other brands, because Apple is strict about what runs on its operating system (although many Apple users "jailbreak" their devices, removing such limits). Which raises the question: Is an iPhone a good investment for cheaters worried about being monitored-or would it too tightly restrict their access to cheating apps? Such are the complexities of modern infidelity.

Of course, no app can remove all risk of getting caught. Technology can, in fact, generate a false sense of security that leads people to push limits or get sloppy. Justin has had several close calls, using CATE to conceal indiscreet texts and voicemails but forgetting to hide explicit photos. When a girlfriend found a naked picture of him that he'd failed to delete after sexting another woman, Justin had to think fast. "The way I talk my way out of it is that I say I was going to send it to her." Then, of course, there is the peril of creeping obsolescence: after several months, regular upgrades to the operating system on Justin's phone outpaced CATE's, and more and more private messages began to slip through the cracks. (A scan of user reviews suggests this is a common problem.)

Virtual surveillance has its risks as well. Stumbling across an incriminating e‑mail your partner left open is one thing; premeditated spying can land you in court-or worse. Sometime in 2008 or 2009, a Minnesota man named Danny Lee Hormann, suspecting his wife of infidelity, installed a GPS tracker on her car and allegedly downloaded spyware onto her phone and the family computer. His now-ex-wife, Michele Mathias (who denied having an affair), began wondering how her husband always knew what she was up to. In March 2010, Mathias had a mechanic search her car. The tracker was found. Mathias called the police, and Hormann spent a month in jail on stalking charges. (It's worth noting that a second conviction, specifically for illegally tracking her car, was overturned on appeal when the judge ruled that joint ownership gave Hormann the right to install the GPS tracker.)

Staying on the right side of the law is trickier than one might imagine. There are a few absolute no-nos. At the top of the list: never install software on a device that you do not own without first obtaining the user's consent. Software sellers are careful to shift the legal burden onto consumers. On its site, mSpy warns that misuse of the software "may result in severe monetary and criminal penalties." Similarly, SpyBubble, which offers cellphone-tracking software, reminds its customers of their duty to "notify users of the device that they are being monitored." Even so, questions of ownership and privacy get messy between married partners, and the landscape remains in flux as courts struggle to apply old laws to new technology.

In 2010, a Texas man named Larry Bagley was acquitted of charges that he violated federal wiretapping laws by installing audio-recording devices around his house and keystroke-monitoring software on his then-wife's computer. In his ruling, the district judge pointed to a split opinion among U.S. circuit courts as to whether the federal law applies to "interspousal wiretaps." (The Fourth, Sixth, Eighth, Tenth, and Eleventh Circuit Courts said it does, he noted; the Second and Fifth said it doesn't.) Similarly, in California, Virginia, Texas, Minnesota, and as of this summer New York, it is a misdemeanor to install a GPS tracker on someone's vehicle without their consent. But when a vehicle is jointly owned, things get fuzzy.

"I always tell people two things: (1) do it legally, and (2) do it right," says John Paul Lucich, a computer-forensics expert and the author of Cyber Lies, a do-it-yourself guide for spouses looking to become virtual sleuths. Lucich has worked his share of ugly divorces, and he stresses that even the most damning digital evidence of infidelity will prove worthless in court-and potentially land you in trouble-if improperly gathered. His blanket advice: Get a really good lawyer. Stat.

Such apps clearly have the potential to blow up relationships, but the question now may be whether they can be used to salvage them as well. Many of the betrayed partners I spoke with believe they can.

A couple of years ago, Ginger discovered that her husband, Tim, was having an affair with a woman he'd met through a nonprofit on whose board he sat. (As Ginger tells it, this was a classic case of a middle-aged man having his head turned by a much younger woman.) The affair lasted less than a year, but it took another eight months before Tim's lover stopped sending him gifts and showing up in awkward places (even church!).

Ginger and Tim decided to tough it out-they've been married for 35 years and have two adult children-but that took some doing. For the first year and a half, certain things Tim did or said would trigger Ginger's anxiety. He would announce that he was going to the store; Ginger would fire up her tracking software to ensure he did just that. Business travel called for even more elaborate reassurances. "When he was away, I would be like, 'I want you to FaceTime the whole room-the bathroom, the closet; open the hallway door.' "

Ginger's anxiety has dimmed, but not vanished. She still occasionally uses Find My iPhone to make sure Tim is, in fact, staying late at the office. "And we use FaceTime all the time. He knows that if I try to FaceTime him, he'd better answer right then or have a very, very good reason why he didn't."

Jay and Ann, of the boudoir photo shoot, also decided to try to repair their marriage. When he first confronted her with a record of her texts, Ann denied that the sex talk was ever more than fantasy. But when Jay scheduled a polygraph, she confessed to a full-blown, physical affair.

As hard as it has been for Jay, one year later he reports that tech tools are helping. Ann's affair grew out of her sense of neglect, Jay told me: "She wasn't getting the attention she wanted from me, so she found someone else to give it to her." To strengthen their bond, Jay and Ann have started using Couple, a relationship app geared toward promoting intimacy by setting up a private line of communication for texts, pics, video clips, and, of course, updates on each person's whereabouts. Every now and again, Jay sneaks a peek at Find My iPhone. He also has set his iPad to receive copies of Ann's texts. "I don't know if she realizes I'm doing that," he told me. But in general, she understands his desire for extra oversight. "She's like, 'Whatever you want.' "

In fact, post-affair surveillance seems to be an increasingly popular counseling prescription. Even as marriage and family therapists take a dim view of unprovoked snooping, once the scent of infidelity is in the air, many become enthusiastically pro-snooping-initially to help uncover the truth about a partner's behavior but then to help couples reconcile by reestablishing accountability and trust. The psychotherapist and syndicated columnist Barton Goldsmith says he often advocates virtual monitoring in the aftermath of an affair. Even if a spouse never exercises the option of checking up, having it makes him or her feel more secure. "It's like a digital leash."

And that can be a powerful deterrent, says Frank, whose wife of 37 years learned of his fondness for hookers last February, after he forgot to close an e‑mail exchange with an escort. "He had set up a Gmail account I had no idea he had," Carol, his wife, told me. Frank tried to convince her that the e-mails were just spam, even after she pointed out that the exchange included his cell number and photos of him.

Frank agreed to marriage counseling and enrolled in a 12-step program for sexual addiction. Carol now tracks his phone and regularly checks messages on both his phone and his computer. Still, she told me sadly, "I don't think that I'm ever going to get the whole story. I believe he thinks that if I know everything, the marriage will come to an end."

For his part, Frank-who comes across as a gruff, traditional sort of guy, uneasy sharing his feelings even with his wife-calls Carol's discovery of his betrayal "excruciating," but he mostly seems angry at the oversexed culture that he feels landed him in this mess. He grumbles about how "the ease and the accessibility and the anonymity of the Internet" made it "entirely too easy" for him to feed his addiction.

Frank has clearly absorbed some of the language and lessons of therapy. "As well as it is a learned behavior to act out, it is a learned behavior not to," he told me. He doesn't much like his wife's having total access to his phone, but he claims that his sole concern is for the privacy of others in his 12-step group, who text one another for support. Frank himself clearly feels the tug of his digital leash. "Now that she checks my phone and computer, I have a deterrent."

Even as he calls virtual surveillance "a powerful tool," though, Frank also declares it a limited one. No matter how clever the technology becomes, there will always be work-arounds. For someone looking to stray, "absolutely nothing is going to stop it," says Frank, emphatically. "Nothing."
* The original version of this article stated incorrectly that TigerText and CoverMe market themselves as tools for cheaters and jealous spouses.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Michelle Cottle is a contributing editor at The Atlantic.

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Technology has made cheating on your spouse, or catching a cheater, easier than ever. How digital tools are aiding the unfaithful and the untrusting-and may be mending some broken marriages. Jay's wife, Ann, was supposed to be out of town on business.

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Korea Repealed Its Adultery Law in 2015. Do laws against adultery protect relationships or just men?

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Korea Repealed Its Adultery Law in 2015. Do laws against adultery protect relationships or just men?

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"Adultery bans are a fading but persistent global phenomenon, and they’re instructive when it comes to assessing how sexual and gender dynamics are shifting in different societies. In the United States, for example, adultery laws enacted in the 1700s and 1800s were often prejudiced against women. The laws “were concerned with women cheating on their husbands and having kids that weren’t theirs, and then [the husbands] taking care of kids that weren’t theirs,” JoAnne Sweeny, an assistant professor of law at the University of Louisville, told me. “Adultery could only happen if the woman was married. If the man was married but the woman wasn’t, that wasn’t adultery” but rather the lesser offense of “fornication.” Moreover, “if a wife wanted a divorce, she had to show that her husband lived in adultery, whereas a husband had to show only that his wife had committed a single act of adultery.” As Sweeny has documented, the legal systems in many states continued to treat male and female infidelity differently until the 1950s; as of 2013, at least 18 states still had adultery laws on the books, though they are rarely enforced."

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Adultery has been decriminalized in Europe and many parts of Latin America. But it is still illegal in the Philippines, where a married woman can be charged with adultery for any act of sexual intercourse with a man who is not her husband, while a married man can only be charged with "concubinage," which requires either keeping a mistress at his home or having sex "under scandalous circumstances." In some Muslim countries whose legal systems rely on or incorporate sharia law, anti-adultery statutes undervalue women's testimony and can be exploited by men to dispatch with an unwanted wife. The punishments meted out against women accused of adultery can also be severe.

In theory, South Korea's adultery ban was designed to protect women in a society where men commonly pursued extramarital affairs, according to Kathy Moon, the SK-Korea Foundation chair in Korea Studies at the Brookings Institution. The law was enacted in 1953, the tumultuous year in which the Korean War ended. "You had so many women and men who had lost families ... tens of thousands that had fled from the northern part [of Korea], who had left their families behind ... or lost them in the frenzy and chaos of the refugee flow," Moon told me. "In that sense, [the law] was an attempt to create order and stability, and, especially for those marrying for the first time, to set a certain standard." Moon also mentioned the need to move past 35 years of Japanese colonial rule between 1910 and 1945. "For a lot of the value-maintaining elite, they condemned Japanese colonial rule partly for introducing 'lewd sexual mores,'" she said. The statute was also meant to benefit women in a society with a tradition, at least in elite circles, of men keeping concubines.

Nevertheless, Moon largely rejected the notion that the South Korea's ban was progressive or protected women. She pointed out that neo-Confucianists lobbied for the law in the 1950s in an effort to reestablish an authentic Confucian social order (last week, a Korean Confucianist organization called the law's repeal "deplorable"), and argued that the legislation was ineffective and hypocritical. "For many of the elite and the wealthy [men], they were able since 1953 to maintain multiple women and have regular affairs without any kind of social stigma from male society, and for the most part women of the older generation kind of just took it as part of their fate," she said. In practice, The New York Times notes, the law was often wielded to compel a spouse to accept a divorce or to blackmail married women who had been unfaithful.

If the repeal of South Korea's adultery law proves to be a net gain for women's rights, there's still a lot of work to be done. Although South Korean women have many more educational and economic opportunities now than they did in 1953, major gender inequities remain. In the World Economic Forum's most recent gender gap report, South Korea ranked 117 out of 142 countries. Only 55 percent of working-age women are employed compared with 76 percent of men, and women are grossly underrepresented in government. Moon said that domestic violence is a massive and mostly overlooked problem, and that immigrant women have recently been arriving in the country as brides, mainly to be used as "child producers." "These women have very little access to [the] Korean language, they come from relatively poor backgrounds ... their husbands sometimes divorce them without the women even knowing what's going on," she explained. If women are being disempowered in South Korea, it's clearly not just by philandering husbands.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Edward Delman is a former editorial fellow at The Atlantic ​.

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Adultery has been decriminalized in Europe and many parts of Latin America. But it is still illegal in the Philippines, where a married woman can be charged with adultery for any act of sexual intercourse with a man who is not her husband, while a married man can only be charged with "concubinage," which requires either keeping a mistress at his home or having sex "under scandalous circumstances."

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"In many states where adultery is prohibited, the criminal law provisions are themselves discriminatory, imposing criminal liability on women and girls in situations in which men would not be criminally liable.

·         In some of these laws, adultery is defined as consensual sexual intercourse between a married woman and a man who is not her husband, targeting married women.[1]

·         In some states, pregnancy outside of marriage constitutes sufficient evidence to enable a woman to be convicted of adultery, targeting women.[2]

·         In some states in which adultery prohibitions apply to both men and women in a way which is apparently equal, there are provisions which allow men to have multiple sexual partners as wives in polygamous marriages or in concubinage arrangements, without incurring liability for adultery, thus establishing a discriminatory criminal regime regarding marital infidelity for women and men.[3]

·         In some states, the crime of adultery (zina) includes non-consensual sex and in this context applies in a discriminatory fashion to women and girls who have been raped.[4]

·         A tragic example was reported by UNICEF: a 13 year old Somali girl, Aisha Duhulow, was stoned to death in a stadium of spectators in Kismayo on 27 October 2008 after having been found guilty of adultery. Reports indicate that she had been raped by three men while traveling on foot to visit her grandmother in the war-torn capital, Mogadishu. Following the assault, she sought protection from local leaders, who then accused her of adultery and sentenced her to death.[5]

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Background Information on the Statement Issued by the Working Group on Discrimination Against Women

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Exodus 20:14, "Thou shalt commit adultery."

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Monogamish? Are extramarital relations always wrong? These stories argue, 'No.' What do you think?

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Monogamish? Are extramarital relations always wrong? These stories argue, 'No.' What do you think?

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"Why do most people assume that all nonmonogamous relationships are destined to fail? Because we only hear about the ones that do. If a three-way or an affair was a factor in a divorce or breakup, we hear all about it. But we rarely hear from happy couples who aren't monogamous, because they don't want to be perceived as dangerous sex maniacs who are destined to divorce."

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Why do most people assume that all nonmonogamous relationships are destined to fail? Because we only hear about the ones that do. If a three-way or an affair was a factor in a divorce or breakup, we hear all about it. But we rarely hear from happy couples who aren't monogamous, because they don't want to be perceived as dangerous sex maniacs who are destined to divorce.

This state of affairs-couples who experimented with nonmonogamy and wound up divorced won't shut up; couples who experimented with nonmonogamy and are still together won't speak up-allows smug and insecure monogamists to run around insisting that there's no such thing as happy, stable monogamish couples.

"You know lots of couples who have had three-ways and flings who aren't divorced," I told the skeptics a few weeks ago, " you just don't know you know them." In an effort to introduce the skeptics to some happily monogamish couples, I invited coupled people who'd had successful flings, affairs, three-ways, and swinging experiences to write in and share their stories. The response was overwhelming-I may do a book-and I'm turning over the rest of this week's column to their stories.

My husband and I have issues like any couple, but I still smile when I see him walk into a room, and he still takes my hand when we're walking down the street. For the past seven years, we have been "monogamish." It started off with a discussion of "If you ever cheat on me and it's a one-time thing, I wouldn't want to know." Then, when he turned 40, we had a threesome with a female friend. When I actually saw him "in the moment," I didn't have the jealous feelings I had always feared. There is no question that our relationship is our first priority, but just the possibility of a little strange now and then makes him feel like a stud. (And I reap the benefits!) I don't much care for sex without emotion and affection, so my flings have been rather limited. We haven't told our families or more than a couple of friends. I don't want to deal with the judgment of others.

For the first five years of my marriage, everything was great: lots of sex, both GGG, lots of love. Then my wife's libido failed. Whatever the problem was, she couldn't articulate it. After a year where we'd had sex twice, I reached out to someone else. I used Craigslist and I was honest: I explained that I had no intention of leaving my wife and that I was looking for someone in a situation similar to mine. It took months to find the right person. We struck up a years-long affair. At the same time, I had a wonderful-yet-sexless marriage. Then, after nearly four years, a strange thing happened: My wife's libido came back strong. To this day, she cannot explain why it left or why it came back. With the reason for my affair gone, I ended things with my fuck buddy. And you know what? Years of honest talk made this easy. She understood; we went our separate ways.

So I had a four-year affair without getting caught. Here's how I pulled it off: I never told anyone about it ever, I chose a partner who wanted exactly what I wanted, we didn't film ourselves (as hot as that sounded), we used condoms, I kept my computer clear of any evidence, and we never called or texted each other.

My husband and I are monogamish but also LMGs-legally married gays. We feel tremendous pressure to be perfect. The thing is, we are perfect. We love each other, we support each other, and we have amazing sex with each other-and the occasional cameo performer, who is always treated with respect. (We have a rule about not inviting someone into our bedroom who we wouldn't be friends with outside the bedroom.) That said, the fact that Ron and Nancy down the street are swingers will raise eyebrows, but it won't impact the perceived legitimacy of mixed-gender marriage. But if Ed and Ted happen to invite a third into their bedroom, that would prove the gays are destroying marriage/the country/the fabric of the universe. Even other gays get judgmental. So, at least for now, our monogamishness is on a strictly need-to-know basis. And who needs to know? Just our sex-positive doctor and the occasional hot third who gets a golden ticket into our bedroom.

I agree with you that we rarely hear about successful marriages that are open. How do I know? I just discovered that my parents are swingers-and they have been married for 26 years!

My husband, almost exactly 10 years older than me, confessed a cuckold fetish to me shortly before our fifth anniversary. I said no, but a seed was planted: Whenever I would develop a crush on another man, it would occur to me that I could sleep with him if I wanted to. Five years later, my boyfriend of two years, who happens to be exactly 10 years younger than me, was one of the guests at our 10-year anniversary party. My boyfriend is a good-looking grad student who adores me and values my husband's advice about his education and career plans. He treats my husband with the perfect blend of affection and contempt. ("Gratitude and attitude," my boyfriend calls it.) I enjoy my boyfriend, but I love my husband more than ever. My husband is not allowed to have sex with other women (he doesn't want to, anyway), and he's not allowed to have sex with me without my boyfriend's permission (which he usually-though not always-gets). Our families would be appalled. We simply don't live in a part of the country, or move in social circles, where we could be honest about any of this with anyone.

From the outside, my husband and I look like a boring vanilla married couple. In fact, people have included me in judgmental conversations about open relationships. But the truth is, for nearly as long as we've been together (three-plus years), we've had a semiopen relationship. My husband is bi. When he told me after a few months of dating, years of Savage Love reading helped me to keep an open mind. Long story short: We worked out rules that were mutually agreeable. Now he can hook up safely with guys and come home to a loving wife with whom he can be completely honest.

I'm a happily married woman... and so is my girlfriend. Maybe it's cowardly of us, but no matter how simple our relationship seems to us, the people we care about would not understand. Yes, we do this with our husbands' blessing. (We even double-date from time to time!) No, there's nothing lacking in our marriages. Our parents, relatives, children, friends, and coworkers know we're close. But I don't see the need to tell anyone the entire truth. I was on the fence about sending this e-mail-that's how little fuss we make about it. Then I thought, if I do send it, and if enough people send their stories, maybe one day we can go public and it won't be a big fucking deal. That'd be awesome.

Find the Savage Lovecast (my weekly podcast) every Tuesday at thestranger.com/savage.

mail@savagelove.net @fakedansavage on Twitter

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Why do most people assume that all nonmonogamous relationships are destined to fail? Because we only hear about the ones that do. If a three-way or an affair was a factor in a divorce or breakup, we hear all about it.

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What are the benefits to marrying young?

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What are the benefits to marrying young?

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"Looking back over a marriage of nearly three decades, I am thankful that I married before going down that road. Now as a college-educated, doctorate-holding woman, I can attest that marrying young (at age 19) was most beneficial: to me, to my husband, and to the longevity of our marriage. Our achievements have come, I am convinced, not despite our young marriage, but because of it.

Our marriage was, to use Knot Yet's terminology, a "cornerstone" not a "capstone." Once that cornerstone was set during the semester break of my sophomore year of college, I transformed from a party girl into a budding scholar. I earned my college degree then two graduate degrees. My husband made music, built things, earned a teaching certificate, and became a teacher and coach. We lived in several towns, two states, countless apartments (and—for six long weeks, a relative's basement), owned a junkyard's worth of beat-up cars (including two, not one, but two Pacers), and held down numerous jobs on our way to financial and social stability. We were poor in those early years. Not food stamps poor, but poor enough to be given groceries by our church without having asked. The church gave us $200 once, too (which is exactly what that second Pacer cost). We held down terrible jobs and then got better ones. Like all couples, we worked and played and worshipped and prayed and travelled and fought together. And sometimes apart. We planned and prepared for children that naughtily never came. We offered our home instead to needy animals and stray college students, and eventually to my own aging parents. It was not the days of ease that made our marriage stronger and happier: it was working through the difficult parts. We learned to luxuriate in the quotidian, to take wonder in the mundane, skills that have become even more valuable in our prosperous years. We invested the vigor of our youth not in things to bring into the marriage, but in each other and our marriage....

Marriage actually works best as a formative institution, not an institution you enter once you think you're fully formed. We learn marriage, just as we learn language, and to the teachable, some lessons just come easier earlier in life."

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"Having an affair is one of the most immoral things you can do, according to a new Gallup poll. As Eleanor Barkhorn reported last week, a survey of 1,535 American adults found that 91 percent considered extramarital infidelity to be morally wrong, a higher percentage than objected to human cloning, suicide, and polygamy. The poll aside, it's difficult to think of any other relatively common and technically legal (adulterous affairs are no longer subject to criminal sanction) practice of which more of us disapprove....

The polls show that a growing number of us want our fellow Americans to be able to marry whom they love, regardless of biological sex. Those same polls show that we also want to have the right to leave a miserable marriage as easily as possible. Those aren't inconsistent positions. They reflect the modern sense that marriage is primarily about individual happiness rather than making babies or ensuring communal stability. Everyone should be able to take their chance at the unique set of rewards we imagine that only marriage can offer; everyone should be able to leave if those rewards are not forthcoming.

The growing abhorrence of infidelity is linked to this more individualistic view of marriage. Just a few decades ago, divorce was scandalous; if your marriage came to an end you and your spouse were likely to face cruel gossip and painful social ostracism. The fear of the public humiliation that attended divorce kept people in unhappy marriages. That fear is gone, replaced by a growing anxiety about the more private humiliation of sexual betrayal. "I'd rather be left than lied to" is the prevailing sentiment that the polling reveals; it's not a stretch to suggest that the reverse would have been true just a few decades ago."

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The polls show that a growing number of us want our fellow Americans to be able to marry whom they love, regardless of biological sex. Those same polls show that we also want to have the right to leave a miserable marriage as easily as possible. Those aren't inconsistent positions. They reflect the modern sense that marriage is primarily about individual happiness rather than making babies or ensuring communal stability. Everyone should be able to take their chance at the unique set of rewards we imagine that only marriage can offer; everyone should be able to leave if those rewards are not forthcoming.

The growing abhorrence of infidelity is linked to this more individualistic view of marriage. Just a few decades ago, divorce was scandalous; if your marriage came to an end you and your spouse were likely to face cruel gossip and painful social ostracism. The fear of the public humiliation that attended divorce kept people in unhappy marriages. That fear is gone, replaced by a growing anxiety about the more private humiliation of sexual betrayal. "I'd rather be left than lied to" is the prevailing sentiment that the polling reveals; it's not a stretch to suggest that the reverse would have been true just a few decades ago.

As Karen Swallow Prior wrote here at The Atlantic in March, young people are marrying later because they see marriage as a "capstone" to a well-ordered life rather than a "cornerstone" upon which to build. Whatever the wisdom of delaying first marriage for the sake of a richer set of life experiences as a singleton, there's little doubt that the "cornerstone" model builds in an expectation of difficulty that the "capstone" paradigm doesn't.

We expect couples who marry young to "struggle"-a common euphemism that encompasses everything from fights over money (of which there is almost invariably not enough) to extramarital flirtations and affairs. The cornerstone model presumes, optimistically, that men and women are transformed for the better by sticking it out through the "tough times" that everyone concedes will attend the marriage of the young, the poor, and the naïve. The expectation of struggle doesn't condone infidelity so much as it concedes its near-inevitability.

The "capstone" model presumes, as one of my friends puts it, that you only should get married "after you've got your shit together." Capstoners believe that marriage is something you enter into only after you've finished sowing your proverbial oats-and come into possession of the financial, emotional, and professional sophistication you'll need to blend your life with another person without becoming dangerously dependent upon them. The capstone model is much less forgiving of sexual betrayal because it presumes that those who finally get around to marrying should be mature enough to be both self-regulating and scrupulously honest. The increased unacceptability of adultery is linked to the rising age of first marriages. The evidence suggests, however, that the capstoners are more than a little naïve if they imagine that a rich set of premarital life experiences will serve as an inoculation against infidelity.

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How Marital Infidelity Became America's Last Sexual Taboo

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The polls show that a growing number of us want our fellow Americans to be able to marry whom they love, regardless of biological sex. Those same polls show that we also want to have the right to leave a miserable marriage as easily as possible. Those aren't inconsistent positions.

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Politicians and Adultery: Does Anyone Care?

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Politicians and Adultery: Does Anyone Care?

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"If this is true, however, it didn’t start with Trump—he simply represents the apotheosis. Instead, it began with Clinton, who previously appeared to be the high-water mark of the middle period. Clinton was caught with his pants down (not quite literally, but close) having an affair with a White House intern. He lied about it, including to his closest friends and cabinet, but most consequentially to a grand jury. That led to Clinton’s impeachment in the House.

But a strange thing happened. Clinton wasn’t convicted by the Senate, and he didn’t resign. He didn’t show much shame at all. Oh sure, he apologized for lying, he bit his lower lip, the whole nine yards, but he more or less forged ahead. It worked. Voters knew—and it turned out they didn’t care. The highest approval rating of his presidency came around the time of his impeachment, and it stayed high, around 60 percent, for the rest of his term.

Clinton has lately become toxic, amid new focus on sexual harassment and assault, but its not his adultery per se that’s been his political problem. More damaging have been allegations of rape and sexual assault like those made by Juanita Broaddrick, as well as a focus on the exploitative dynamic between the president and an intern. There’s still not much reason to believe voters care about infidelity....

Because the public seems largely unbothered by infidelity, politicians are less likely to show shame; because politicians treat infidelity lightly, the public focuses less on it too. It is literally a vicious cycle: a cycle in which vice is encouraged."

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"If Nixon's resignation created the character culture in American politics, then Hart's undoing marked the moment when political reporters ceased to care about almost anything else," Matt Bai argued in a 2014 book on Hart. "By the 1990s, the cardinal objective of all political journalism had shifted from a focus on agendas to a focus on narrow notions of character, from illuminating worldviews to exposing falsehoods."

Or so the story went.

But this narrative looks dubious these days. Friday morning, The New Yorker's Ronan Farrow published a long, detailed account of how Trump's friend David Pecker, the head of the tabloid empire that includes The National Enquirer, killed the story of Trump's affair with former Playboy model Karen McDougal by buying the rights. The Wall Street Journal previously reported on the Pecker's move to suppress the story, but Farrow adds a great deal of detail, and obtained a contemporary written account by McDougal of her relationship with Trump, who was early in his marriage to his third wife, Melania.

And Farrow's story comes the same week that Michael Cohen, Trump's attorney, admitted he "facilitat[ed]" a payment to Stormy Daniels, a porn star who also alleged an affair with Trump, in exchange for her silence. Cohen had previously denied this; his vague statement did not really rule out Trump having been the source of the $130,000 payout, though it was clearly intended to give that impression. Friends of Daniels promptly told a celebrity news site that she felt this disclosure sprung her from her agreement to be silent.

There's simply no plausible deniability that Trump is a serial philanderer-each of these stories has contemporaneous evidence and hush-money agreements, to say nothing of Trump's history of infidelities. There's also no reason to believe that the latest story will change much. In the old era, voters didn't know about infidelity and what they didn't know didn't hurt them. In the interim, they knew, and it drove lots of politicians from office. And in the new era, voters know and they just don't care.

If this is true, however, it didn't start with Trump-he simply represents the apotheosis. Instead, it began with Clinton, who previously appeared to be the high-water mark of the middle period. Clinton was caught with his pants down (not quite literally, but close) having an affair with a White House intern. He lied about it, including to his closest friends and cabinet, but most consequentially to a grand jury. That led to Clinton's impeachment in the House.

But a strange thing happened. Clinton wasn't convicted by the Senate, and he didn't resign. He didn't show much shame at all. Oh sure, he apologized for lying, he bit his lower lip, the whole nine yards, but he more or less forged ahead. It worked. Voters knew-and it turned out they didn't care. The highest approval rating of his presidency came around the time of his impeachment, and it stayed high, around 60 percent, for the rest of his term.

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What If Voters Don't Care About Infidelity at All?

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"If Nixon's resignation created the character culture in American politics, then Hart's undoing marked the moment when political reporters ceased to care about almost anything else," Matt Bai argued in a 2014 book on Hart.

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"The wedding industry has consistently sought to link wedding spending with long‐lasting marriages. Industry advertising has fueled the norm that spending large amounts of money on the wedding is a signal of commitment or is helpful for a marriage to be successful. In either case, the general message is that wedding spending and marriage duration are positively correlated. This study is the first to examine this relationship statistically. We found that marriage duration is either not associated or inversely associated with spending on the engagement ring and wedding ceremony. Overall, our findings provide little evidence to support the validity of the wedding industry's message connecting expensive weddings with positive marital outcomes. In future research, it may be useful to construct a population‐representative longitudinal sample of dating couples, following them through the multiple stages of their relationship and gathering prospective information on wedding expenses and marital quality."

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A Diamond is Forever and Other Fairy Tales-The Relationship Bewtween Wedding Expense and Duration

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"For Richer or Poorer" -PRO TIP: START WITH CHEAP WEDDING

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"For Richer or Poorer" -PRO TIP: START WITH CHEAP WEDDING

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"In the research paper, the authors suggest that the financial burden incurred by lavish, expensive weddings leads to financial stress for the couple, which ultimately tears the marriage apart. They found that women, in particular, are vulnerable to divorce after expensive marriages: women in couples who spent $20,000 or more on their wedding are 3.5x more likely to end up divorced than their counterparts who spent less than half that.

In other words, Bridezilla = Divorcezilla. Don’t let advertisers fool you into spending your life savings on your wedding."

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Marriages are not just between two people-they are community affairs.

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Marriages are not just between two people-they are community affairs.

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"Crazy enough, your wedding ceremony has a huge impact on the long-term stability of your marriage. Perhaps the biggest factor is how many people attend your wedding: Couples who elope are 12.5x more likely to end up divorced than couples who get married at a wedding with 200+ people. Clearly, this shows us that having a large group of family and friends who support the marriage is critically important to long-term marital stability."

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Rising Costs of Weddings Prohibitive to Covenant Relationships? 

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Rising Costs of Weddings Prohibitive to Covenant Relationships? 

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"Howard traces the growth of wedding-related entrepreneurship involving rings, gowns, consultants and catering services. She demonstrates "how the commercial became the cultural--how the rise of consumer capitalism transformed one of life's most significant, intimate moments." Using historian Eric Hobsbawm's notion of invented traditions, Howard illuminates the solution that the wedding industry has worked out concerning its central dilemma: "how to persuade consumers to accept new goods and services in connection with a ritual that was ostensibly 'traditional' and 'noncommercial.'" By conjuring up notions of the traditional wedding as timeless and unchanging, Howard writes, businesses have been able to slip in new products and requirements, resulting in what Mead dubs the "traditionalesque": "a pleasing mélange of apparently old-fashioned, certainly nostalgic… practices that may have little relevance to the past or to the future and are really only illustrative of the present in which they emerge."

https://www.religion-online.org/article/weddings-inc/

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"One is mass incarceration.

In the two decades preceding the Great Recession, the American prison population nearly tripled, according to the Pew Center on the States. And make no mistake: mass incarceration rips at the fabric of families and whole communities.

According to the 2011 book “A Plague of Prisons” by Ernest Drucker, a public health expert:

■ “The risk of divorce is high among men going to prison, reaching 50 percent within a few years after incarceration.”

■ “The marriage rate for men incarcerated in prisons and jails is lower than the American average. For blacks and Hispanics, it is lower still.”

■ “Unmarried couples in which the father has been incarcerated are 37 percent less likely to be married one year after the child’s birth than similar couples in which the father has never been incarcerated.”

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We often hear that marriage is a panacea for our problems - as a nation as a whole, and especially for the black community, in which more than 70 percent of children are now born to unmarried women.

Less discussed are the societal factors contributing to this phenomenon.

Let's start with this: while marriage may be losing a bit of its luster for some, it is still a desirable institution for most.

According to a Gallup poll released Friday, a majority of American adults (54 percent) are married. Another fifth have been married or did not classify a marital status. Yet another fifth has never married but wants to.

And among younger people, nonwhites were less likely than whites to be married, but they were more likely to say that they wanted to be. Only 6 percent of whites and 12 percent of nonwhites said that they had never been married and didn't want to get married.

So most Americans - both whites and minorities - still believe in marriage, but there are factors working against marriage for many, factors that need to be acknowledged.

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Charles M. Blow Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times

One is mass incarceration.

In the two decades preceding the Great Recession, the American prison population nearly tripled, according to the Pew Center on the States. And make no mistake: mass incarceration rips at the fabric of families and whole communities.

According to the 2011 book "A Plague of Prisons" by Ernest Drucker, a public health expert:

■ "The risk of divorce is high among men going to prison, reaching 50 percent within a few years after incarceration."

■ "The marriage rate for men incarcerated in prisons and jails is lower than the American average. For blacks and Hispanics, it is lower still."

■ "Unmarried couples in which the father has been incarcerated are 37 percent less likely to be married one year after the child's birth than similar couples in which the father has never been incarcerated."

Related to mass incarceration is the disastrous drug war, which essentially has become a war on marijuana waged primarily against young black men, even though they use the drug at nearly the same rate as whites.

Then there's the Aid Elimination Provision of the Higher Education Act, a provision that took effect in 2000. It denied financial aid to students with drug convictions. A couple of years after it took effect, the American Civil Liberties Union called the law "unjust and counterproductive" and "both morally wrong and unconstitutional."

Researchers at Cornell found last year that the provision "had a large negative impact on the college attendance of students with drug convictions" - that students who were affected delayed college enrollment or were made "less likely to ever enroll in college," among other things.

Add to that the explosion in student loan debt, which has passed the trillion-dollar mark, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Such debt is now held by a record one in five households, said a Pew report last year.

But this debt crisis isn't evenly distributed. According to a report last year by the Center for American Progress: "African-American and Latino students are especially saddled with student debt, with 81 percent of African-American students and 67 percent of Latino students who earned bachelor's degrees leaving school with debt. This compares to 64 percent of white students who graduate with debt."

The debt burden is having a significant impact on marriage. A survey published in May by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants showed that 15 percent of respondents delayed marriage because of student loan debt.

Furthermore, for the poorest Americans, there are marriage penalties built into many of our welfare programs. As the Heritage Foundation has pointed out: "Marriage penalties occur in many means-tested programs, such as food stamps, public housing, Medicaid, day care and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. The welfare system should be overhauled to reduce such counterproductive incentives."

This is not to explain away why people don't marry or delay marriage or have children before marriage, but to give the discussion context.

In a report financed by the Department of Justice a decade ago, Donald Braman, a George Washington University law professor, argued, "For generations, social institutions from slavery and segregation to broadly punitive criminal sanctions have borne down unremittingly on poor and minority families and communities."

One can't bemoan the breakdown of the family - particularly the black family - without at least acknowledging the structural and systematic forces working against its cohesion.

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We often hear that marriage is a panacea for our problems - as a nation as a whole, and especially for the black community, in which more than 70 percent of children are now born to unmarried women. Less discussed are the societal factors contributing to this phenomenon.

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"Glass and her fellow researchers concluded that the conservative religious culture is in fact a major contributing factor thanks to "the social institutions they create" that "decrease marital stability."

Specifically, putting pressure on young people to marry sooner, frowning upon cohabitation before marriage, teaching abstinence-only sex education and making access to resources like emergency contraception more difficult all result in earlier childbearing ages and less-solid marriages from the get-go, Glass writes in the paper."

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It may seem counterintuitive, but divorce rates are higher in religiously conservative "red" states than "blue" states, despite a Bible-based culture that discourages divorce.

In a new study titled "Red States, Blue States, and Divorce: Understanding the Impact of Conservative Protestantism on Regional Variation in Divorce Rates," which will be published later this month in the American Journal of Sociology, demographer and University of Texas at Austin professor Jennifer Glass set out to discover why divorce rates would be higher in religious states like Arkansas and Alabama -- which boast the second and third highest divorce rates, respectively -- but lower in more liberal states like New Jersey and Massachusetts.

It was previously thought that socioeconomic hardships in the South were largely to blame for high divorce rates, however Glass and her fellow researchers concluded that the conservative religious culture is in fact a major contributing factor thanks to "the social institutions they create" that "decrease marital stability."

Specifically, putting pressure on young people to marry sooner, frowning upon cohabitation before marriage, teaching abstinence-only sex education and making access to resources like emergency contraception more difficult all result in earlier childbearing ages and less-solid marriages from the get-go, Glass writes in the paper.

"It's surprising," W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project, told The Los Angeles Times. "In some contexts in America today, religion is a buffer against divorce. But in the conservative Protestant context, this paper is showing us that it's not."

Glass and her colleagues also concluded that the religious culture of the area permeated into the divorce rates of even the non-religious people who lived there. In other words, simply by living in counties that were dominated by conservative Protestantism, people were at a higher risk for getting divorced.

As Glass told The Los Angeles Times, "If you live in a marriage market where everybody marries young, you postpone marriage at your own risk. The best catches ... are going to go first."

Correction: An earlier version of this story referred to the University of Texas at Austin as the University of Austin. The text has been updated to reflect the change.

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religion and divorce red state divorce religious conservatives higher divorce rates Red States divorce in the south divorce bible belt divorce study Video blue states divorce rates red state values blue state divorce

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religion and divorce red state divorce religious conservatives higher divorce rates red states divorce in the south divorce bible belt divorce study video blue states divorce rates red state values blue state divorce

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'Red' States Have Higher Divorce Rates Than 'Blue' States, And Here's Why

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It may seem counterintuitive, but divorce rates are higher in religiously conservative "red" states than "blue" states, despite a Bible-based culture that discourages divorce.

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""Young adults are dropping out of college," she told the lawmakers. "They're getting married just to have insurance or not getting married to the love of their lives because they'll lose their state-funded insurance."

I can relate to that, too. My fiancé moved to a different state recently, and soon I'll be joining her. I'll be freelancing and won't have health benefits, though she will via her job. We're getting married — one year before our actual wedding — so I can get insured, too."

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Diabetic ketoacidosis is a terrible way to die. It's what happens when you don't have enough insulin. Your blood sugar gets so high that your blood becomes highly acidic, your cells dehydrate, and your body stops functioning.

Diabetic ketoacidosis is how Nicole Smith-Holt lost her son. Three days before his payday. Because he couldn't afford his insulin.

"It shouldn't have happened," Smith-Holt says looking at her son's death certificate on her dining room table in Richfield, Minn. "That cause of death of diabetic ketoacidosis should have never happened."

The price of insulin in the U.S. has more than doubled since 2012. That has put the life-saving hormone out of reach for some people with diabetes, like Smith-Holt's son Alec Raeshawn Smith. It has left others scrambling for solutions to afford the one thing they need to live. I'm one of those scrambling.
Not enough time
Most people's bodies create insulin, which regulates the amount of sugar in the blood. In the U.S., the roughly 1.25 million of us with Type 1 diabetes have to buy insulin at a pharmacy because our pancreases stopped producing it.

My first vial of insulin cost $24.56 in 2011, after insurance. Seven years later, I pay more than $80. That's nothing compared with what Alec was up against when he turned 26 and aged off his mother's insurance plan.

Smith-Holt says she and Alec started reviewing his options in February 2017, three months before his birthday on May 20. Alec's pharmacist told him his diabetes supplies would cost $1,300 a month without insurance - most of that for insulin. His options with insurance weren't much better.

Alec's yearly salary as a restaurant manager was about $35,000. Too high to qualify for Medicaid and, Smith-Holt says, too high to qualify for subsidies in Minnesota's health insurance marketplace. The plan they found had a $450 premium each month and an annualdeductible of $7,600.

"At first, he didn't realize what a deductible was," Smith-Holt says. She says Alec figured he could pick up a part-time job to help cover the $450 per month.

Then Smith-Holt explained it.

"You have to pay the $7,600 out of pocket before your insurance is even going to kick in," she remembers telling him. Alec decided going uninsured would be more manageable. Although there might have been cheaper alternatives for his insulin supply that Alec could have worked out with his doctor, he never made it that far.

He died less than one month after going off of his mother's insurance. His family thinks he was rationing his insulin - using less than he needed - to try to make it last until he could afford to buy more. He died alone in his apartment three days before payday. The insulin pen he used to give himself shots was empty.

"It's just not even enough time to really test whether [going without insurance] was working or not," Smith-Holt says.
A miracle discovery
Insulin is an unlikely symbol of America's problem with rising prescription costs.

Before the early 1920s, Type 1 diabetes was a death sentence for patients. Then, researchers at the University of Toronto - notably Frederick Banting, Charles Best and J.J.R. Macleod - discovered a method of extracting and purifying insulin that could be used to treat the condition. Banting and Macleod were awarded a Nobel Prize for the discovery in 1923.

For patients, it was nothing short of a miracle. The patent for the discovery was sold to the University of Toronto for only $1 so that live-saving insulin would be available to everyone who needed it.

Today, however, the list price for a single vial of insulin is more than $250. Most patients use two to four vials per month (I personally use two). Without insurance or other forms of medical assistance, those prices can get out of hand quickly, as they did for Alec.

Depending on whom you ask, you'll get a different response for why insulin prices have risen so high. Some blame middlemen - such as pharmacy benefit managers, like Express Scripts and CVS Health - for negotiating lower prices with pharmaceutical companies without passing savings on to customers. Others say patents on incremental changes to insulin have kept cheaper generic versions out of the market.

For Nicole Holt-Smith, as well as a growing number of online activists who tweet under the hashtag #insulin4all, much of the blame should fall on the three main manufacturers of insulin today: Sanofi of France, Novo Nordisk of Denmark and Eli Lilly and Co. in the U.S.

The three companies are being sued in the U.S. federal court by diabetic patients in Massachusetts who allege the prices are rising at the expense of patients' health.

The Eli Lilly did not make anyone available for an interview for this story. But a company spokesman noted in an email that high-deductible health insurance plans - like the one Alec found - are exposing more patients to higher prices. In August, Eli Lilly opened a help line that patients can call for assistance in finding discounted or even free insulin.
A dangerous solution
Rationing insulin, as Nicole Smith-Holt's son Alec did, is a dangerous solution. Still, 1 in 4 people with diabetes admits to having done it. I've done it. Actually, there's a lot of Alec's story that feels familiar to me.

We were both born and raised in the Midwest, just two states apart. We were both diagnosed at age 23 - pretty old to develop a condition that used to be called "juvenile diabetes." I even used to use the same sort of insulin pens that Alec was using when he died. They're more expensive, but they make management a lot easier.

"My story is not so different from what I hear from other families," Smith-Holt recently told a panel of U.S. Senate Democrats in Washington D.C., in a hearing on the high price of prescription drugs.

"Young adults are dropping out of college," she told the lawmakers. "They're getting married just to have insurance or not getting married to the love of their lives because they'll lose their state-funded insurance."

I can relate to that, too. My fiancé moved to a different state recently, and soon I'll be joining her. I'll be freelancing and won't have health benefits, though she will via her job. We're getting married - one year before our actual wedding - so I can get insured, too.
This story is part of NPR's reporting partnership with Side Effects Public Media and Kaiser Health News. A version of this story appears in The Workaround podcast.

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Insulin's High Cost Leads To Lethal Rationing

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Diabetic ketoacidosis is a terrible way to die. It's what happens when you don't have enough insulin. Your blood sugar gets so high that your blood becomes highly acidic, your cells dehydrate, and your body stops functioning. Diabetic ketoacidosis is how Nicole Smith-Holt lost her son. Three days before his payday.