I experienced a version of this myself once, when my girlfriend got upset with me due to Instagram activity. I was taking off for a flight to New Zealand for a cousin’s wedding. Before boarding, I called her. I got her voice mail. I texted her a message saying, “Hey! Taking off soon. Just wanted to talk before the flight took off. Gimme a ring.” She wrote back, “I called you four hours ago.”
I could tell she was upset because she also included the emoji of the Indian guy with a gun beside his head.
I called her back and eventually she answered. I explained that I was busy packing and getting ready for my trip and that I knew I would have time to talk when I got to the airport. She said, “Oh, so you were busy packing? Well, I saw on your friend’s Instagram he posted a photo of you hanging out by the pool taking Polaroids, so I feel like if you have time to play with a Polaroid camera, you’d have time to call or text me back.”
I simply said I was sorry and it wouldn’t happen again.
A week later, though, it was Valentine’s Day. I pulled out all the stops. It was our first Valentine’s together. I sent her her favorite flowers at work, along with Fuzzball (a stuffed animal from the Disney Michael Jackson show Captain EO, to remind her of our trip to Disney World) and some chocolates that were the same type she had loved on a trip we took to Mexico together.
When she came to meet me at home after work, I made her close her eyes and walked her into a room where I had on one of her favorite Stevie Wonder records. When she opened her eyes, she saw glasses of her favorite wine for the both of us. Then it was time for the gift exchange.
I went first.
I said, “Hey, so you remember a week ago you were upset that I didn’t call you back before my trip, and you were mad because I was playing with the Polaroid camera. Well, the reason I was doing that is I bought you this nice vintage Polaroid camera and I was just making sure it worked before I gave it to you, so . . . here’s your gift.”
She felt HORRIBLE.
It was the greatest Valentine’s Day gift I’ve ever received.
HOW PREVALENT IS CHEATING?
Fear and suspicion of cheating aren’t always unjustified. According to nationally representative survey data, in the United States 20 to 40 percent of heterosexual married men and 25 percent of heterosexual married women will have at least one extramarital affair during their lifetime, and 2 to 4 percent of all married people are willing to tell survey researchers that they’ve had an affair in the past year.
In nonmarried but “committed” couples there is a 70 percent incidence of cheating. In addition, 60 percent of men and 53 percent of women confess that they’ve engaged in “mate poaching”9 (trying to seduce a person out of a committed relationship). This is not to be confused with rhino poaching, where someone tries to seduce a rhinoceros into a cross-species romantic tryst. Or egg poaching, where someone tries to seduce a delicious egg into their belly without overcooking it.
Let’s take the “best case” cheating scenario. Your partner of ten or more years has had a one-night stand with someone they will never see again, they regret it, it didn’t mean anything, and they would never do it again.
According to Match.com’s nationally representative survey, 80 percent of men and 76 percent of women would prefer that their partner “confess their mistake . . . and suffer the consequences,” rather than just “take their secret to the grave.”
I asked a lot of people in the focus groups how they’d feel about their partner having a one-night stand with someone else. Their discomfort seemed to be less about their partner hooking up with someone else—in practical terms, it wouldn’t change much about the relationship—and more about knowing that their partner had been unfaithful.
“In theory I’d be okay with it,” said Melissa, twenty-six. “But actually knowing it happened? I don’t think I could handle that.”
As we all saw in the hit film Indecent Proposal, just because Woody Harrelson thinks he’ll be cool with something doesn’t mean he will be when it actually happens.
Others were not at all accepting of the hypothetical situation. For many it would be an immediate relationship ender. One woman we met recalled a night when she told friends, a couple with a new baby, about an extramarital relationship that she’d had.
The wife turned to her husband and said, “If you ever cheat on me, I am divorcing you and taking the baby,” then got up and went to bed. And he said, “Sounds good to me. Sayonara, lady!”
Okay, the latter part of that exchange didn’t happen, but there definitely were those who had zero tolerance for infidelity, and also marriages that have ended with someone angrily leaving a room and shouting, “Sayonara, lady!”
FRANCE:
MONOGAMY AND MISTRESSES