In the United States there’s an optimistic expectation that most people will remain faithful to their partner, but actual data show great numbers of people will not. As we’ve seen, when it comes to sex and relationships, what we believe in theory does not line up with what we do in practice.
When the New York Times opinion writer Pamela Druckerman conducted interviews for Lust in Translation, her book on infidelity around the world, cheaters in the United States seemed to try to distance themselves from their act. “A lot of people I interviewed started off by telling me, ‘I’m not the kind of person who would have an affair,’” she explained. “And I’d always think, Of course, you are exactly the kind of person who would have an affair, because there isn’t one kind.”
According to a recent survey of attitudes about extramarital affairs in forty different nations, 84 percent of people in the United States said infidelity was “morally unacceptable.”10 Another poll, from Gallup, found that infidelity is more universally disapproved of than polygamy, animal cloning, and suicide.11
So if there were two guys at a bar, one cheating on his wife and another with a cloned pig named Bootsie, it would be the cheater, not Bootsie the pig, getting more disapproving looks.
When you compare this level of disapproval with the data on the actual prevalence of cheating, it paints a strange picture. Do we really believe that all these masses of people who engage in affairs are immoral monsters? That’s quite a lot of monsters. It seems that we often reluctantly accept the act of cheating in our own lives while still condemning the practice at large.
Not all cultures condemn infidelity so fiercely.
The country that has by far the highest tolerance for extramarital affairs is—no surprise here—France, where only 47 percent of people surveyed found such activity morally unacceptable. That’s good, because France is the country with the highest rates of infidelity: 55 percent for men and 32 percent for women, according to the latest data.12
The second-most-tolerant nation is Germany, with 60 percent considering extramarital affairs morally unacceptable. Several other European nations, including Spain and Italy, are in that range.
In contrast, the countries that rank close to the United States are mainly in Latin America and Africa, places like Ghana, Bolivia, and Brazil. Those where disapproval rates are highest, in the ninetieth percentile, are mainly traditional Islamic nations in the Middle East.
Seizing an opportunity to eat amazing food in Paris, I decided to travel to France and try to learn about their romantic culture.
Now, granted, everyone knows France is famously tolerant of infidelity. But there’s a difference between reading a number from a survey of attitudes and talking to real people about their experiences with something as messy as having affairs. We went to France not to verify that people cheat and feel differently about it from how we do but to find out how their more open attitudes about monogamy affect their relationships, their families, and their lives. We didn’t romanticize the way they do things there, but we wondered what, if anything, people in more conservative places could learn from the more lenient French approach.
During our interviews and focus groups, most of the French people I met said it’s natural, if not inevitable, to seek sexual novelty and excitement. They’d still get angry about cheating, but not in the same way we do in the States. They don’t judge the transgression so harshly.
“In France, you can be a good guy and still have affairs,” a young Parisian named Lukas told us.
“I don’t think you can be faithful all your life,” said Irene, twenty-three. “It’s unreasonable to think you wouldn’t be attracted to someone else. If I was married and we had kids, I wouldn’t give that all up if he slept with someone else.”
“You know pretty much everyone has strayed, so there’s more understanding when it happens,” said George, a twenty-five-year-old who’d lived in France and in Austria. “In the subconscious of French people is an idea that everyone cheats, even though in fact not everyone does.”
In France most people have come to expect that their political leaders will have affairs, at minimum, and often an entire second family too. When Fran?ois Mitterrand was president, his mistress Anne Pingeot, and their daughter, Mazarine Pingeot, would often visit him at the élysée Palace, despite the fact that he had a wife and children. At Mitterrand’s funeral in 1996, his second family sat alongside his first family.
Politicians aren’t the only ones who do this kind of thing. The focus group participants shared tales of other arrangements French couples have that would be hard to fathom in the United States. One woman told us that her uncle used to quietly take the bones from his wife’s meat dishes to feed the dog of his mistress, and eventually her aunt, annoyed by the charade, simply started bagging the bones for her husband’s mistress herself.