“O curse of marriage, that we can call these delicate creatures ours and not their appetites”.
– William Shakespeare, Othello Act 3, Scene 2
A Ghanaian writer who does a lot of work on all aspects of relationships recently published accounts of infidelity from a group of anonymous married men and women. Reading through the rather graphic descriptions set me thinking. It made me want to explore the topic and so I started doing some searching.
The issue of infidelity in marriages, its causes and ramifications can fill a book of thousand pages. When I sat down to write my thoughts on the topic, I resolved to let a yet unknown line of thinking guide me. Let’s see what I can tease out.
There are events in life that can incite a lot of emotional turmoil – the death of a loved one comes to mind. Another is infidelity or adultery for married folks. If you do not believe me, find a quiet corner, close your eyes and imagine your wife or husband making love to another. See?
The chaos that ensues in the life of the cheated almost mirrors that seen in patients after trauma and has garnered the description, “Post Infidelity Stress Disorder”, PISD.
Even though compared to married women married men are more prone to cheat (by a factor of about 2:1), both sexes do stray. Cultural stipulations may dampen the infidelity of women but it still does occur.
To understand why we stray, one has to look back at human ancestry.
The man historically was concerned about sowing seed and propagating his genes. His involvement in conception lasted minutes to maybe an hour so multiple sexual partners were possible and thus that sexual appetite.
Women, on the other hand, could get pregnant only twice a year, irrespective of how many sexual partners they had. Since the woman was more concerned about her offspring and their well-being, her craving for sex was not as incessant and rabid.
Yet throughout history, men’s appetite for casual sex has found some reciprocation for it to last through the ages. This means that there were women throughout history until today who have shared the desire for casual sex too.
Sexual jealousy in men, stories of infidelity from all cultures and the controversial theory of sperm competition (this occurs when the sperm from two different men inhabit a woman’s reproductive tract at the same time) may point to the fact that women are also connoisseurs of casual sex.
So whereas men are driven by a burning desire to pass on their genes, leading them to stray, women cheat for more solid reasons. These are all reasons that came about from our days as hunter-gatherers.
First is the economic benefit of liaising with a man wealthier and more powerful than one’s partner. In olden times, this could mean more meat and yams in the dry season. Today, we see this driving infidelity in poor countries and families in the lower socioeconomic bracket. Another reason is the genetic benefit. Women picked men who had traits a partner might not have. Lastly is the need for a woman to have a form of backup in case her partner was no more. Life then was short. An affair provided “partner insurance”.
Thus we see that both men and women have a propensity to stray.
That is why over the ages, the human has developed a rather powerful mechanism to protect against this insult.
This phenomenon is jealousy. Even though jealousy can ruin relationships and even lead to men battering or killing women, in its benign form, it is the one thing that helps us fight for our partners and ward off potential sexual challengers.
Interestingly, the behavior in women that evokes jealousy in men is totally different from that in men that makes women green.
Now due to internal fertilization in humans, a woman is always sure that the baby that pops out after nine months is hers. The man though cannot be sure. How can he tell that that baby was not sired by another man?
The woman, on the other hand, has a different set of worries. For her, a man’s emotional involvement is the surest sign that he is still committed. If he starts showing emotional involvement with another woman, that is a dangerous sign.
So for the woman, it is not so much the one night stand but that threatening emotional attachment to another female that is dangerous.
For the man, the thought of his wife involved in the physical sexual act with another man evokes the most jealousy. It births the fear that he could be a cuckold – a man raising a child sired by another man or even the husband of an adulteress. Being a cuckold can also be a fetish but that is a discussion for another day. For now, let’s stick with adultery.
The term “cuckold” comes from the cuckoo bird, a bird that lays its egg in the nests of other birds so they incubate, hatch, and raise the young cuckoo. It is a behavior termed “brood parasitism”.
Hence adulterous women risk turning their men into the bird that “breeds the young cuckoo”. It is this innate fear that drives the sexual jealousy in men. It is this innate fear that through the ages caused men to make female adultery a crime, sometimes punishable by death.
The plight of the cuckold is depicted beautifully in the hilarious Miller’s Tale from Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales”.
So how rampant is cuckolding really? A UK study from 2009 puts it at about 1 in 25 children. However, could this higher in other countries. I have a feeling it might be.
In most western societies, adulterous behavior can have dire economic consequences for the cheater or even the whole family including the kids, especially when it leads to divorce. This may act as a deterrent in some instances against adultery.
In societies where divorces do not carry such an economic burden for the man, it is not uncommon to see the rampant male adulterous behavior. I call this the “Sidechick Culture”, where a “sidechick” is whichever woman a man may be having an affair with at any particular time.
Besides the risk of disease, the emotional toll on the women and the neglect of the family, such behavior makes men in such cultures oblivious to the biggest fear of any man — to be a cuckold.
As an adulterous man is busy sowing his wild oats all over town, his wife may just well be finding solace in the arms of another man. Women, as we discussed earlier, are wont to do that too. The interesting bit is, an adulterous woman has the most desire to sleep with the other man when she is ovulating and with her husband at the other times.
In an interesting Uk study from 2007, strippers were asked to keep a tally of their tips for two months. They also reported the beginning and the start of their menses so the investigators could calculate their ovulation time. The strippers received an average of £42 per hour when they were near ovulation, but only £33 at all other times.
So guess who will impregnate the wife of that adulterous man who is having an affair too? And if she does get pregnant, guess who will raise that child if she stays married to the husband?
I think an active adulterous life prevents a man from picking up cues that his wife might be straying, a feat that under normal circumstances is nigh impossible.
There are several reasons given for why the Akans of Ghana have maternal inheritance. The one I subscribe to the most is because of cuckolding — a man can be sure of the fact that his sister’s son is his kin but can never be sure that his own wife’s son is really his.
So to all married men who prance around enabled by a “sidechick culture” to tick off their amorous conquests like Cassanova; to all the married men who ascribe to the belief of Verus, that “Uxor enim dignitatis nomen est, non voluptatis”, (a wife is for honor, not for pleasure)…to all of you I have this old saying:
“Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe”.
References:
Buss, David M. The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love or Sex. Bloomsbury, 2001.
Lecky, W.E.H. History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne, vol. 1 [1869]. E-Book
Anna Hodgekiss For The Daily Mail, 31 October 2016: Why the time of the month makes you TWICE as likely to CHEAT: Periods make women smarter, sexier and more tempted to stray
Wikipedia. Cuckold. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuckold
Wikipedia. Adultery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adultery