OK, now that the election is over, let’s get back to talking about what’s really important: Sex.

In all the election frenzy, you may have missed an article in the October 28th New York Times about research showing marital infidelity is on the rise, particularly among younger couples. But couples over 60 are also getting friskier, with Viagra and HRT named as co-conspirators in lubricating what would once be considered semi-geriatric sex.

However, it is the rise in infidelity among women both young and old that was considered the most notable finding.

For me, the most interesting aspect of the research was the implication of electronic communication in infidelity for the women surveyed, with most saying that it had played a major role in their affairs. And not, as you might expect, because it assists in making dates for clandestine meetings, but because talking creates intimacy, perhaps even faster and better than sex does. And talking, it seems, leads to sex.

This will come as no real surprise to most women, who will tell you that while men may be focused on visual attraction, we are seduced by communication. Talk to us the right way -- and even better, listen to us -- and we may be yours.

And the opportunity for intimate talk (without being found out by your spouse) has never been easier. As the New York Times article notes:

And even for women who stay home, cellphones, e-mail and instant messaging appear to be allowing them to form more intimate relationships, marriage therapists say. Dr. Frank Pittman, an Atlanta psychiatrist who specializes in family crisis and couples therapy, says he has noticed more women talking about affairs centered on “electronic” contact.

“I see a changing landscape in which the emphasis is less on the sex than it is on the openness and intimacy and the revelation of secrets,” said Dr. Pittman, the author of “Private Lies: Infidelity and the Betrayal of Intimacy” (Norton, 1990). “Everybody talks by cellphone and the relationship evolves because you become increasingly distant from whomever you lie to, and you become increasingly close to whomever you tell the truth to.”

I found Dr. Pittman’s conclusion striking because, after being a spectator to the infidelity of various friends, I have arrived at a similar conclusion, one that inverts the conventional wisdom:

I believe that deception leads to infidelity rather than infidelity leading to deception.

That is, I think deception is a precondition of infidelity, not a by-product of it. And I’m not talking about lies used to cover one’s actions – that’s the kind of deception that follows infidelity, and the type that everyone thinks of when you pair the two concepts.

No, I’m referring to deception about one’s feelings, thoughts and desires -- a deception that often occurs almost entirely in silence, in the lack of what is shared, rather than in outright lies. I think that such deception always precedes any infidelity, and for months, if not years, before any unfaithfulness occurs. In some cases, it may have gone on for the entire relationship.

Whenever you hide your real feelings from your partner, you begin descending the ladder of intimacy that you climbed as you formed the partnership. With each omission or lie, you slip further and further away from the shared truth of your relationship, loosening whatever bonds you share. And every inch of your inner self that you hide makes it easier to expose your outer self to a new lover.

And, as Dr. Pittman notes, it’s not just that hiding distances you from your existing partner – it’s that revealing yourself emotionally draws you to the new one.

When we do an emotional striptease, it’s the ultimate foreplay. When we tell someone what we can’t tell our partners – and even tell them that we’re revealing something our partners don’t know about us -- we build a bed not of deception but of truths, a bed that we can’t wait to lie in. We want to make love as our true selves, the selves that we have been hiding from our partner but revealing to our new love.

Most people turn this around – blame their partner for the lack of intimacy, claiming s/he doesn’t communicate or want to be close. Yet for every element of truth in such accusations, there is a larger lie, which is that the unfaithful partner has been withdrawing from the relationship for some time.

And it’s that very distance that enables the infidelity. It’s far easier to harm someone we don’t know than one we do (which is why soldiers are taught to dehumanize the “enemy”). Distancing yourself from someone you loved and pledged your life to is the only way to go through with an act that in your heart you know will probably devastate them.

Many years ago, a boyfriend went seemingly overnight from planning a life together to abruptly breaking up with me. And what hurt most was that while I was swimming in a deep and shattering grief, he seemed cold and distant, unaffected by losing a woman he’d called his “soulmate.” And when I tearfully asked him about this, he admitted that he’d had to cut off his feelings in order to separate from me. He had decided the relationship wasn’t tenable and the break-up needed to happen, and amputated his feelings accordingly.

We think relationships follow feelings, but often we cut our feelings to fit the relationship we want to have – or get out of.

People often describe their infidelities as being inevitable, filling a vacuum. Few seem to consider that they created the vacuum by subtracting themselves from the existing relationship, which they then deem “empty.”

And empty it is – empty of the wandering partner, who moved step by step, phone call by phone call, away from their old partner and closer to their new one.

 

 

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