What We Really Think About Adultery

He was a doctor, 47 years old. He had a successful orthopedic practice and a nearly full head of hair. Many women found him quite attractive, and vice versa.

But his string of extramarital affairs did not merit so much as a mention in his messy divorce proceedings late last year--not even when the doctor’s most recent girlfriend turned up to cheer him on in the courtroom, beaming and visibly pregnant.

“It was adultery and it meant nothing,” said the doctor’s former wife. In the courtroom and even among many of her own acquaintances, she said, “I don’t think it was taken seriously.”

As recently as a generation ago, adultery was a source of major social opprobrium. But many Americans now seem to have adopted a more casual attitude--at least when it happens to someone else. While adultery causes grief and trauma for those involved, changing attitudes may have made society and the legal system more tolerant.

Some of the experts--lawyers, therapists, sociologists--say adultery almost seems like an everyday event. Los Angeles celebrity divorce lawyer Marvin Mitchelson says infidelity is so widespread that judges in divorce cases barely blink when extramarital sex is involved. A recent adultery case in Wisconsin was considered such a novelty that the litigants found themselves bathed in the glare of media spotlights.

Of course, virtually no one advocates adultery. In fact, a majority of those surveyed in national polls continue to voice strong disapproval.

A 1989 survey from the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University showed 87% of 3,000 respondents describing extramarital sex as “always wrong” or “almost always wrong.”

But opinions expressed in a survey are one thing, and everyday life is another. “Everyone publicly will say they are against affairs, but privately they will say something else,” says New York psychotherapist Marcella Weiner.

“It is considered something that happens,” says Pepper Schwartz, a professor of sociology at the University of Washington and the author of a book called “Couples” about marital behavior. Someone who commits adultery is no longer considered to be “morally bankrupt,” Schwartz says.

When asked about changing attitudes, experts frequently point to the sexual revolution of the ‘60s and ‘70s. (See accompanying story on E8.)

“Many people now are sexually more experienced than, say, 30 years ago or 25 years ago,” says Frank Sommers, a University of Toronto psychologist who studies sexual behavior. So while “not everyone’s” attitude has changed, Sommers says that the “valence we assign to sexual interaction, which is ultimately what adultery is, is not as earth-shattering as it has been in the past.”

Extramarital affairs are now commonly seen on television. Magazines print endless articles about the subject, such as Glamour’s recent treatise, “Can Lovers Cheat and Still Be Faithful?” (The answer was: not really.) Newspapers document the affairs of the rich and the powerful, such as Donald Trump, political figures such as former Sen. Gary Hart or many Hollywood stars. These well-publicized liaisons may have helped erode some sanctions against adultery, Sommers says.

“I think people are using that as a force to loosen up some of the hypocritical forces that have bound us,” he says. “I think what people are saying is, ‘If it’s good enough for the stars, it’s good enough for me.’ They think that if those people can have an affair and still manage their lives, then they can too.”

The institutional consequences of adultery are less severe than they were 20 or 30 years ago, suggests David Moultrap, a Belmont, Mass., psychologist and author of “Husbands, Wives and Lovers.” At first, eyebrows may be raised, and fingers pointed--but those reactions pass. People are less likely to be fired from their jobs for having an affair. Adultery seldom influences a divorce settlement. Custody fights may not even acknowledge a parent’s extramarital liaisons.

Divorce attorney Mitchelson says that in 34 years of practice he has seen adultery lose its stigma. “I think it is a reflection of a society that has a lot fewer moral dictates than we used to have,” he says. “We treat marriage as something you can go in and out of.”

“There’s been a real change in the climate,” says Weiner, co-author of a book about adultery called “Stale-Mate.” “There’s no longer such a sense of being judged by the outside world. There’s a sense that you’re entitled to a good life, that you only go around once, that life is hard and that you should grab all the pleasure you can get.”

Therapists like Weiner point to their clients as a gauge of changing attitudes. When she began her practice 26 years ago, Weiner says, her patients would see her for months before discussing an affair. “Now they come in, sit down, and tell me in the first session that they’re seeing someone. I have never seen so many people talk about affairs as they are now.”

Weiner offers the example of a friend, who was considering marrying an older man. “The sex isn’t so great,” her friend told her. “But she said that was no problem, because she could always have an affair.”

In its 1990 “New Report on Sex,” the Kinsey Institute reported that 37% of husbands and 29% of wives had at least one sex partner outside marriage. But Atlanta psychiatrist Frank Pittman, in his book “Private Lies, Infidelity and the Betrayal of Intimacy,” suggests those figures are probably too low.

Surveys in recent years show that “about 50% of husbands have been unfaithful, while about 30% to 40% of wives have been,” Pittman reports in his book.

Pittman, who writes playfully that “I’ve spent my life in the middle of other people’s affairs,” has also found that “the younger generation of women is more likely to be unfaithful than the older generation was at that age or is now. In the very youngest groups, the husbands and wives are equally unfaithful, while among the oldsters, infidelity is largely a male activity. As the percentage of adulterous wives goes up, the percentage of adulterous husbands may actually have been going down.”

But “if infidelity of some sort takes place in over half of all marriages, that’s a lot of infidelity,” Pittman writes.

Most statistics on adultery refer only to sexual intercourse, says Shirley Glass, a Baltimore psychologist. “That’s a male definition,” she says. “If you look at emotional involvement and sexual involvement short of intercourse, you add another 20%.”

While any increase in adultery may have helped to soften public reaction it hasn’t lessened its impact on the couples involved.

Glass says adultery is a problem for “probably 60%” of the couples in her family therapy practice, she says.

And Fred Humphrey, a University of Connecticut professor who has had a private practice for more than 30 years, says adultery “is still a source of enormous trauma, anger and strife” in marital therapy. “There’s still an enormous hurt and shock when infidelity occurs.”

All the enlightenment in the world can’t diminish the effect when adultery hits home, Humphrey says. When it actually touches them, Humphrey says, “people really still get socked between the eyes.”

At least since the beginning of this century, the primary legal significance of adultery has been in divorce cases, says Ronald J. Allen, a professor of criminal law at Northwestern University.

However, some attorneys say current no-fault divorce laws have changed all that.

“Adultery is no longer relevant because the law has taken the position that marriage is an economic partnership, and that, therefore, the fact that someone does something in the back of a car should not affect someone’s economic rights,” says New York divorce lawyer Raoul L. Felder, whose clients included Robin Givens, ex-wife of boxer Mike Tyson.

Adultery laws have steadily woven themselves out of the country’s legal and social fabric, Allen says. Now, “when (these laws) are enforced, people look at them oddly.”

Family structures have broken down, Allen says, and sexual monogamy is no longer a mandatory norm. “Essentially, it looks to me like adultery isn’t the morals crime that it used to be.”

Nonetheless, laws stay on the books in many states, he says, “because what politician is going to come out in favor of adultery?”

In 1990, felony adultery charges were brought against a Wisconsin woman in a case that evoked shades of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter,” a morality tale about adultery in 17th-Century New England. Truck driver Robert Carroll claimed his then-wife, Donna, had an affair while he was out of town on business.

The case was controversial both because the adultery law was invoked at all, and because Robert Carroll admitted to having an extramarital affair of his own, but was never charged. In the end, Donna Carroll, while never admitting guilt, agreed to complete 40 hours of community service and to attend a parent-education session.

Donna Carroll’s lawyer, Jay S. Moynihan, says he was amazed that the case got as far as a hearing before Wisconsin Family Court. “I remember having this picture of people all across the state, sitting across the breakfast table from their spouses, opening the newspaper and suddenly spilling coffee all over themselves” when they read about an adultery prosecution, he says.

Although virtually never enforced, adultery remains a felony in Wisconsin, where Donna Carroll might have faced a $10,000 fine and up to two years in jail.

Twenty-five other states retain some kind of adultery law. (California is not among them.) Michigan and Massachusetts have felony adultery laws. In Maryland, adultery is a misdemeanor, punishable by a $10 fine.

Until only a few weeks ago, adultery in Connecticut was a misdemeanor carrying a fine of $1,000 and up to one year in jail. But a flurry of four cases in one three-month period last year raised the concern that old laws regulating sexual behavior would once again be enforced. This prompted the state legislature to overhaul its statutes, effectively taking the crime of adultery off the books.

Attorney Richard D. Tulisano, chairman of the Connecticut House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, led the move to rewrite the laws largely because he said the old law was being misused. “Vengeance is not the right way to use the law,” he says.

Contemporary regulations, says Tulisano, “are selectively enforced,” bringing their effectiveness into question.

At least in colonial days, when states like Connecticut first enacted their adultery regulations, “everybody got punished,” Tulisano says. “Under God’s law, everybody (who committed adultery) went to hell.”