Marriage Stands Up for Itself
They’re done. Toast. The governor needs his head checked. His wife needs to launch his clothes from the bedroom window. Time for those two to get in line behind that “Jon & Kate Plus 8” couple and call this charade off.
The speculation over the future of the marriage of Mark Sanford, the South Carolina governor, after his recently disclosed affair is likely to die off well before the family’s pain. So, too, will the unsolicited lectures — about his hypocrisy, about her obligations, about the dire state of marriage in general.
Yet if recent research is any guide, the marriage itself has a chance to outlast all of it, the public leer and the private sting, by many years.
Despite strong social riptides working against it — the liberalization of divorce laws, the vanishing stigma of divorce, the continual online temptations of social sites like MySpace or Facebook — the marriage bond is far stronger in 21st-century America than many may assume. Infidelity is one of the most common reasons cited by people who divorce. But surveys find the majority of people who discover a cheating spouse remain married to that person for years afterward. Many millions more shrug off, or work through, strong suspicions or evidence of infidelity. And recent trends in marriage suggest that the institution itself has become more resilient in recent years, not less so.
“Every marriage has many, many more dimensions to it than faithfulness,” said Betsey Stevenson, an assistant professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania who studies marriage and divorce trends. “We don’t see the other sacrifices or other betrayals of promises. I wonder if faithfulness really is a litmus test in marriages, or if it just becomes a litmus test in the media because that’s the one betrayal we hear about in these celebrity relationships.”
Historically, the institution of marriage has not succumbed to infidelity so much as coexisted with it, like a body does with the flu virus: weakening at times, yet developing some immunity from long exposure. Anthropologists have found patterns of infidelity in diverse communities around the world, just as historians and novelists have. Many men and women, and most visibly men, have long been “publicly monogamous and hidden their affairs,” as the anthropologist and writer Helen Fisher of Rutgers University has said. Read Article
By Benedict Carey and Tara Parker-Pope