SEXUALITY IN MARRIAGE: CONSENSUAL ADULTERY
Consensual adultery occurs with the knowledge and consent of the spouse. Smith and Smith have described three forms: adultery toleration, comarital relations, and group marriage. Adultery toleration is similar to conventional adultery except that the spouses extend to each other the freedom to engage in extramarital sex, relieving the partners of the requirement of sexual exclusivity and of the need for secrecy and deception. Such liberal arrangements are by no means new. Havelock Ellis had such an agreement with his wife, and the gynecologist, Robert L. Dickinson in 1932 described such a case among his series (Brecher). Others have been reported by Hamilton and by Lindsey and Evans. On a more contemporary level, the open marriage model proposed by the O’Neills includes absence of sexual exclusivity.
Comarital relations incorporate extramarital relations into the marital relationship. Both partners participate as a dyad, both on a couple-to-couple basis and sometimes a group basis, which is popularly called mate swapping or swinging. Although such relations may be quite impersonal and transient, the Smiths say that their studies suggest that some couples “succeed in establishing basic friendship relations which yield more enduring and more rewarding social networks”.
Group marriage does not include, strictly speaking, extramarital relations, since it consists of members of a group all of whom consider themselves married to each other. Rarer than the other two forms, it is ideologically the same as the Oneida model discussed earlier, with unrestricted sexual access of the individual members to each other.
Such forms of extramarital sex with the knowledge, consent, and sometimes the participation of the spouse are phenomena which have attracted much more attention than their prevalence in the population seems to justify. Their deviance from traditional norms in an area of behavior which more than any other has historically been rigidly defined and prescribed has attracted a high level of attention in the popular media.
Recent estimates agree that the numbers of persons participating in any of the forms of consensual adultery are quite small. No reliable data exist on adultery toleration but if they did, they would probably be higher than figures for the other two forms, simply because “toleration” is less deviant from conventional norms than is mate swapping or group marriage. Hunt found that about two percent of the husbands and wives in his sample had ever engaged in mate swapping, but Tavris and Sadd reported that four percent of the Redbook wives, a less representative sample, had tried swapping at least once. A stratified probability sample of 579 married adults drawn from a mid-western community of 40,000 found that less than two percent of the respondents had ever participated in swinging (Spanier and Cole). Smith and Smith state that the incidence of group marriage is far lower than either of the other forms. Ramey provides an interesting account of eighty upper-middle class couples who explored over a three-year period the various problems and possibilities of communal and group marriage arrangements. Only eighteen of these couples did, in fact, have any experience in such living arrangements.
Finally, in an analysis of some moral and social implications of infidelity, Bernard speculates that the conditions of exclusivity and permanence required in traditional marriage may now be incompatible: “It may be that we will have to choose. … If we insist on permanence, exclusivity is harder to enforce; if we insist on exclusivity, permanence may be endangered. The trend . . . seems to be in the direction of exclusivity at the expense of permanence in the younger years but permanence at the expense of exclusivity in the later years”.
Bernard reveals in this same paper that she has changed her views on the significance for women of extramarital relations. A few years ago she thought that women could not be casual about such relations. She sees now that there is a new kind of woman who can be casual about sex and can accept the idea of sex-as-fun without conflict. She believes that the increasing economic independence of women plays some part in this change. We have seen already that working women were more likely than nonworking (outside the home) women to have affairs, certainly in part because of more opportunities and contacts with men. At the same time, such a woman, less dependent on her husband for economic security, might be less fearful of the consequences of discovery. She also might be less frightened at the prospect of her husband’s involvement with another woman although, as Bernard rightly pointed out, economic independence is far from the whole story. The threat to one’s psychological needs can be more terrifying than the threat to one’s material security.
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