わりに面白い記事 浮気、不倫について
But why should everything we built be destroyed by a minor infidelity?”
“There is no subject that elicits more fear, gossip and fascination in the realm of couples than adultery,” says Perel. Back when divorce was a shameful prospect, couples grappling with an affair typically found a way to muddle through. Now, however, men and women are often made to feel ashamed if they try to move past a partner’s infidelity, instead of “kicking the dog to the kerb”. This view is particularly popular in America, Perel adds, where “cheating” tends to be seen in purely moral terms. Critics of Hillary Clinton, for example, have long seen her tolerance of her husband’s infidelities as a blot on her character, rather than as a sign that she prioritises their strengths together over his personal weaknesses. This is a problem, Perel explains, because we have never been more inclined to stray.
Reliable statistics on infidelity are hard to come by as there are few incentives for candour and definitions vary. Numbers of those in Western countries admitting to some sort of infidelity range from 30% to 75% of men and 20% to 68% of women. Now that more women enjoy financial independence and jobs outside the home, the gap between philandering men and women is narrowing swiftly. “There is not a single other taboo that is universally condemned and universally practised,” says Perel. Basically, cheating is something we don’t want and don’t like, but it is something we do and do often.
Nowhere is the prohibition against infidelity in the West more severe – and the consequences more dire – than in America. “People in the States are massively hypocritical,” says Perel. “They don’t cheat any less than the French. They just feel more guilty about it.” Perel argues that this is because Americans not only have more puritanical views of sex and deceit, but also because struggling with self-control is central to the national ethos. “Everything is exaggerated here, everything is world-famous, the portions are gigantic, it’s all about excess and control. In Belgium you don’t sit and eat a meal and talk about all the things you shouldn’t be eating because it’s bad for you. Being bad is a pleasure.”
Perel wants to change the way we think about infidelity. Instead of seeing it as a pathological and immoral impulse that invariably leaves trauma and destruction in its wake, she wants us to understand that extramarital yearnings are all too natural, and that affairs are terribly, perhaps even inevitably, human.
“Infidelity was always painful, but today it’s ‘traumatic’,” says Perel. “This notion that ‘my whole life is a lie, I don’t know anymore what to believe’, or that you apply PTSD to infidelity? That’s a completely recent construct.”
Most people – including many couples therapists, particularly in America – assume that if you stray outside the marriage, there must be something fundamentally wrong with the union itself. But Perel argues that our motivations for affairs are far more complicated than that. “In an age of consumerism, an age of entitlement, we are never meant to feel satisfied,” she says
This is not a new perception, as countless women’s magazine stories entitled “365 ways to bring passion back into your marriage” can attest. What’s interesting about Perel’s work is her nuanced view of the erotic. Infidelity, she believes, is rarely about sex, or even about the other person. Rather, it’s about recapturing “a feeling of aliveness with someone, of playfulness and curiosity, of selfishness” – that is, the very feelings that time and the mundane necessities of life tend to erode in marriage.
Desiring people other than our partner is fundamentally, unsettlingly natural. Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist, argues that adultery even makes evolutionary sense, as affairs allow males to spread their seed, and females to diversify their gene pool and collect a little extra help on the side. But what we once tolerated as an unfortunate fact of life, we now see as traumatic. This, Perel argues, is because we not only expect our carefully chosen soul mates magically to satisfy all of our needs, but also rely on them to anchor us in an otherwise rootless and existentially lonely world.
Yet Americans have a uniquely narrow-minded take on infidelity, says Perel. “Most Europeans see it as an imperfection, and not something worth destroying your marriage over.” But Americans, who tend to see sex as corrupting and approach pleasure with scepticism, often view affairs in more binary terms. “Here there’s a persecutor and a victim, these are the only two options,” Perel says. “The language is criminal. I think that speaks volumes.”
“I began to understand eroticism not from the sexual modern definition, but from the mystical definition, as in maintaining aliveness, an antidote to death.”
she also sees infidelity as a complicated business that often lacks a clear villain or victim. “Betrayal comes in many forms,” she says. “You can be the person who has steadfastly refused your partner for decades, but then he cheats on you and you’re the victim? The victim of the marriage is not always the victim of the affair.”
Others criticise Perel for her view that loving couples might struggle with desire.
To suggest that people in happy marriages seek affairs is all kind of a fabrication. People have affairs because they get lonely, because they can’t connect with their partner. They tend to be into thrill-seeking and not into long-term relationships.”
浮気というのは、男がその精子を拡散する意味でも、女が多様な遺伝子を確保しておく意味でも、進化論的に合理性があるし、実際、かなり割合で浮気をしている。
ところが、アメリカ人もフラン人と同じくらい浮気しているのに、アメリカ人は罪悪感だけはひどく感じる。それは、彼らにとって、浮気は不倫、不道徳であり、性行為がそもそも、堕落で、快楽について懐疑的だからだ、と。例えば、ヒラリーがビルの浮気を大目にみたときも、、ヒラリーが浮気という一時の事件より、ビルとの長い関係の方を重視したとはみられず、ヒラリーの性格の欠点のように世間から評価されたのも、そうした道徳観からだ、と。
アメリカでは、夫や妻が浮気すると、結婚の終わりで、もう何を信じて良いのかわからない、などと絶望に陥ったりするが、しかし、欧州では、浮気は、人間の不完全さの表れであり、浮気ごときで関係を終わらせるとは限らない。
浮気されると浮気された人が被害者のような思い込みがあるが、しかし、例えば、パートナーとの性行為をずっと拒否していたかもしれず、誰が被害者なのかも、単純な話ではない。
もっとも、浮気をするのは、また、誰かと以前のように、いっしょに活き活きとしていたい、おちゃらけたい、好奇心をもって付き合いたい、といったところからきていて、
相手に不満があるとか、セックスがもの足りないからするのではないのである、と。エロティズムとは、まさに、生き生きとした感じを維持することで、死の対極にあるものである、と。
反対意見もあるようですが、面白い。
因みに、各国の浮気率
浮気に関する寛容度（上の国のほうが浮気は駄目率が高い）
もう一つ、面白いのは、この人、外国生まれでアメリカ国籍
Although Perel became an American citizen in 2013, she remains a perennial outsider – a Jew in Antwerp, a Belgian in Israel, where she went to university, a European in America. This distance, and her way with languages, lends some heft to her observations of universal urges and local idiosyncrasies
Perel’s status as a foreigner also seems to give her licence to say things that might be off limits to insiders
自分のことを perennial outsider 永遠のよそ者、としている。
外国出身者は、アメリカでも、eternal foreigner とかperpetual foreigner とか言われるのであるが、それを、逆手にとって、アメリカを独自の観点から観察できるものとして自分を評価しているし、また、他人からも、そうした評価を得ているわけですね。
