The Wanderlust of Married Women

Laura seemed to have it all. She was smart and beautiful. She had an intelligent, loving husband, two beautiful children and an interesting career.

But that was not enough. She wanted excitement and passion. So for 11 years she carried on an extramarital affair with a longtime friend, a married lawyer. It was during their forbidden, secret moments together that Laura (not her real name) got “the rush” she was seeking. And it wasn’t just sex.

“The secretiveness and the lust of the affair alone became addictive,” she recalls. “It was risky and it was exhilarating. It was an incredible high--like when you first fall in love.”

Laura’s story of betrayal reflects in many ways what author Dalma Heyn observes in her controversial book published this year, “The Erotic Silence of the American Wife” (Turtle Bay Books, $22).

More women today, Heyn says in the book, are rejecting the role of the forever loyal, self-sacrificing “perfect wife” and are finding pleasure and escape through extramarital relationships.

Far from ruining a woman’s life, an adulterous relationship can actually enrich it, contends Heyn, a former editor-in-chief of Family Health magazine and executive editor of McCall’s.

Although Heyn insists she is not advocating adultery, her research and interviews with hundreds of women who had strayed outside their marriages led her to conclude that in some cases, infidelity in the ‘90s may even enhance and save marriages.

However, many, including experts in the field of marital relationships, warn that adultery isn’t all fun and games. It’s a dangerous violation of trust that shatters marriages and causes enormous pain to children. Some women who have been unfaithful say that after the thrill is gone, their lives are left in shambles.

Cathy, an Orange County doctor’s wife who fell in love with one of her husband’s colleagues, disagrees that adultery can improve a marriage.

“My advice to married women is: Don’t fool around. Having an affair and living two lives may be fun at first. But you pay for it later. Too many people get hurt.”

Even Laura admits she deluded herself for years into thinking she had the best of both worlds--a great marriage and a lover on the side.

But eventually the fantasy began to crumble and her marriage was left in tatters.

“An affair does not enhance your marriage, it detracts from it,” she now believes. “It was an escape. A way for me to avoid facing things in my relationship with my husband.”

Some marriage and family experts, as well as divorce lawyers, agree they see more women today who admit they have been unfaithful to their husbands.

Women have always had affairs, they say. So it’s debatable whether an increasing number of women are actually doing it, or they are just more willing to talk about their indiscretions.

San Juan Capistrano psychologist John Paul Gray, who is president of the Orange County Psychological Assn., believes “more women today are giving themselves permission to have affairs when they think they have a dead relationship (with their husbands).”

“They are beginning to view it as men do,” observes psychologist Everett Jacobson, who counsels married couples at his Yorba Linda and Long Beach offices.

“If men can do it, why can’t women?” is a refrain he sometimes hears from clients. In what he views as “one of the more negative aspects of women’s movement,” Jacobson says some women believe they “can act out and do all the terrible things men can do.”

“There seems to be a breakdown of trust and commitment in marriages and it’s a reflection of what is happening in society,” says Jacobson.

The statistics on infidelity among women vary greatly depending on the study.

The latest report from the Kinsey Institute in 1990 estimated that 29% of all American wives have had extramarital sex at least once. Whereas, in 1987 researcher Shere Hite surveyed 5,000 married women and found that 70% of them had been unfaithful to their husbands.

Most women who are having dalliances are doing so for the same reasons men do--they feel neglected or their sex lives are not good, according to Claremont psychologist and family therapist Marcia Lasswell.

As more women enter the work arena and begin reaching equal status with men, they have more opportunities to meet professional men they find interesting and with whom they may share career goals and interests, according to Shirley Glass, a Baltimore psychologist noted for her national research on issues involving marriage and sex.

An affair, whether it is strictly emotional or sexual, is bound to bring some excitement because “you don’t have to live with the realities of life,” points out Glass. “An affair is fantasy.” Lasswell, president-elect of the American Assn. of Marriage and Family Therapists, agrees, saying, “You don’t have to deal with backed-up garbage disposals, kids with measles or paying the bills.”

During her affair, Cathy recalls, “I could get all dressed up, leave the kitchen and kids behind and enter my pretend world. This man made me feel good about myself. He really paid attention to me and talked to me.”

Often, when marriages or relationships have passed the initial magical phase of romantic passion, people complain that something is missing and they may seek satisfaction from someone else, say family therapists.

Consequently, if women feel their husbands are disinterested in them, it can be an enormous temptation to suddenly “have someone new lavishing praise and attention on them,” says Yorba Linda psychologist Lois Gobrecht.

She often hears women describe their extramarital affair as like “having a new best friend.” The psychologist says the women usually add, “My husband doesn’t treat me like that anymore.”

But Gobrecht and others doubt Heyn’s theory that some women can really be in love with two men at the same time.

When a husband and wife “are passionately in love, they only have eyes for each other,” says Gobrecht. “An affair is a symptom of a poor relationship with your husband.”

Heyn’s book is based on her research involving interviews with hundreds of primarily white, upper-middle-class professional women between the ages 20 and 60.

The book has drawn considerable fire from some corners and support from others.

“Dalma Heyn shows us a new reality and a tantalizing hint of the future--and neither women nor marriage will ever be the same,” says feminist Gloria Steinem in her endorsement on the book cover.

Critics of “Erotic Silence” challenge her unscientific method of reaching conclusions based on interviews with friends and acquaintances from primarily professional, upper-middle-class backgrounds. And she fails to seriously address the negative effects affairs have on children and husbands.

Psychologist Lasswell and others insist there’s really no such thing as a guiltless affair. Most men and women she sees in her practice admit that what they have done is wrong. And women, even more so than men, anguish over the pain the affair causes their spouses and children, she says.

She has also been taken to task for ignoring the risk women may run of getting AIDS or other sexually transmitted diseases if they stray outside the marriage.

Heyn counters that the kinds of women she interviewed don’t run a high risk of getting such diseases because they aren’t the types to pick up men in bars for one-night stands. Nevertheless, the risk could exist, and does have an inhibiting effect on many people, say experts.

In fact, Steven Clark, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCI, believes the threat of AIDS has become a deterrent for many people. Although women may be more inclined to discuss their extramarital affairs now, he believes adultery was more prevalent in the late ‘70s and and ‘80s than it is today.

When Heyn was on the talk-show circuit plugging her book, she encountered angry men and women alike who vehemently chastised her for advocating a lifestyle of infidelity for women. “It’s an incendiary topic,” admits Heyn during a recent telephone interview from her home in New York. “I’m not advocating adultery; I’m saying let’s not stone the women (for doing it).”

Much of the wrath over the book comes from people who believe “women aren’t supposed to need anything outside of marriage,” says Heyn, who currently writes a column, “The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Sex,” in Mademoiselle magazine.

Heyn, 45, is married and says she has a “monogamous relationship.”

“There is this underlying fear that if women depart from marriage and really pursue pleasure, there will be chaos,” says Heyn. “They are afraid everything will go to hell and family bonds will fall apart.”

That won’t necessarily happen, says Heyn. For some women, life will be happier and so may their families’ lives. “I’m not saying affairs will always be good for marriages. More often they blow them up. But if the wife can be rejuvenated by an affair and bring that (feeling) back into the marriage, then it can be positive.”