If you read the tabloids, you might be tempted to believe that people who have the most sexual partners belong to an entirely different socioeconomic group—that of extremely wealthy married men. I wouldn’t be too quick to jump to that conclusion, though. In fact, as we are about to see, income is a much more important determinant of whether or not women are unfaithful than it is for men.
CHAPTER 8
NAUGHTY BY NATURE
TILL DEATH DO YOU PART . . . OR AT LEAST UNTIL YOU ARE READY TO SAY “TIME FOR A CHANGE”
Google has a very interesting feature called “predictive queries,” which when used for marriage terms reveal a searching history that would convince any casual Web searcher that marriage is an extremely unpleasant state of being.
According to Google, for example, if you are typing the phrase “Why does my wife . . .?” the most likely question you are phrasing is: “not love me anymore,” “cry for no reason,” and “not want to be touched.”
If you are typing the phrase “Why does my husband . . .?” Google will kindly offer up the most obvious completions: “hate me,” “ignore me,” and “cheat.”
This chapter is about the people who have reached a stage in their lives where they are searching the term “My marriage is . . .” and the finishing phrase is “over,” “failing,” and “in trouble.”
And while I can’t tell you “How do you know when it is time . . .” “to end a relationship,” “to break up,” or “to divorce,” I can give you some economic insight as to why infidelity happens.
Here is a story to get us started.
SWINGERS CLUBS ARE STEALING SEX-TRADE MARKET SHARE
The recent shift in social acceptance of swinging as an activity for married couples has, according to economist Fabio D’Orlando, not only increased participation at swingers events but also encouraged swinging couples to engage in more radical sex acts.
No doubt there have always been couples who would like to be swingers but feared the activity was too costly. I am not talking about entry fees to events, although that might be a consideration, but rather the expected costs of swinging: the risk of humiliation, for example, or the risk that the experience will either be a disappointment or will lead to marital dissolution. Over time though, because the Internet has made it easier to find like-minded couples who are willing to share their experiences, these risks have fallen, reducing the expected cost of swinging.
This fall in costs has encouraged more couples to enter the swinging market and, according to D’Orlando, encouraged couples on that market to move from “softer” sex acts (for example, having sex with each other on a bed in which another couple is doing the same) to “harder” sex acts (for example, involving a single man who has sex with the wife or the husband or both).
The transition to harder sex acts for swingers has drawn single men onto that market at a greater rate, which is what makes the story really interesting from an economic perspective.
Clubs that organize swinging events have a perverse economic incentive (pun intended) to allow as many single men into the club as possible. Many couples don’t want them in the club, but since the demand of places for single men exceeds the supply of spaces for single men, the prices they pay to enter are high. Profit-maximizing club owners, therefore, want to sell spaces to single men who are willing to pay a higher fee.
As couples engage in harder sex acts, the demand for single men in the clubs increases. This increase in number of spaces available for single men drives down the price they have to pay to enter the club. And so, more single men are visiting swingers clubs.
For single men, swingers clubs are a substitute for prostitution and, as anyone who has taken an intro-economics class knows, if two goods are substitutes and the price of one good or service falls, then demand for that good increases relative to the other good.
So swingers clubs are cutting into sex market shares by providing similar services to single men at a much lower price.
I am told that a single woman at a swinger event is called a “unicorn,” a mythical being that is only rumored to exist. Not surprisingly, these women can enter the clubs for free.
Leonard was a good man. He was committed to social justice and worked to support local politicians who shared his beliefs. He was involved in his church, playing an important role in raising enough money to renovate the building. He was successful in his career, priding himself in the role that he played in his workplace as a strict but caring father figure for those just beginning their careers.
It was fairly well known that Leonard had been married once before he met his current wife, but there were problems in his first marriage that he would rather not discuss publically.
They had married in the early 1970s, while he was still in graduate school and, despite the birth of two children, had maintained a very active sex life. Through the years they had kept their fire burning by frequently acting out their sexual, and often bisexual, fantasies with other like-minded couples they met in swingers clubs.
Over time, though, even those encounters bored Leonard, and he tried to convince his wife to escalate into sexual behaviors that took her farther and farther out of her comfort zone. Eventually she had had enough; he had pushed her too far, and she called a stop to all sex outside of their marriage. Initially he agreed to the new arrangement, of course, but two months later, she heard from a friend that he had tried to enter a swingers event without her.
That betrayal brought an end to their marriage and, ironically, without a partner, it also brought an end to his participation in the swingers club.
Being single was far less sexually exciting than Leonard had imagined. So much so, in fact, that for the five years prior to meeting his second wife, he had depended on the services of sex workers for sexual release. Now in his mid-50s and married again, he was convinced that his need for sexual diversion was behind him. He committed himself to building a more mature relationship with wife number two that involved sex, certainly, but only within the confines of their marriage.
The problem with this arrangement was that over time Leonard began to grow lonely. He loved his second wife, he really did, but he longed for the type of intimacy that comes with new love. More than anything, he wanted to be with a woman who was enthusiastic in her desire for him, extolled his sexual prowess, and would do anything to please him.
In short, he wanted to be adored.
Leonard was just beginning to come to terms with what he had come to consider his externally imposed impotence when something changed. A promotion at work gave him greater authority over, and more one-to-one contact with, some of the younger employees in his firm. He felt appreciated, if perhaps not adored, by his new charges and that appreciation convinced him that he had something to offer a younger generation of sexually vibrant women.
A friend of mine once said to me that loneliness when you are alone is one thing, but loneliness within marriage is loneliness stripped of all hope. And for that reason, part of me would like to tell you that Leonard found the fulfilling relationships that he had been seeking. But hope was all that this new position of authority gave Leonard. Even when he was younger and single, he didn’t appeal to women looking for short-term relationships. The women he came into contact with now liked him, maybe even enjoyed flirting with him, but they had no interest in being his part-time lover.
And so, Leonard was a faithful husband to his second wife, not because he believed in fidelity but rather because the market on which extramarital lovers operates did not offer up any alternatives.
No one really knows how prevalent extramarital sexual relationships really are; a very rough estimate places infidelity at about 50 percent—half of all men and women will cheat on their spouse at some point in their marriage.
The problem with that estimate, however, is that what it means to be “faithful” is often specific to the marriage and, as a result, is very imprecisely measured in the data. If you sit at your desk and fantasize about a cow
orker, are you being unfaithful? To some people the answer is yes, and some of the very high estimates of marital infidelity include this behavior in their measure. If you have had sexual intercourse with someone other than your spouse at some point over the course of your marriage, are you being unfaithful? Often yes, but if your spouse condones sex outside of the marriage, or was with you and having sex with that same person, is it really infidelity?
A more reliable measure of infidelity is the share of men who have children whom they mistakenly believe are their own, when they are, in fact, not related. Evolutionary biologist David Buss reports that in blind paternity studies, approximately 10 percent of children fall into this category. But this measures only female infidelity, and in an era in which approximately 40 percent of births are to unmarried women, even this fails as a measure of extramarital infidelity.
CHEATING AS A PROBLEM OF DYNAMIC INCONSISTENCY
Dynamic (or time) inconsistency tells us that preferences can change over time; what may seem like the optimal choice in period one is not necessarily the optimal choice in period two. It is often used to explain how monetary authorities or governments behave when there is no mechanism forcing them to commit to a specific course of behavior. It can also tell us why as individuals it is difficult to enforce no cheating in marriages.
To give you an example of how dynamic inconsistency applies to cheating, consider a husband who fears that his wife will cheat, so when they marry he tells her that if she cheats he will leave her and provide her with no financial support. At the beginning of their marriage that is his preference—to leave if she cheats—and by telling her this, he hopes that she will chose not to cheat.
Imagine that later she meets a man with whom she would like to have sex. Her husband promised that he would leave her if she cheated, but she knows that he would not fare well on his own and, even if he does, the no-fault divorce laws prevent him from withholding financial support. To her his promise to leave is not credible, and so she chooses to have extramarital sex.
Her husband later finds out that she has cheated and, while very hurt, decides to stay in the marriage because, as she anticipated, he does not wish to leave her. His original preference was to leave if she cheated, but now that she has cheated, his preference is to stay.
The reason why this dynamic inconsistency problem is interesting is that now that we recognize that the problem exists we can find a way to solve it. One solution, for this husband, is to find a way to commit to leave if his wife cheats. For example, he could remain independent and insist on a prenuptial contract that penalizes her financially if she cheats.
Historically, this is not a problem couples have had to contend with on their own because governments imposed laws that harshly punish infidelity—particularly female infidelity. Even without repercussions to infidelity here on Earth, religious faiths have made sex outside of marriage a sin so that cheaters have an eternity of damnation to fear. Social norms that encourage family and friends to disapprove of men and women who choose to forgive a partner who has strayed play a similar role in that they shame people into leaving unfaithful spouses. These mechanisms help solve the dynamic-inconsistency problem couples face by imposing punishment that is external to the individuals involved.
In general, dynamic-inconsistency theory tells us that these mechanisms will be much more effective in preventing infidelity than will unenforceable contracts between two people.
Bruce Elmslie and Edinaldo Tebaldi find that among Americans who are still married to their first husbands or wives, 7 percent of women and 14 percent of men said yes in response to the question “Have you ever had sex with someone other than your husband or wife while you were married?” When they consider only men and women under the age of 35, men and women appear to cheat at similar rates, with 7 percent of women and 9 percent of men admitting to extramarital sex. As we will see, this difference between age groups probably stems from the timing of infidelity rather than a societal shift that has caused a new generation of men to cheat less and a new generation of women to cheat at roughly the same rate.
These numbers seem low and, the fact is, they underestimate the pervasiveness of infidelity because they represent only the behavior of people who are still in their first marriage—anyone ever divorced was excluded from the data set. Donald Cox, using data from a nationally representative survey, finds that people who report that they have cheated on a marriage partner at some point in their lifetime are more likely to be divorced; 49 percent of male and 56 percent of female cheaters are divorced, compared with 29 percent of male and 31 percent of female non-cheaters. So removing divorced people from the data set means that the propensity to cheat in marriage will be predicted as lower than it really is in the general population.
Donald Cox finds that 25 percent of men and 14 percent of women have had an extramarital affair at some point in their lifetime. If we ask only about behavior in the previous twelve months, 8 percent of men admit to having an extramarital affair compared with 3.5 percent of women. When we include people who are cohabitating, as well as those who are married, the share admitting to infidelity increases to 34 percent for men and 23 percent for women. We also know that men who cheat on their partner cheat more frequently than women do; cheating men are twice as likely as cheating women to have had sex with two or more partners in the past year. Men tend to cheat with women who are younger (no big surprise there) and women tend to cheat with men who are better educated. Very young women (less than 26 years old) cheat more than women of any other age, and while men also cheat more when they are young, the relationship between age and infidelity isn’t nearly as pronounced for men as it is for women.
You might be wondering how thinking about infidelity from an economic perspective helps our understanding of this behavior. There’s no doubt that biology plays a huge role in encouraging married people to seek sex outside of their marriages, but, at some level, the final decision to act on those biological impulses is made by rational people seeking to maximize their well-being. As we will see later, that decision might not always make them happy, but nonetheless the decision to cheat is the optimal one at the time that it is made.
Let me introduce the economic model that can be used to explain infidelity. It will look familiar to you because it is the same approach we used in chapter 1. Rather than explaining how sexuality has changed over time, however, we will use it to explain why it is that some men and women are unfaithful while others are not.
UNFAITHFUL MATH
Men and women cheat in marriage because they believe at the outset that the benefit of doing so outweighs the expected costs. The expected cost of cheating looks something like this:
The probability of being caught cheating depends on an individual’s circumstances. For example, consider two women who are both considering having an extramarital affair. The first woman works outside of her home, is financially independent, and lives in an urban environment. The second is not employed on the labor force, is financially dependent, and lives in a rural community. Without knowing any more information, it is reasonable to assume that the woman who works at home, and lives in a remote area, has a much higher chance of being caught cheating than the woman who works outside of the home and might even have opportunities to travel for business.
The “cost of being caught” is a little more complicated, but it too is an expected cost—no man or woman really knows what the cost of cheating is until they are caught. If neither the career woman nor the homemaker is paid alimony in the event that her husband divorces her for adultery, the financially dependent woman has far more to lose by being caught cheating. If alimony is paid despite the infidelity, on the other hand, the dependent woman is more likely to be the recipient of alimony payments, and it is the financially independent woman who has more to lose. In fact, she might end up being the alimony payer if her husband earns a lower income.
The final thing we need to know is the probability that each woman’s husband will
leave if he catches her cheating. In reality we have no idea what those probabilities are as they will vary from woman to woman and from husband to husband. The husband of the financially independent woman might stay if he enjoys the financial stability their marriage gives him, or he might prefer financial insecurity to living with an unfaithful wife. The husband of the homemaker might leave if he is unwilling to support an unfaithful wife or might stay if they have young children whom he wants to protect.
We may not know what these probabilities are, but my guess is that these women already have a pretty good idea what will happen if their husband finds out they have been unfaithful before they make the decision to stray.
Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that the chance of the homemaker being caught cheating is 30 percent, the probability that her husband will leave her if she is caught is 50 percent, and, in the case of divorce, she loses $100,000 worth of goods and services that her marriage provided her. Her expected cost of cheating is then:
0.30 x 0.50 x $100,000 = $15,000
So the benefit of the extramarital sex would have to be large in order for her to cheat; she would have to value it more than $15,000 in monetary terms.
Now the woman who works outside of the home faces very different risks and costs. Let’s say her chance of being caught cheating is only 5 percent, the probability that her husband leaves her if she is caught is 50 percent, and, in the case of divorce, she loses $50,000 worth of goods and services that her marriage provided her. Her expected cost of cheating is:
Dollars and Sex Page 20
