A marriage guru looks at Unfaithful - 5/16/02

[Smartmarriages ®]

subject: A marriage guru looks at Unfaithful - 5/16/02

from: Smart Marriages
 
This article interviews Scott Haltzman who will present a seminar at the
Smart Marriages conference.  Also, we will be graced with the wisdom of
Shirley Glass who will present a keynote, "Not Just Friends: The New Crisis
of Infidelity" which outlines step-by-step the best practices for avoiding
affairs and maintaining monogamy.  She'll present these in a way that these
practices and behaviors can be easily added to any marriage education or
enrichment program.  To learn more about the Glass "Walls and Windows" model
read her upcoming book, Not Just Friends, purchase her tapes from the Smart
Marriages conference ($11 for a 90 minute tape at 800-241-7785), or just
click on: http://www.smartmarriages.com/glass.html


A marriage guru looks at Unfaithful
05/15/2002 
Providence Journal 

BY AVIS GUNTHER-ROSENBERG
Journal Staff Writer

The affair in Unfaithful starts innocently enough.

Suburban housewife Connie Summer (played by Diane Lane) -- who dresses in
heels and slim skirts to work on her 8-year-old son's school fundraiser --
is battered about by a windstorm that makes the twister in The Wizard of Oz
look like a light breeze.

Struggling through the New York City streets, she is blown past all the
bored-looking businessmen, the bums and the homely folk, and right into the
arms of gorgeous 28-year-old Paul Martel (Olivier Martinez), a French
rare-book dealer whose accent melts whatever his smoky eyes miss.

Although Paul breaks her fall -- she lands conveniently on top of him in a
foreshadowing embrace -- Connie manages to scrape a bloody patch along her
leg. 

Gallantly, Paul invites her up to his nearby loft for tea and bandages.
Connie walks past a taxi that might take her home, and up the stairs. She
washes her knee and leaves, but not before accepting a book of poetry from
her gracious host, who instructs her to open it to page 23, a poem about
wine and passion. 

"This moment is your life," he breathes before she walks out the door, and
returns to her world of bedtime stories, dirty dishes and overcooked chicken
dinners. 

Several scenes later, family is left far behind, and she's going at it with
Paul in the stall of a cafe ladies' room, while two of her
suburban-housewife friends sip coffee and talk about how perfectly she's
kept her figure. 

"If people are looking for a realistic portrait of an affair, they're not
going to find it in this movie," says Dr. Scott Haltzman, a Barrington
psychiatrist who specializes in marriage and couples' counseling. "Most
affairs don't happen by chance meetings."

Cheating statistics

Depending on which study you look at, infidelity occurs in up to 40 percent
of marriages, Haltzman says. By age 45, two out of every five men and one
out of every five women has had at least one affair.

For an overwhelming majority of spouses who cheat -- 80 percent -- the
reason is not sexual, Haltzman says. Most simply seek validation, warmth,
understanding or love.

"Feeling validated, heard and loved are exactly the same needs that make you
fall in love with your spouse to begin with, but as a marriage progresses,
you don't feel adored," Haltzman says.

"There are going to be times in every marriage when you don't feel you're
getting your needs met. It just feels like everything is wrong in the
marriage, like not only do I not love my spouse, but I hate them."

In Unfaithful, which opened last Friday, director Adrian Lyne deliberately
made Connie's marriage to her husband Edward (played by Richard Gere) warm
and loving. 

Lyne -- whose steamy hits have included 91/2 Weeks, Indecent Proposal and
Fatal Attraction -- was actually at odds with 20th Century Fox over the
nature of Connie and Edward's relationship. The studio had wanted Lyne to
paint the couple's marriage negatively, perhaps have them fight all the time
or be bored with sex.

The moviemaker's intent

"For me, the whole point of the movie was the arbitrary nature of
infidelity, the fact that you could be the happiest person on earth and meet
somebody over there, and suddenly your life's changed," Lyne told a Chicago
Tribune reporter. 

"I thought, well, if it's a crappy marriage, why wouldn't she have an
affair? Where's the drama in that?"

In fact, opportunity is an essential part of infidelity, Haltzman says.

"You have to meet someone to cheat someone. When movie stars announce their
breakups and simultaneously announce their new romances, did you ever notice
that it's the co-star of the latest movie they were in? "

Seventy-three percent of unfaithful men meet their mistresses at work. The
statistics are lower for women -- less than 50 percent -- but seem to be
growing as women spend more time at the workplace.

"Most people don't choose to have an affair," Haltzman says. "Some may even
be morally opposed to affairs. Frequently it starts with a conversation.
Then, it moves to a conversation about intimate issues and experiences in
each person's own relationship.

"The distance between meeting someone and a first kiss is much longer than
the distance between a first kiss and ending up in bed. It's a slippery
slope, and you make choices all along the way."

Books in the works 

Haltzman, 41, is the medical director of NRI Community Services in
Woonsocket, and author/founder of the Web site www.secretsofmarriedmen.com

First-person stories collected by readers of the site will form the basis of
a book Haltzman is writing called The Secrets of Married Men.

He's also co-authoring a second book -- Ways to Win Your Wife's Heart
Forever -- with former Journal reporter John Martin, and recently appeared
on The Today Show as an expert on infidelity.

What is typical about the Unfaithful affair, he said, is the sequence of
events that led up to Connie's tryst.

Connie has just shooed her young son off to school, when she picks up the
poetry book, and Paul's business card falls out. She calls him from a pay
phone in Grand Central Station, ostensibly to thank him for helping her with
her wound. He asks how she is, then beckons, "Come and see me. I'll make you
some coffee." 

Another time, she shows up with muffins, and when she admires his choice of
music, he asks her to dance. Each step of the way, actress Lane's face
registers an inner turmoil -- a mix of desire, confusion and guilt. If she
just calls him, it's not so bad. If they have coffee, that's not cheating. A
waltz is not an affair.

Mistakes and accidents

When things take an inevitable turn, she tells him, "I think this is a
mistake," to which Paul replies, "There's no such thing as a mistake. It's
what you do or you don't do."

Later, these words come back in a refrain when her son is upset about
wetting the bed. "It's an accident," she tells him, her voice sincere.
"Everybody has an accident."

But while bed-wetting is an accident, there is no such thing as an
accidental affair, Haltzman says.

Every decision Connie made, from not getting in the cab in the first place,
was a conscious decision. "She was surprised she was invited over. She was
surprised he wanted to have sex with her. What did you expect? Excuse me,
its the third time you've been in this guy's apartment!"

The bottom line is, affairs can be prevented, Haltzman says. It's all in the
choices you make. "It should be a gigantic red flag the minute you tell
yourself your spouse wouldn't be happy if they knew. You don't have a
clandestine lunch with someone. You don't share intimate details with a
co-worker you have some attraction to."

An affair is not something apart from the marriage, as Connie's friend says
in the movie: "He wouldn't have to know about it. It would be something I
did for myself, like taking a pottery class."

"This is exactly what's not true," Haltzman says. "People delude themselves
into thinking that you only live once" so it's okay to live it up, but "I
have never treated a couple where one partner was unfaithful where there
weren't disastrous consequences."

Married sex is better

And it's not really worth it, Haltzman says. The steamy movie sex where Paul
pins Connie's wrists in his hands, draws hearts on her belly as she sleeps,
and takes her roughly in a public hallway is all Hollywood exaggeration.

"In general, extramarital sex is actually not as good as marital sex,"
Haltzman says. "On average, married couples have sex more often than any
other group, other than couples who are living together, and married couples
report the greatest satisfaction with sex."

Still, Haltzman concedes that the forbidden is titillating, which is why
affairs typically lose their steam once they become public knowledge. "It is
the secrecy that holds them together."

In his practice, Haltzman hears one theme repeatedly: "Marriages improve
when a spouse learns to shift away from his or her own personal desires, and
listen to the needs of the husband or wife.

"One of the main thrusts of my book is that most people recognize the need
to communicate in a marriage. Really, the best way to communicate is to
listen to what your spouse's needs are, make meeting their needs your main
purpose. 

"Marriages are about much more than whether I'm happy today," says Haltzman,
who jokes that he would never be unfaithful to Susan, his wife of 14 years,
because it would throw a serious wrench into his credibility as a marriage
guru. 

"You have to think back to your commitment. My happiness is going to come
out of making this marriage work."

And while up to 40 percent of married people may have cheated, there is good
news. Most spouses who have affairs don't do it habitually or repeatedly. In
fact, in any given year, 95 percent of married men and women are monogamous,
Haltzman says. "Most couples are monogamous most of the time."

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