Extramarital Activity
Most of us, male or female, enter into marriage, vowing to be faithful to each other.
So why is it that more than 80% of men, according to our Questionnaire responses, appear to confess to having had some sort of extra-marital activity during their married life, and perhaps more than 50% of women. The figure for women is still be established, as we receive more responses to our questionnaires.
Filling the gaps ......
Extra marital activity whether with a man or a women is often because of something lacking in the marriage, that one or both partners need(s) to catch up on, to fill the gaps, thereby finding satisfaction, fulfillment and perhaps stability .
It may have been that a wife went outside the marriage, because she was not getting what she needed from within the marriage. Similarly for the husband. This may be even more acute if the person's yearning is for someone of the same sex.
Because everyone else seems to do it, why shouldn't we follow suit?
This is the quandary we find out ourselves.
- The ideal is that we should remain loyal and faithful to our partner, maintaining a level of honor between us, and keeping our vows.
- The practice may be rather different - whereas we may be able to maintain that honor for a very long time, even for 10 or 20 years after marriage or when the children have grown up, many of us fall during the life time of the marriage, which may last 30 or more years.
The shock of failure by one partner can be quite traumatic for the other, but would it help if we took a very different attitude from the start?
That everyone is fallible and that it would be wrong to view anyone as perfect, as honorable, as likely to be faithful, until proven to be the case, however long that takes.