Carol Botwin - Tempted Women: The Passions, Perils, and Agonies of Female Infidelity

Tempted Women

The Passions, Perils, and Agonies of Female Infidelity

Carol Botwin

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

Copyright 1994 by Copestone Press Inc.

ISBN: 978-1-4532-6807-0

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com

TOALEXANDRAANDWILLIAM,ASALWAYS

A CKNOWLEDGMENTS

My very special thanks go to all the brave and candid women who revealed the passions, pleasures, and agonies of their extramarital love affairs either in letters or in person. Without the contributions of this necessarily anonymous group, this book could not exist.

I am also grateful to Liza Dawson for her editorial support, enthusiasm, and suggestions. Finally, Barbara Lowenstein, my agent, brought this book into being through her brilliant determination and initiative. I am indebted to her for that, and for her continued support over the years.

Contents

Chapter 1

T HE G ROWING W ORLD OF U NFAITHFUL W IVES

Linda is going about her usual morning routine. A sweet-looking, tall blonde, Linda at age forty is a successful interior designer. After seeing her husband, a lawyer, off to work she bundles her seven-year-old daughter into warm clothing and, in the brisk wind of the winter morning, walks her to school. She drops her child off, then strolls to a fashionable shopping area nearby where she stops to see a few antique dealers in search of some tables and mirrors for her clients.

When she finishes her business, Linda doesn't return to her own apartment. Instead, she walks to a building a few blocks away, takes the elevator to an apartment on the eighth floor, rings the bell, and is greeted at the door by an older, charming European art dealer she met while lunching with a client. He has been eagerly awaiting her.

Linda has been having an affair with this man for the past two years, seeing him three afternoons a week. She is part of a large group of daring women who have swollen the population of unfaithful wives in our society to an all-time high.

Husbands have always been known to cheat in large numbersin 1948, Alfred Kinsey, in his first landmark study of human sexuality, pegged the rate of male infidelity at 50 percent. Other, more recent estimates place the contemporary figure at anywhere from 60 to as much as 70 percent for men in the upper income brackets.

Although it has taken a while for women to embrace the playing around game, statistics from many sources indicate that wives increasingly have been taking lovers of their own. The rise in female infidelity is evident once you look at the results of these surveys:

In 1953, Kinsey reported that 26 percent of wives had been unfaithful.

By 1970, the number had risen to 36 percent, according to a poll done for Psychology Today magazine.

In 1975, a survey of the readers of Redbook magazine (considered to be a conservative population of women) uncovered the fact that 39 percent of them had been unfaithful.

In 1980, Paul Gebhard, a coauthor of the first original Kinsey report, estimated that 40 percent of married women would have an affair by the age of forty. That same year, a survey conducted by Cosmopolitan magazine came up with the startling fact that 51 percent of its readers had committed adultery.

In 1982, a survey by Playboy that included fifteen thousand females found that 38 percent of the wives had been unfaithful.

In 1984, Playgirl magazine sponsored a survey that revealed one out of every two wives among 1,207 women had played around.

In 1986, a survey of thirty-four thousand women by New Woman magazine found that 41 percent of the wives had actually had extramarital sex, while 44 percent admitted being tempted.

In 1989, New York Woman magazine polled its readers and reported that almost one out of every two wives surveyed had cheated.

In that same year Woman magazine revealed (in a report I wrote for the magazine) that half the women who had responded to its survey about office affairs were wives carrying on with men they had met in the workplace.

Of course, men still are having more affairs than women, but based on cumulative data, the evidence is quite clear: Women are catching up to men, and both sexes are indulging in a lot more extramarital hanky-panky.

The high rates of female infidelity uncovered by the more recent surveys jibe with earlier predictions by many respected sex researchers. Looking at the greater number of unfaithful wives among younger women (a finding of all surveys since Kinsey's), and figuring that these younger women would be moving through the life cycle, researchers Morton Hunt; James Ramey; and Gilbert Nass, Roger Libby, and Mary Fisher all made an educated guess that in the last years of this centuryjust about now45 to 55 percent of all married women would be unfaithful by age forty.

As I report later in this book, two surveys reveal that in the youngest age groups, under the age of thirty, wives may even be outstripping husbands by a small margin.

No one knows how the fear of AIDS may be cutting into the infidelity rates of both sexes, but, according to recent reports, heterosexual women and men are still by and large continuing to practice sex as they did before it became so potentially deadly. Only two among the 250 letters in my files from women having affairs mentioned AIDS.

The statistics alone warrant a serious consideration of infidelitya significant proportion of the female population is involved, using a conservative estimate backed by the majority of the surveys cited, if approximately 40 percent of wives in the United States have had extramarital relationships, that means more than twenty-one million wives in this country alone have sampled the joys and sorrows of a secret love life.

Women as a group don't cheat lightly, and don't have quick or casual flings. Because most have serious, lengthy affairs that engage their emotions, unfaithful wives tend to be troubled in one way or another. They are afloat in uncharted waters, in which they often flounder.

W OMEN IN THE D ARK

There are no guidelines for women in affairs, no models except soap operas and steamy novels, which serve up glamorized and inaccurate portraits. In more serious works of fiction suicide, social ostracism, and other disasters, unlikely for contemporary women, befall possible models like Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary.

Women are further hampered in understanding the female experience of adultery by the secrecy that surrounds their liaisons. Wives are extremely furtive about their extramarital activities. As a result, many of them have no idea how other women act and react in similar situations. With no confidantes, they have no place to unload their feelings. They are unable to seek solace or insight into their dilemmas. They often feel very alone.