Infidelity

I have asked her in recent months to recount what she told me 25 years ago about her sexual experiences. Not only will she not discuss it and gets angry about it, she now claims that she never did any of those things. Well, of course, I have some proof that she did many.

My question is why can’t I stop obsessing over her past sexual conquests (and that’s what they were — she seduced primarily married men), and why is she now denying and refusing to discuss her past?

I feel for your wife, man. You’re interrogating her about her sexual past after a quarter-century of marriage. There should be a statute of limitations on such things.

There must be a reason why this suddenly matters to you now. M. Gary Neuman, a therapist and author of “Connect to Love,” senses “some guilt or fear of the ‘what goes around comes around’ karma.” He says, “Maybe you now feel doomed to struggle since this relationship began through inappropriate behavior,” and adds: “It’s never too late to apologize to those you may have hurt in the past. Do what you need to in order to feel freer moving forward and allowing yourself to enjoy your marriage to the max.”

Listen to the man. He’s been on “Oprah,” yo.

Therapist Charles Foster, co-author of “I Love You but I Don’t Trust You,” says there are a couple of possible interpretations of what’s going on here. It could be that “after 25 years, their sex lives — so clearly in need of spicing up from the beginning — are developing rigor mortis, and his re-opening this can of worms is the best way he knows how to wake things up in bed.” Or maybe “for some reason, trust issues have reared their ugly head.”

Is your wife giving you new reason to mistrust her — based on her current behavior, as opposed to things she did when she was a young seductress? If not, this might be less about your wife’s actual trustworthiness than obsessive thinking.

Foster has little patience for this: “Come on, what is it you really want? Better sex? More closeness? More trust? Any of these could make you happy,” he says. “But satisfying your obsession will only stimulate the very itch that’s making you miserable.” Instead, he suggests that you “focus on your real needs, and work with your partner to get them met, and keep telling yourself that your obsession is just a sinkhole of misery.”

On a similar note, Diana Kirschner, author of “Sealing the Deal: The Love Mentor’s Guide to Lasting Love,” suggests that you start by simply listening to each other: Sit down and give each other 10 minutes to talk uninterrupted about whatever is on your mind. Instead of talking about past exploits, try talking about “sexual longings or fantasies you have right now and especially how you would like to act them out with each other.” She says, “Build a whole new relationship now that is so satisfying, the past just doesn’t matter.”

Supporters of the sex-addiction paradigm will point to the current umbrella category of “Sexual Disorder Not Otherwise Specified,” which recognizes “distress about a pattern of repeated sexual relationships involving a succession of lovers” — but the term “sex addiction” is unscientifically applied to a vastly greater range of behaviors, including subjectively excessive masturbation and porn-viewing. An entry on “hypersexual disorder” is being considered for the DSM revision — for the appendix — but it’s important to note that the concept of sex addiction is but one approach to conceptualizing and treating hypersexuality.

In the interest of countering the Newsweek narrative, I gave clinical psychologist David Ley a call. I figured he might have a thing or two to say on the topic, given that for the past year he’s been working on the upcoming book “The Myth of Sex Addiction” — and did he ever.

Have you had a chance to read the Newsweek cover story?

I did. It’s the same old story.

And what is the same old story, exactly?

There’s a gross over-representation and exaggeration of research. The sex-addiction concept is a belief system, not a diagnosis; it’s not a medically supported concept. The science is abysmal.

What’s the worst example of the pseudo-science?

The thing that drives me craziest is that over the past year or two, [proponents of the sex addiction model] have started trying to use brain science to explain it. They’re now talking about morphological changes that supposedly happen in the brain as somebody watches porn or has too much sex. The reality is, careful scientists will tell you they are absolutely unable to identify any brain differences between these alleged sex addicts and non-sex addicts. The other thing that they’ll tell you is that the brain changes constantly — any behavior that a person engages in, especially repetitively, changes your brain. So, identifying changes related to this sexual behavior and distinguishing it from anything else is absolutely ridiculous.

What they’re doing is trying to build credibility. The major way that they build credibility is through metaphor, or “valley-girl science,” as I call it. They will tell you, and [the Newsweek] article is a good example of it, that sex addiction is like an eating disorder, it’s like a heroin addiction. The reality is this is an incredibly weak form of argument, because it’s so subjective; and when they tell you that sex addiction is like an eating disorder, they don’t tell you all the things that are different about it. They live by anecdotes, because they don’t have good science.

It seems the question underlying the whole conversation is: What does a healthy relationship to sex look like?

They are typically unable to put forth a healthy model of sexuality, and when they do, it is so transparently conservative and religiously driven that it’s frightening. Most of the leaders of the sex-addiction movement are themselves recovering supposed sex addicts and religious folks. That’s fine, it’s fine for them to be advocating, but what they’re advocating for is a moral system, not a medical one.

For a while, they were pushing the idea that if you had an orgasm once a day, every day, that made you a sex addict — but they finally had to back off on that because data was building up showing that there are lots of people who have sex once a day and have no problems. That’s the other big hole in their argument: For every one of the behaviors they raise as addictive — whether it’s porn, strip clubs, masturbation, infidelity, going to prostitutes — I can present 10,000 people who engage in the exact same behavior and have no problems, and they can’t explain why that is.

They are trying to connect a lot of disparate behaviors. Frankly, I think that it is ludicrous to try to apply one sex-addiction concept to the behavior of a person who spends 12 hours a day masturbating and that of a person who has three or four mistresses.

How should we look at someone who spends their entire day masturbating?

A lot of the research that has been done shows that between 70 and 100 percent of these alleged sex addicts have some other major mental-health problem — there is some other diagnosis, whether it is substance abuse, depression, anxiety or a personality disorder. It violates Occam’s razor to then throw in a sex-addiction diagnosis when these behaviors are just symptoms of the underlying mental illness.

The other thing is, why are we singling out this one behavior as a problem? There are people who do model trains obsessively: They focus their life on it, their relationships end because of their interest in this, they fill their houses with these model trains –

But we aren’t rushing to subject them to brain scans.

Exactly, right. This is a moral attack on sexuality. They it is in the interest of people to build and develop fear of sex. Because they think that if we’re not afraid of sex, people are going to go out and have lots of sex. God forbid.

What cultural forces are bringing this to the fore right now?

I think it’s a perfect storm. It’s the media and the transparency of our society. All of these behaviors have been happening for millennium — people cheating, people having lots of sex, people viewing pornography. There’s nothing new about this. But all of a sudden we have this 24/7 media that is hungry for scandals. “Gotcha” journalism grabs an audience by putting out a sound bite, a meme, as quickly as possible, regardless of how true it is. The memes that grab the most are black-and-white, two-dimensional concepts. Rather than explaining that there are thousands of reasons a person might engage in infidelity, it’s easier to say: Sex addict.

Does it make people feel more secure, like the threat of infidelity is contained to a “disordered” or “addicted” population? Blaming infidelity on sex addiction might be easier than questioning monogamy or our expectations for long-term commitments.

Yep. Instead of examining the application of the concept of monogamy over a 30- or 40-year marriage, and looking at how male sexuality works, it’s much easier to say: “Well, it’s a disease.” I include a quote in my book where a woman says, “When my husband was cheating, it really was a comfort to consider it a disease and that it really wasn’t his fault. Finally, I had to realize that it wasn’t a disease, it was just him being selfish and treating my life and health casually.” If we look at it as a choice, what changes?

What is the risk of the spread of the sex-addiction model?

There is a dramatic risk of stigma and over-diagnosis. Gay and bi men often engage in significant promiscuity that is outside the norm for heterosexual men, and certainly for heterosexual women — are they eligible to get diagnosed as sex addicts? Yeah. A social worker I talked to at a mental hospital told me that whenever an LGBT person was admitted onto the psych ward, they automatically considered them as having hypersexual disorder, because they were concerned that person might act out sexually on the unit.

There’s incredible risk of pathology here — we only need to look at the history of nymphomania to see that. Women had their clitorises removed they were subjected to electroshock therapy, all kinds of medication. When female sexuality was diagnosed as a disease. Now male sexuality is diagnosed as a disease, only instead of getting electroshock therapy they get the country-club treatment for 30 days.

When it comes to celebrity divorce, the ambulance-chasers aren’t just lawyers keen on getting a cut of a fat settlement, it’s also the experts who promise to help the general public deal with their own romantic breakdown or how to avoid a similar fate. Kim Kardashian was too flimsy a poster child for marital strife, what with the rumors that the whole thing was staged for reality TV, but Moore is just the unwilling spokesperson that relationship experts, divorce coaches and even financial advisors need to ply their trade, and ply they did. The P.R. push in the hours following her announcement was tasteless enough to catch the eye of several tweeters — a group not exactly known for their rejection of shameless self-promotion — who called out the indelicate tactic. Because, really, you’re going to use someone’s failed marriage to promote your tips for marital success, recovering from infidelity or coping with divorce?

But of course they are! It’s unseemly and utterly predictable, all at once. Match.com relationship expert Kate Taylor weighs in on “what went wrong,” pointing to the ongoing involvement of ex Bruce Willis in her and her kids’ lives. Divorced parents who can maturely coexist around their kids? A father who lives up to his parental commitment? Tsk, tsk. She also fingers the age gap and the disparity in income and fame, invoking the hoary maxim, “Who wears the trousers?” If only Demi had been a little less successful! (Take note, ladies.)

So-called experts on “cougar dating” are getting in on the action too by offering “some ‘musts to avoid’ that can help both you and Demi when dealing with a younger man.” WhatsYourPrice.com, a site that lets people literally buy and sell dates, issued a press release reminding everybody that it totally predicted the couple’s split, based on a survey it conducted of cougar-cub dates among its users. The headline: “Scientific Reason for the Ashton and Demi Breakup.”

If you’ve already failed to follow the advice of such sage experts, there is always post-divorce support. The press release about “celebriries” that I mentioned earlier advertised a message board support group and online courses meant to help you through divorce. Another email from a site making similar promises began, “First it was Kim Kardashian and now it’s Ashton and Demi. Unfortunate as it is, divorce is once AGAIN rearing its ugly head.” Surely, though, this can’t be a surprise to “the leading authorities on marriage and divorce in the country” — they must be aware of the high divorce rate, right? (And that’s probably why they offer an array of divorce boot camps and getaways.)

It might actually be reassuring that there are so many people out there with answers, if they weren’t all offering different advice. You need only look at the sprawling relationship advice section of your local bookstore to confirm that no one has discovered the one-size-fits-all guide to lasting relationships. But these experts are catering to a real desire for comfort and reassurance. High-profile divorces and cheating scandals tap into common insecurities: If a woman like Demi can’t keep her man from straying, can I? If two people with such pretty, perfect lives can’t make it work, can we?

Since everyone seems to be dispensing relationship advice, you might as well consider the recommendation of this never-married 27-year-old: Don’t trust anyone who says he or she has the secret to marriage.