Were you surprised that Russia turned out to be the capital of cheating?
I knew Russians had a reputation for not being particularly rule-bound. But the extent to which they totally accepted infidelity very much surprised me. I later found an international poll that said that 40 percent of Russians say that extramarital affairs are either not at all wrong or usually not wrong. The percentage of Americans who say cheating is not at all wrong or usually not wrong is 6. So Americans are at the other end of the spectrum.
Along with geography, do economics play a role in shaping attitudes about adultery?
Definitely. It turns out that in America and other wealthy countries people are mostly faithful. The big divide is between rich and poor countries.
Did you come across a reason for those disparities?
Well, in many of the poor countries I visited there is this cultural story again that men have very powerful libidos and they can't be expected to control themselves -- and there isn't that same story about women. Another reason men in poor countries might cheat more is simply that they can. That is, they often have a lot more power than their wives, and cheating is one of the ways they express it.
You went into these interviews with American values, listening to these people talk about their own cultural script. Was it hard to understand where they were coming from?
I'm a journalist so I'm used to listening to a lot of people's different points of views, but there were definitely times when I thought, now you've gone too far. For instance, when I was in Indonesia I went to this town in the middle of the island of Java and met this foreign man who was Italian-Brazilian and had moved to Indonesia, converted to Islam hastily, and within the space of a couple of years married four different women, had 12 children with them. And then he was also having extramarital affairs because of the stress of all these young wives demanding things from him. Then he hit on me, and my friend who was interpreting! It was almost comical. Needless to say we said no.
I got the impression that oftentimes when you were talking to men, they took it as if you were almost propositioning them.
Sometimes people were very suspicious; they just assumed that if I was researching this topic it was something that I was interested in myself. One of the most embarrassing moments was not when I was in an exotic country, but interviewing these women in their 70s in retirement communities in Palm Beach. They all had had extramarital affairs and they were delighted to tell me about them. It was some of the best times of their lives. A lot of them married their affair partners and they felt none of the contemporary shame that we feel about cheating. This one woman, and this is not a woman you can exactly imagine in a sexual way, was describing to me how she used to perform oral sex on the guy she was having an affair with in cars in New York City after they would come out of nightclubs. It was like watching your grandmother talk about sex. It was very "Golden Girls."
Then there were also these Hasidic guys. One guy took me aside and wanted to tell me all about the laws of adultery, and Jewish law, and at a certain point I realized that he was giving much more detail than was required in describing the sexual acts that were and were not permitted in the Talmud.
Was that an uncomfortable moment?
Let's just say I got up and looked for the potato chips.
Do you think it's harder for Americans to deal with infidelity than in other cultures?
I think there are aspects of the American experience of adultery that make it much harder to get over. First of all, you have this idea that your spouse would never cheat on you and if he or she does, that means there is a tragic flaw in your marriage that can never be repaired. If that's your assumption, then when it happens, it's going to be especially devastating. Americans often told me that "once I discovered that my wife was cheating I realized that we had been living a lie and that our whole relationship was built on a false foundation."
You talk about America's "marriage-industrial complex" and the therapeutic idea that the cheater has to reveal everything to their spouse about the affairs to complete the healing process. Did you meet anybody for whom that strategy actually worked?
I can't say I did a scientific study, but no, I definitely didn't meet anybody who said, "now that I know exactly how many blow jobs my husband got from his mistress, I feel a whole lot better." But that idea that marriage ought to be this kind of transparent zone where nothing important is hidden is so powerful that as a quote-unquote solution it has a lot of resonance.
You say one of the reasons you wrote this book was because when you were working in Latin America all of these married men propositioned you, and you found it "repugnant." After writing this book do you think you've become more tolerant of that behavior?
It's funny. I think there is a puritan part of me that will never go away. So when I hear about cheating in the lives of people I know personally, I'm still a little bit surprised ... But now that I have the statistics on how many Brazilian men cheat, and how many Peruvians cheat, and Dominicans, I think I would have a more scientific perspective. Part of the American way of thinking about affairs -- and I'm including myself in this -- is to think the adulterer isn't just doing something wrong, he's also a bad person, a bad guy, and there's no telling what other bad things he could do if he could cheat. I think my perspective has changed in that respect.
About the writer
Yael Kohen is a reporter at New York Magazine.
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