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.”

The men gathered around were rapt. Who could blame them? This was at least as good as any porn movie. And it involved a real man with huge muscles and tattoos. But Rachael sighed and walked by me in a huff, slid open the screen door leading to the living room and shut it loudly behind her. A sinking feeling pierced the haze of my high. Jason and Mandy showed no signs of letting up, so I headed inside to find Rachael.

It was Rachael who had opened the door to this world. Before I met her, I’d been floating through life, brooding, adrift, like the down-on-his-luck male lead in a film noir, nursing his drink in some saloon, wondering what was next. But Rachael was beautiful, smart and driven. So were her friends — witty, confident gay men who reveled in their success and flaunted it with cool cars, beautiful clothes and impeccably decorated homes. Rachael loved them, and so did I.

It was the mid-’90s, the era of Clinton, boom times and surplus. Over cocktails and cocaine, there was talk of Human Rights Coalition fundraisers, hot tech investments, the cost of kitchen renovations, vacations to Tuscany, and second homes in Rehoboth. In this world, Rachael and I were the exotic ones — the hot straight couple who partied like rock stars with the boys. There were group vacations to Provence, Cancun and Istanbul. There were parties in Miami, New York, Amsterdam, Montreal, Mykonos and San Francisco. We became a major subculture’s minor celebrities.

In one important aspect, though, we remained outsiders. Most of our gay friends, even the ones in committed relationships, were having sex like it was the last days of the Roman Empire and they were Caligula. We heard about three-ways, four-ways, orgies, sex parties at home, sex in sex clubs, sex in cabs on the way back from sex clubs, sex in public bathrooms and in truck stops.

Rachael and I were curious. Everything else about this lifestyle seemed to be working for us. Could promiscuity? Not according to our best friend, Christian.

“I’m telling you,” he said, “you’re asking for trouble.”

“You manage just fine,” Rachael said. Christian and his male partner of nearly 15 years had avoided the emotional minefields of playing the field by employing a policy of full participation when they were together and discretion when they were not. It was an arrangement I referred to as “don’t ask, don’t smell.”

“It is different when it’s boys,” Christian said. “Most of us have a knack for separating our heads from our penises. My advice: Treat it like live porn. Or a yoga class with a happy ending. Keep your emotions out of it. Set some ground rules and talk about them before you go there.”

“Damn,” I said. “Should I be writing all this down?”

Christian patted my cheek. “Laugh now, but you’re getting privileged information here. Hard-earned, too. Truth is, straight or gay, it’s a crap shoot. Everything’s going along fine, then someone sticks his willy somewhere and the damn thing blows up like an exploding cigar.”

Still, we were determined to find out for ourselves. The opportunity to do just that came in the form of Jason and Mandy, two personal trainers we met at a club during gay pride celebrations in Boston. Jason was straight; Mandy was bisexual. Most of Jason and Mandy’s clients were gay, as were many of their friends. It seemed so perfect.

Then came Fire Island.

Narrow boardwalks wound through pine forests and connected the houses together like the yellow brick road. Trees reverberated with the clickity-clack of big men pulling little red wagons full of groceries and luggage to and from the ferry terminal. There were miles of desolate sand dunes and achingly beautiful sea grass-lined beaches. Then, shoved into this bucolic utopia were New York City sensibilities, as over the top as William Shatner reciting Shakespeare: designer-decorated homes where a summer share cost the same as a three-bedroom rambler in most parts of the country; huge, lavish parties; smaller, yet more lavish parties; social climbing galore; one-upsmanship; balls-to-the-wall, 24/7.

The only nightclub, the Pavilion, was a wooden sweat box. In the morning, a stream of clubbed-out zombies shuffled shamelessly along the walkways looking for an after-party and sex.

The owner of the house in which we stayed was Ramon, also known as the cha-cha-doctor of Chelsea, who specialized, ironically, in the research and treatment of AIDS. (Though Ramon was not really his name. I’ve changed all the names in this piece, for what I assume are obvious reasons.) He was the perfect host. Anything you wanted — as long as what you wanted was sex or drugs. There were vials of everything, everywhere, all the time. If it wasn’t in front of you, all you had to do was ask: K, G, X, poppers, weed, Viagra, crystal — especially crystal. Snorted, smoked or shot up, only crystal could keep the party, and the sex, going full-tilt for days.

The first people we met were the Porn Boys, feature acts in a series of videos. We nicknamed them Tweaked and Chipper. I kept forgetting their real names. This was awkward considering how often I ran into them traipsing around the house naked. The first time I walked by the Porn Boys’ room with the door open, I saw what looked like a naked rugby scrum. Based on what I heard, it was a high-scoring game.

Rachael and I saw the last translucent veil separating us from our friends ripped away. We hung a welcome sign on our bed. Jason and Mandy jumped right in. High as I was, the sex had a dreamy quality, as though I was watching myself perform pornography through a Vaseline-coated camera lens.

Then, just as Christian predicted, things came undone. I happened upon Rachael and Jason having sex in the poolside shower. I tried to ignore the stab of jealousy and resentment. But I couldn’t. Mandy, jacked up on nearly everything, woke me up in the middle of the night to see the stars. We jumped in the pool and had sex as the sun came up. Mandy’s sex with Jason was raw, animal-like, but with me she was tender and sweet, a perfect counterpoint to her rock-hard body.

I fell into a crush. And that’s when, with the two of us standing in the shallow end of the pool, her legs wrapped around my waist, she made a confession:

“You know, I think I’m a little ga-ga.”

My heart raced. “That makes two of us,” I said.

“It’s not just his looks. I’ve dated plenty of guys built like him — you know other trainers and body builders.”

Oh.

“I see,” I said.

“He’s so good to me. A genuinely nice guy. Slide back a little.” I did. She swiveled her hips and lowered herself onto me. “There,” she said, “that’s better.”

“Does he know?”

“Oh, he knows, all right. But I just can’t get him to make a commitment. At least not the way I want him to.” Her thigh muscles pulsed against my hips.

“So, you’d be willing to be exclusive if he agreed?”

“Sure. I’d be monogamous in a heartbeat with him — and with you and Rachael, of course. Pull my hair. Harder.”

In the midst of having sex with an acquaintance, Mandy was proposing a monogamous relationship involving four people, two couples — one of them married — living in different cities, a union composed of two heterosexual men and a couple of bisexual women.

Then, things got really complicated.

Rachael, Ramon and I walked into the guest bedroom and found Mandy pancaked between Jason and Ramon’s boyfriend. Ramon played it off as though it didn’t bother him. Rachael was mortified that our guests had appropriated our host’s partner. It did strike me as bad form.

The next evening, we all went over to the neighbor’s pool to watch the sunset. Rachael and I left Jason and Mandy, who gave in to the urging of the crowd and had sex on a lounge chair. The applause carried all the way over to Ramon’s house.

Jason and Mandy had become the show. My crush had been crushed. Rachael’s anger was smoldering. Behind my hurt feelings and Rachael’s indignation hid another emotion. We were jealous — and not just of each other. We were used to being the hot straight couple in this scene. After having the spotlight for so long, neither of us was OK with second billing.

What followed next was a naked version of a comedy of manners — minus the comedy and the manners. Rachael confronted Mandy in the kitchen. Mandy burst into tears. Jason confronted Rachael in the bedroom about confronting Mandy. Rachael burst into tears. I confronted Jason in the living room about confronting Rachael. Rachael and Mandy burst into tears. When I confronted Rachael about cavorting with Jason, things got personal.

“You’ve got nerve,” she said. “After that late-night stargazing session in the pool?”

“Why don’t you go and snort up a few more lines,” I said. “It brings out such a lovely side of you.”

Our experiment had gone haywire. Someone in charge needed to pull the plug. The problem was that no one was in charge of anything.

Jason and Mandy began staging special command performances in various venues, including the living room, the pool deck, the second floor balcony, the outdoor shower, the kitchen, and most recently, the Jacuzzi, where Rachael had just left me — high and dry.

I turned the corner into one of the guest rooms. There was Rachael sitting on the bed with the Porn Boys. She was just about to inhale white smoke from the end of a small, glass water pipe. Privately, Rachael had been deriding the Porn Boys for smoking crystal, which she said hit too close to the utterly un-fabulous act of smoking crack. I had to admit, the distinction was lost on me.

Rachael saw me, lowered the pipe a few inches and shrugged. “When on Fire Island …”

I sat on the edge of the bed in the Porn Boy’s bedroom and watched Rachael press the glass pipe to her lips.

Except for the muffled moans coming from the hot tub, the hiss from the small butane lighter was the only sound in the room. A thin tendril of smoke streamed into Rachael’s mouth.

Tweaked said, “Hold it in.” Rachael puffed up her cheeks and waited. “Now,”he said. She exhaled a small plume, like breath on a frosty morning.

Chipper pointed the pipe in my direction. “You want?”

“Yes, he does,” said Rachael.

“I do?”

Rachael said, “If this is the highway to hell, I’m not riding it alone.”

I tried to think of a reason not to. A good reason wouldn’t be good enough. Not here. Especially not here.

Tweaked snapped on the lighter and maneuvered the pale blue flame under the crystal. It melted and was transformed from powder into a white haze.

“Draw,” he said. “Not too hard.”

I touched my lips to the tip of the warm glass, inhaled and watched the smoke disappear until it emerged again as a frail, white wisp. There was only the slightest chemically tinged aftertaste. A wave spread through me, euphoric, but much more. There was clarity — perfect, doubt-obliterating clarity.

From outside, Mandy’s voice spiraled up, signaling her orgasm. I looked up to the ceiling. The image there was as plain as it is unambiguous: It was me and Rachael, sharing the first car on our fantasy roller coaster — a ride with no rules or limits, our arms held over our heads as it came right off the rails.

Rachael came up to me. She placed her arm on my shoulder. “You OK?”

I took a deep breath. “I think it’s time to go back.”

“Back?” said Chipper. “You can’t go back. Not now.”

Chipper was right. Rachael and I returned home, where our sleep-and-food-deprived bodies finally teamed up with our ravaged nervous systems and our bruised egos to let us have it, right in the old cerebellum. The whole damn country seemed to join us in a spectacular crash, as markets collapsed and planes smashed into buildings. Some of our friends ended up sick, others in rehab. It had been one hell of a party, but the party was over.

And so were Rachael and I. After Fire Island, a black shroud descended over us. We burrowed down into a grinding disillusionment and mutual resentment from which our relationship never really recovered. There was an affair — mine — followed by divorce.

“More is more,” Rachael used to say. Maybe so. But on Fire Island I learned that, sometimes, more is just too much.

The relationship proceeded in a cautious yet positive manner, despite our unsuccessful pasts. We are both writers, so we had enough to talk about. (Space breaks! Semicolons!) We fought well, which I always find important. I liked to watch him rearrange my books; I appreciated the scuff marks his boots left in the kitchen. The dog grew fond, after a mourning period. Ben just seemed to fit.

Yet still the nagging problem: our wandering eyes. At first, this reared its head in a disappointingly expected manner. “You should still see other people,” he said one afternoon, looking up from “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” “I’m still pretty hung up on the last one.”

It’s not as if I hadn’t heard this line before. (Another classic: “I never said I wanted a girlfriend.”) With other boyfriends, I’d cried. But this time, I was uncharacteristically calm. Maybe the thing to do, I thought, was just try it.

The more I pondered it, the better it sounded. Yes! An open relationship! Still, I needed some reassurance that this wasn’t completely stupid. Some people, in this situation, would seek advice from friends, or perhaps some data from sociological institutions, like the highly regarded National Marriage Project. But I already knew my friends would say that I was fooling myself, and data bores me. So, I turned to my most trusted source: fiction.

I didn’t have to look hard for examples of adultery in literature. In fact, the steam seemed to rise from my bedside table as I tentatively fingered the Salter and the Berriault. Of course, in most examples, stepping outside of a relationship brings ruin and misery. Emma Bovary’s death, for example: “Her chest soon began heaving rapidly; the whole of her tongue protruded from her mouth; her eyes rolled, grew paler, like the two globes of a lamp that is going out.” Pretty unappealing. Then there is April Wheeler in “Revolutionary Road,” who bleeds to death after violently aborting her own child when her adulterous marriage goes sour.

And yet, I was determined. There had to be instances of successful open relationships somewhere in the stacks. After all, it happens, doesn’t it? In France? Utah? After a few days, I found some Updike stories where both husbands and wives seemed quite tolerant of a bit on the side. In Josephine Humphreys’ excellent “Dreams of Sleep,” Alice is downright thankful when her dreary husband of 10 years takes up with someone else. There is Nicole and Dick Diver’s rather modern, look-the-other-way setup in parts of “Tender Is the Night.” And certainly, at the beginning, Marya has a terrific time with the Heidlers in Jean Rhys’ “Quartet.”

It was settled. Preemptive non-monogamy would obviously be better than the inevitable sneaking around. So, after the third time Ben said it was OK for me to see someone else, I did. I mean, I really saw him, the way Dean saw his French girl in “A Sport and a Pastime. ” The result was not shocking. It didn’t help my relationship with Ben at all.

“I didn’t mean him,” he cried after wrenching the identity of my other from me — a cute, gregarious friend 10 years my junior. “How could you?”

Immediately, I stopped. I hadn’t really wanted to go out with anyone else anyway, because I was in love with Ben. But now, dear God, I was a potential (though, thankfully, childless) Medea. The ax was sure to fall sometime. I had sinned, and now it was his turn.

The thought made me sick. The truth was I would be completely crushed if he slept with someone else. How could I have been so stupid as to propose this plan? I became obsessed with the thought of him in bed with almost every woman I knew. Would it be the intern? Or that blond student? What about that bitchy editor with the hip spiky boots?

Certainly, opportunity loomed large. Ben is a successful novelist. When you are a woman and you share your work at a reading, you can probably expect a free drink, if you’re lucky. Male writers — even mean, old ones — invariably end up surrounded by willing women between the ages of 22 and 30 in innocently bookish yet tight sweaters. (I still have a few leftover in my closet.) How could anyone turn away from those shining faces, those adoring nods at dial-a-writer gems such as: There’s no such thing as a happy ending! and When you stop writing, you die!

The stress was mounting. One evening, after patiently listening to my jealous wheedling, he left for a reading alone. I pitched “Anna Karenina” at the door, then passed the rest of the night with a bottle of Malbec and one of my very favorites: “Wide Sargasso Sea.” Ever read that one? The heroine gets so crazy over the loss of her husband’s love she sets herself on fire, along with Thornfield Hall, the home of the much less endearing Jane Eyre.

Ben returned, reeking of beer and innocence.

“Of course I could have,” he said to my tinny whines. “We always can. But why would I be out there when you’re in here?”

Reader, it was a night for the pages. I was in love, and I was loved back. I didn’t trust it, given the literature, but it was nice for a while, anyway.

And then, the big plot twist: I got pregnant. There was hysteria, there was hair pulling. It didn’t matter. The kid was real.

After a few weeks, the panic waned. We took stock of our feelings and, frankly, our ages. Over some wine in a hippie beach town, we decided to try the “happy family thing.”

(Though, going back to that canon of greats, there aren’t a whole lot of examples of those, either.)

You might not believe this, but the monogamy questions persisted. This time there were no good literary examples to follow. Adultery when there is a child involved is not only kooky, it’s inarguably selfish. OK, in some instances, when the offspring is well insulated by staff and governesses, it can work for a while. Pierre sort of gets away with it in “War and Peace” – at least, that’s what a friend told me, as I’ve never finished the damned thing. Brenda Last, too, in “Handful of Dust,” until her son’s head gets kicked in by a horse. But in our servant-less existence, the prospect seemed to have real “Ice Storm” potential.

“Wait. Does this mean we can’t ever see other people again?” Ben asked, calling from one of his summer writing conferences when I was about 10 weeks along. “I never thought about that. Wow.”

My hormones were raging. I was also at a conference, staying in a sweltering dorm room in Tennessee. All around me, writers were making out, drunk, against trees while I struggled not to vomit from morning sickness. And he was saying what? From a distance, I now completely understand his frightened musings. But that night, a kindly university security guard soon arrived in response to my murderous screams.

When I was four months pregnant, we moved in together. After the initial frenzy of dog hair and rampant tirades of fear, we settled into a boring, pleasant chapter. We forwent parties to burrow under blankets with our books; we waved at each other over our laptops from different corners of the house. We seemed OK. Dare I say, happy.

However, given our history and the current environmental factors — not to mention the novel arcs — I knew it would be a miracle if something didn’t go wrong. A few weeks after we merged our belongings, Ben went as a visiting writer to Alaska and didn’t call all weekend. I’ll never know what happened in the tundra of Fairbanks. Most likely nothing. Yet as I sullenly accepted his peace offering of the ugliest University of Alaska T-shirt I’ve ever seen, I had to point to the evidence on our sagging bookshelf.

“It’s not if you cheat, Rabbit. It’s when.”

And yet: As I got more pregnant, the other people — dreamed up or real — slowly faded. Perhaps the reason was obvious. I could now no longer cram my feet into any shoe under size 10, and seeing someone else while your girlfriend is swollen with child is right up there with seal-clubbing in terms of vile behavior.

(Though, again, examples can be found. “Doctor Zhivago, ” anyone?)

But I would like to give us more credit than that. The more Ben and I got to know and love each other, the less interested we were in outsiders. Also, there was another person emerging in our house. During those strange days we called her Creature, and she was already taking up much of our attention and time.

Advice seeker, please note: Under no circumstances, in life or literature, is “baby” a recommended answer to “commitment phobia.” We still had enough problems for a good Cheever story, at the very least. At nine months, I continued to lob the occasional email at that younger man, and Ben was still pretty hung up on that last one. Neither of us could use the word “family” without stuttering. As I cleared the scarier books out of corner of the apartment where the nursery was to be (Forster’s “Where Angels Fear to Tread” was relegated to the basement, as was Lorrie Moore’s “Birds of America”), I trembled at the thought of our future.

As if sensing our reluctance, the baby was three weeks late. On the way to the hospital for induction, the father of my child looked at me a bit blankly.

“Are people like us supposed to be doing this?”

“No,” I replied. “But I’m pretty sure they do all the time.”

In the next 18 hours, there was enough gore and horror to send the bravest male protagonist running. Ben held fast. Then Creature emerged, angry, beet-red, and indifferent to our screw-ups. She screeched like a gull and looked at us with expectation.

Be better than the books, she seemed to say.

A foolish dream, but we’re trying.

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.