Recently my husband of 18 years has explored his sexuality with other men. He admitted having four sexual encounters with random men he solicited from Craigslist. After a week of hell, and many a shouting match, he begged me to take him back, claiming that his experimentation is not worth losing his family. As in a textbook scenario, he, somehow, convinced himself that I, being very liberal and supportive of gay community, would understand, and maybe even approve, his urges. Having two teenage daughters and being a stay-at-home mom, I have initially agreed to let him back into the family fold, after all his STD tests came back clean.

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I really need you to tell me how to forgive myself, and how to carry on after I had an affair. I'm sorry if this ends up really long and please edit however you need to. Basically, I have been married for 15 years to a man who really is a fundamentally excellent person. We were married quite young for a couple in our socioeconomic bracket, and have been together since college. Like any couple that goes the distance, we have been to (relative) hell and back, most of which was the byproduct of trying to make our careers fit together, dealing with each other's families, family money issues, etc. Totally run-of-the-mill problems. I have had my doubts, at times over the years, whether we were "meant for each other," which we have discussed openly and honestly several times throughout our relationship.  We always come to the conclusion that we just do not want to break up. We love each other and we love most things about the life we've built.

Two years ago I entered an extremely challenging graduate program, which also wreaked havoc on our lives, and therefore, our relationship. Though I knew that all last summer and fall was an especially low point in our communication and in our overall happiness with each other, I'm still shocked and gutted whenever I "remember" that I cheated. Which is several times a day.

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I fear my marriage is in trouble and I need help. My wife and I used to be well matched as slightly neurotic types who worried about small things. Perhaps it's better to say that we were both risk-averse types, and worried that things weren't going to work out. That made us work to manage our lives in order to minimize risks.

Five years ago my dad died. He had heart problems and so it wasn't wholly unexpected. After this I searched for some good books to help me understand how sons deal with the death of their fathers. One sad thing about our culture is that there are few cultural references for this event. I guess that's liberating in a way, but I also really wanted to know how others had responded to this shock.

Through my own searching  I've come to realize in these years one important way his death has changed me. It has enabled me to value the days more, and fear living less. This is a wonderful thing. Having been visited by the experience of the death of someone close to me, I feel like I am now much better at understanding what matters and what does not. That's helped me to become a more relaxed person, and more adventurous too.

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This was new territory for many people, but not for LGBT advocates, who hear about it all the time. Won't legitimizing same-sex marriage lead to legitimizing polyamorous relationships too? If two men can marry one another, why not one man and two women?  This argument is a favorite of former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, the so-called Christian right and the right-wing blogosphere.

Responding to these arguments is a challenge. On the one hand, I reject the tactic of distinguishing the good gays from the "bad" poly people. Further marginalizing the marginalized is just the wrong trajectory for any liberation movement to take. And it reminds me of the way that some mainstream gay activists have sold out transgender and gender-nonconforming groups. We’re the married gays who make neighborhoods stable and herald the arrival of cool coffeehouses; we're not those awful drag queens. This is all trash, it sells out members of our own community who deserve more than that, and it’s a punt, really, not an argument.

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The Glanville-Harvey nuptials were clearly never meant to be more than a lighthearted lark, some attention-getting fodder for the Twitter streams. In an interview on the Crooklyn's Corner blog, Harvey explained that alcohol was "some sort of a factor." "We were in Vegas, and we wanted to do the classic Vegas thing," he said. "On the way to the chapel, I'm reading on my iPad, doing a quick Google search on annulments in Nevada." Because if you can't have a marriage that lasts as long as a Woot! deal, what's the point of living in this country anyway?

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Although, at first glance, this trend seems like a testament to the successes of feminism, Ralph Richard Banks, the author of the new book, "Is Marriage for White People?", argues that it represents a disturbing shift in the landscape of African-American intimacy. Banks, a professor of law at Stanford University, uses detailed interviews and extensive statistical research to argue that this gender and racial imbalance has dire implications for both child-rearing and the long-term happiness of African-American women. In the process, he makes provocative claims about both the importance of marriage and the reasons for its decline -- claims that are sure to inflame opinion in a number of circles.

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Great-grandfather Stephen walked a well-trodden path. I realized this as I matured and met real mistresses and their lovers. The first, whom I encountered during the summer after my freshman year in university, was a young woman who shared her sometimes exciting but mostly wretched experiences with me. Katerina was an exotic, sloe-eyed East German who fled to West Berlin two weeks before her high school graduation, forfeiting her diploma in exchange for freedom. Kati was a governess -- actually, an exalted babysitter -- for the same family that employed me during summer vacation at their resort hotel in Quebec's Eastern Townships. Despite (perhaps because of) my parents' objections, she and I developed a curious sort of intimacy. What they frowned on as fast and cheap, I admired as sophisticated -- Kati's lean, tanned and flat-chested body proudly exposed by her signature strapless tops; the hennaed rope of hair that swung nearly to her knees; the guttural, heavy accent that transformed me into "Elisabess," or "Bess" for short.

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But there are times along the way when I have to emerge from the trunk to do things: taste the food that will be served at our reception, choose a tuxedo style and, recently, participate in an engagement photo shoot.

This is not a thing I knew existed. I assumed that on the day of our wedding a photographer would take pictures of us and we would put those photos in an album that we'd keep on a shelf until we needed to bore dinner guests into leaving. And that would be that. But like so many lessons on the steep learning curve that is being a man about to get married, I discovered there was this thing called engagement photos and they were part of my future.

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You might wonder what this has to do with monogamy. Well, Ryan argues that in actuality the meat would have been shared with the entire tribe, because pre-agricultural societies shared everything -- including sex. This is a key point he and co-author/wife Cacilda Jethá make in "Sex at Dawn," which was released last year in hardcover and this month in paperback. Our hunting and gathering ancestors were nonmonogamous, they argue -- the implication being that, biologically speaking, sexual exclusivity is unnatural.

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In a campaign designed to warm the cockles of your heart and drain the retirement funds from your bank account, the venerable jeweler has created a new campaign centered around the most glamorous city in the world. And Edward Burns, the guy who 15 years ago was America's bright indie filmmaking hope, is on board with a tale of "romantic and witty stories of proposals from New York City couples." In other words, a six-and-a-half-minute rip-off of the less annoying part of "When Harry Met Sally," a movie that was itself a rip-off of everything Woody Allen has ever done. And while the meet-cute stories of an ethnically diverse array of gay and straight couples may do wonders to sell "the most beautiful" engagement rings, they're one a hell of a pitch for couches.

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In a 64-page affidavit, the University of British Columbia professor used his areas of expertise -- psychology, anthropology and economics -- to demonstrate the social harm associated with men taking multiple wives. Implicit in his argument was an endorsement of monogamy, which, he wrote, "seems to redirect male motivations in ways that generate lower crime rates, greater GDP per capita, and better outcomes for children." His interest isn't in the individual, emotional experience of sexual and romantic exclusivity so much as the evolution of cultural norms and how they impact society.

Last week, I spoke with an expert who explained why monogamy makes biological sense. This time around, I spoke with Henrich about the evolutionary basis for monogamy.

You've argued that there's a connection between monogamy and democracy. What's the link there?

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We've already had experts weigh in on the many challenges associated with sexual exclusivity, so this week it felt like time for an optimistic and passionate endorsement of the maligned practice. That would be easy to find if I was interested in ideological or religious reasoning, but I wanted an empirical approach -- I wanted facts! The problem is that experts from relevant fields, like sociology and anthropology, are often more inclined to highlight the diversity of romantic arrangements around the globe.

Eventually, I found a willing defender: Justin Garcia, an evolutionary biologist at Binghamton University. It's no accident that he's a scientific advisor to Match.com, which needs all the romantic optimism it can get. There's just one small technicality: His evidence supports social monogamy, which is not always, or even often, accompanied by sexual monogamy (more on that later). This might seem like a rhetorical sleight of hand, but his views raise the intriguing possibility that our continued idealization of sexual exclusivity -- despite many unattractive cultural blemishes -- is actually the best argument for the practice.

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The sociology professor at New York University is something of an expert on alternatives, having spent more than a decade studying everything from "monogamish" arrangements among gay men in California to polygamy in South Africa to nonmonogamous, matriarchal households in southwest China. The result is her fascinating book, "Unhitched." It doesn't simply offer a mind-bending cross-cultural perspective -- you can find that in any Anthropology 101 textbook. Instead, Stacey uses her observations to underscore just out how stifling and unstable the Western romantic ideal of marital monogamy can be for some people, as well as the vast array of romantic arrangements that are already out there in the world.

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Now she's done it again. Bachmann just became the first candidate to sign "The Marriage Vow: A Declaration of Dependence Upon Marriage and Family," a four-page pledge put out by prominent Iowa social conservative Bob Vander Plaats.

The pledge (which comprises two pages of pledge, two pages of endnotes) covers a lot more than just marriage.

There is, for example, this gratuitous reference to slavery in the preface to the pledge:

Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born in to slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African- American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President.

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As we're continually reminded of the problems with monogamy -- most recently courtesy of Anthony Weiner and Arnold Schwarzenegger -- we seem to keep rediscovering this solution anew, or reinventing the marital wheel, if you will. There is at once a desire for a way to avoid the pain and humiliation of failed monogamy and yet resistance to actual alternatives. With these issues at the fore of the American subconscious, Times writer Mark Oppenheimer devotes his feature to detailing Savage's personal solution: deemphasizing marital monogamy in favor of total honesty. That philosophy can manifest itself in countless ways -- from simply refusing to let an affair destroy a partnership to agreeing ahead of time that sex with others is OK.

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"Facts" are easy to come by in this arena, in the sense that there are scores of surveys on the prevalence of extramarital affairs in America. In 1948, Alfred Kinsey famously reported that seven out of 10 men and one in five women admitted to having an extramarital affair. Most contemporary surveys estimate the number of people who cheat during a marriage at anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of women and 30 to 60 percent of men. Note, though, that in 2002 the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago found that 15 percent of married women admitted to an affair, compared to 22 percent of men. The best educated guess, according to researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, is that an affair takes place within 40 to 76 percent of marriages: "A conservative interpretation of these figures suggests that although perhaps half of all married couples remain monogamous, the other half will experience an infidelity over the course of a marriage."

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I have another theory: the Web. No, the Internet didn't make him do it, but I suspect it is a significant factor here, and it's worth considering how it's changing the nature of personal fantasy within relationships.

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