truly extreme example, consider the dreadful case of Elin Woods, who had to endure the knowledge that her husband, Tiger, had sex regularly with a waitress who worked across the street—at a diner they frequented—seduced the daughter of a next-door neighbor, a family she had known for several years, employed numerous people to hide his sexual life who also interacted directly with her, and then—to top it all off—let a billion people in on the secret. Arnold Schwarzenegger has now pulled off his own stunt along these lines, also available for full public enjoyment.
Why is sex so often associated with shame? One reason is that sexual activity often acts against self-interest directly—the damaged self. This includes, in principle, masturbation, bestiality, homosexuality—all sexual behavior that fails to benefit self. Unrelated individuals will have no direct self-interest but relatives will—their self-interest is directly harmed by your sexual misbehavior, as may be their reputation. So they may feel special pressure to shame you.
In principle, your inappropriate sexual behavior can upset many individuals.
Again the contrast with the family offers insight. We could have grown up under complete subjugation while being sold an ideology of equality, but usually we fall somewhere along a continuum of relative domination and misrepresentation. But infidelity (like pregnancy) is not spread along a continuum. You either are unfaithful or you are not—pregnant or not. The reversal of fortune is often absolute.
Perhaps you say to yourself, “What’s the appropriate reward for someone who has lied to me, disrespected me, and plundered from me for two years?” and strangulation comes to mind. But should you not strangle yourself as well? Every deception was received and ignored by you. Your own self-deception was manipulated against you, probably both consciously and unconsciously by your partner. The two of you made that bed and lay in it.
There is often some kind of relationship between the family situation you grew up in and the one you find yourself in. Surely some of the resemblance is both genetic and through imitation. But there are also logically related effects of a different kind. Chris Rock, the American comedian, likes to joke that every woman has “a daddy problem” and you, her current partner, have to pay the price. Imagine dating a woman and taking her one day from an abusive relationship with her father. At first she will be happy, but with any hint that a man strong enough to do that could dominate her worse than her father in other ways, you have a problem on your hands.
Sexually induced pain is presumably greater the more intimate a couple have been—probably independent of the chance of propagation. Why? Imagine a sex life of relatively modest physical commitment—an embrace, a few kisses, the man climbs on top, and the two enjoy a good copulation. Contrast this with lovemaking that involves the intimate exploration of and numerous loving acts toward the body of the other person, and vice versa. After betrayal, the second is the much more painful of the two, loss in the pleasure of intimacy being the greater and also suggesting greater long-term love lost. And the greater intimacy is more painful to your imagination on both sides—he now has done those things with someone else, giving you a stabbing pain, and you also did such-and-such with him and he has gone elsewhere.
There is little doubt that pain from a relationship is among the worst of pains. With physical pain, you can almost always do something to ease it, but with emotional pain, you have to wait until it eases itself. The pain is felt on the inside and the outside—there is a social dimension that only adds to the personal. Remember that betrayal often links your partner to a web of lies involving many others—people who knew but did not speak, and so on.
Another very painful part of the interaction is that when evidence suggests that a long-term relationship is hopeless, the best strategy may be to cut the relationship in half, discard the other person, and minimize interactions, but this in itself is very painful, as if you are cutting yourself in two. Grown up between the two of you may be multiple lines of communication, now severed, so that you suffer extreme social deprivation. Two or three phone calls a day give way to oppressive silence. The sharing of joys, of minor insights, of hopes and fears, all fall by the wayside. The desire to reestablish contact—even hostile contact—is almost overwhelming. You find yourself talking