I’m not sure if rigorously faithful men have low sex drives necessarily — of course it’s just speculation, but I would guess that there are many men. as well as women, whose psychic organization is threatened by going outside the couple formation, and/or who need the structure and reliability of secure married life more than they would derive pleasure from passion. One of my brothers is like that — I believe him when he told me that the idea of another woman would never tempt him. The other brother, by the way, is not like this. Interesting.

But it seems embedded in American culture. Don’t most people getting married think they are making a lifelong commitment? (Or are there more people than we think like my husband and me who left that part of the ceremony up for grabs?) I frankly find it hard to believe those men who say they have NEVER been tempted — but maybe they just have low sex drives, so it’s easier for them to stick to the morality of exclusivity in marriage and sex. And I’m assuming here that “male-pattern affairs” are primarily for sex. I know that my affairs were primarily for sex. So by Dozie’s husband’s morality, they don’t really count. And they certainly didn”t interfere with my marriage — if anything, they made me want to have more sex, rather than less, with my husband.

Second, in my opinion you’re absolutely right about these guys messing up not only their own political careers but risking Democratic elections, though that isn’t a moral criticism of their adultery per se.

As for the duality of those who are and are not passionate, I did exaggerate to make a point. Of course it goes without saying that there is a vast range of desire and self-restraint in between, the gray area. In fact, I think it’s more complex than that — it isn’t just a simple continuum from lack of passion to intense passion, there’s a whole variety of feelings and experiences possible in unique combinations. For example, I can’t personally relate myself to the story of your friend who ended her affair and cried for two years, then felt dismissive of her former lover when she met him later, nor does that necessarily make me believe she was truly self-denying. There are few things I claim to know for sure, but one of them is that the strength of the passion I felt did not admit of dismissing the love affair; also, I have never once since wondered what I saw in him, and I’m willing to bet a lot I never will. I can’t prove it, but my guess is still that people who are willing to reject the objects of their desire are able to do so in proportion to how deep the desire went in the first place. I just am not convinced this has anything to do with superior morals or character, cynic that I am.

Another thing: You seem to have arrived at a duality that doesn’t reflect reality; that is, that there are people who have never been tempted and so have no right to blame those who have, and people who have been tempted, and have participated in adultery, and are therefore less likely to blame those who’ve done likewise. What about all those grays in the middle, those who’ve been tempted (to varying degrees)and refrained(to varying degrees)? Once you’re tempted, is that all there is to it, I mean if it’s a really “powerful urge”? Or is the assumption that if you didn’t give in to the urge, well, it must not have been that strong an urge? (Story of a good friend of mine: As a young married woman with two kids, had an intensely emotional love affair that went on for about 2 years, then the guy insisted that she leave husband and live with him. She wrestled with the issue and finally decided to give up lover and stay with husband; leaving, she felt, put too much at risk, most especially children, etc etc so she broke up with lover. It wasn’t til like maybe ten years or so later that she told me this story, and I asked her, so, was it easy, once you made the decision? Oh no, it was horrible she said, I cried every night for about 2 yrs. Now I’m over it, and we ever see the guy and his new wife, and it’s amazing, he just seems like a kind of mildly interesting friend. ) End of that story; I just include it as an example of a gray area, someone who gave in to an urge and who refrained from it too, in the end. Husband never knew any of it, by the way.
I do totally agree, though, that adultery is so multi faceted as to merit a lot more than one word for it, you know, like the Eskimos have 7 words for snow.
I had something of an argument with my cozy? husband re which adultery
is more serious, or I guess “immoral” – casual sex with multiple”easy” women, just for the fun of it, or an ongoing love affair with someone one cares about, the emotional wrench you spoke of?
(Clinton and Kennedy being examples of the first, FDR and Lucy Mercer being the second. ) My husband thought FDR despicable, and the others, well, so what, he thinks, it’s just for the momentary pleasure, like a massage, or something. I have more admiration for a true love affair because sex with women that people that one doesn’t care about seems so inhuman. But you’ll not be surprised when I remind you that he was involved in the first category, and I in the second. I just can’t imagine being tempted by a one night stand, and I’m not sure he understands the power of a love affair. But neither of is is standing there so calmly or feeling so respectable just because we’ve never experienced the thrall of the “other adultery”.
The the question goes on: why are love and sex and exclusivity and anger and religion and and and and all so intertwined?

I do agree with you, though, about the two-edged nature of making meaning. Religions are just some of those attempts to make meaning, and most of those stories are pretty meaningless to me, especially when each one tries to claim, from its very parochial stance, that it’s the only true story.

And the idea that the universe will go on without us isn’t even slightly comforting to me — not that I don’t want it to, I do, but to me it’s not a comfort if I can’t be there to be part of it. The connection with nature idea strikes me as very Wordworthian (do you know Wordsworth’s Lucy Gray poems?). Yes, I’m going to devolve into atoms that float around somewhere doing God-knows-what, but what does that do for me?

As for our tendency to “make meaning out of all the meaninglessness in the universe”, yes, I think about that all the time, but I see it as two-edged: when it’s done well, that human ability can be beautiful and even noble, but as an everyday process, it often leads to the basest and most arrogant deception and self-deception.

I guess I’m an old crank, as I’d suspected. I love nature (see Vancouver entry) but I don’t get existential consolation from it.