Tainted Love? Let Us Count the Cost. Forbes Magazine Audits Adultery's Accounts.
May 04, 2018
"How Much Does Infidelity Cost?", Forbes.com asks. I'm just glad someone is asking the question, and acknowledging that such choices, and divorce, have costs and are not "value-neutral."
The article starts with costs so trivial as to be ridiculous, but then follows out some very foreseeable and common consequences -- separate vacations, faraway hideaways, therapy, marriage counseling, separation, restraining orders among new partners and old, loss of security clearances and arms-bearing rights for people under restraining orders, divorce, increased divorce-lawyer costs as the adultery makes every issue in the divorce more vicious and hard-fought, job loss for workplace affairs, a few months of unemployment, and finally a new job that pays 20% less.
The writing tone is a little bit like a typical canned article, what Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones called "a two-shrink, five-friend" article, except that the subject is so rarely brought up in the media, though it has always been a huge topic in life, art and literature. There's a bit of copy-editing, or lack thereof, that's really surprising in a top-flight source like Forbes. A couple times I thought I was reading one of those odd articles that are taken from real ones, then run through a couple translators and/or some guys in India who didn't qualify for jobs with the gang that calls people up pretending to be "Windows." That's happened to many of my own articles. It ends oddly, like a freshman term paper ending at the exact turn-in deadline with a neat balancing of supposed opposites that actually makes no sense, resting on assumptions and definitions that reveal the author to know far less of the basic terms and context than it appeared from the introduction as it rose slowly through 50 shades of obvious, or from the body of the paper as the student could lean this way and that on quotations and cautiously slight paraphrases of opposing authorities on the topic. Anyhow, back to the Forbes article. No, wait, this lamest conclusion that I've seen, except in term papers that potential interns send me as writing samples, goes on for two paragraphs of appalling shallowness, totally betraying the whole point of the article by nattering about these things as if they were subjects one would encounter for the first and last time in a college class, and never in real life:
"Who are the people engaging in these covert relationships? Nika Kabiri, Director of Strategic Insights for Avvo, the company which offers a fixed fee uncontested divorce, recently conducted a relationship study to uncover this answer.
Avvo is where you go for reliable studies of marriage? I mean, they're a great company for what they do, and I'm sure Kabiri and his team are good at studying their potential customers, but there are actual disinterested scholars, statisticians and therapists who study these things, many of whom are studying how to keep more marriages healthy and together, not to grow the number of people who get ensnarled in family/legal problems.
"Kabiri found that 61% of Americans are unhappily married.
[I've never seen a figure over the high 40s.]
"Yet only ΒΌ of these people say that divorce is inevitable if one no longer wants a romantic relationship with his/her spouse. In fact, nearly 80% believe in staying together so much so that they are open to exploring alternatives to breaking up. Only half of these people say that if their partner wanted an open relationship they would leave him or her. [What about those who respond with, "Oh No, you won't,", among many others?] In other words half who are confronted with a partner who wants to stray are willing to talk about it, work through it, maybe even be part of an open relationship.
[Uh, you're not curious about defining who wants to fix the marriage versus who wants an 'open relationship'?]
"While on the surface it seems that having an affair is financially a more affordable road than divorc'em this is not necessarily the case. Clearly the emotional, mental and financial hardship could end up being more detrimental than enduring a divorce."
Huh? Despite everything in the first half of the article, now "Having an Affair"and "Divorce'Em" are not cause-and-effect, but the two mutually exclusive alternatives for a Smart Shopper to thoughtfully consider? All that talk about how a marriage that grows unhappy doesn't have to devolve into divorce, and in fact 80% of them recover, and suddenly the only alternatives to divorce are affairs and "open relationships"? Sick.
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