Illustrative. (photo credit: TNS)
I’m a secular, middle-aged woman, and I’ve been married for nearly three decades. I’m marrying off my daughter in a month but I’m feeling worried and disenchanted with the institution of marriage as a whole. Too many of my friends have been hurt by their husbands’ infidelity; I myself can well relate to the disappearance of intimacy after some years of living as a couple. Has marriage gone bankrupt only in the secular world, or is this the same across the religious spectrum?
Name withheld
Petah Tikva Tzippi Sha-ked:
“People are people,” as Pam is fond of saying, though she usually adds that religious men are no different and perhaps even worse. Yet, deceiving a spouse is hardly exclusive to men. “Since 1990,” writes Esther Perel in The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity, “the rate of married women reporting unfaithfulness has increased by 40%.” To further disturb us, she adds that “monogamy is a spectrum.”