Don’t Try This at Home - Adultery in the Marital Bed
THE woman who came to see Ken Altshuler, a divorce lawyer, had reason to be enraged: her husband was not only having an affair, he was also having an extravagant, money’s-no-concern, fabled-and-faraway-beaches affair. He had taken his girlfriend to Tahiti, he was sending flowers to her. But what infuriated his wife the most was where he had often made love to his girlfriend: their marriage bed.
“She was totally fixated on that,” said Mr. Altshuler, who practices in Portland, Me., and is president-elect of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers. “ ‘You had sex with that woman in our bed’ — that was overriding everything else. For a year in the divorce, every time an issue came up, that was part of it. We’d need to talk about placing the house up for sale, she’d say, ‘You mean that house where he brought that so-and-so to our bed?’ Or, when we talked about personal division of property, ‘He can take the bed and shove it’ or ‘He can use it with his next whore.’ ”
How did Mr. Altshuler’s client find out her husband was using their bed?
“He admitted it when he got caught,” Mr. Altshuler said, in the tone of one who has spent two and a half decades observing the stupidities of humankind and still retains a touching ability to be amazed. “I think she found some of the charges on the credit card, so he fessed up. And she said, ‘Where did you have sex with her?’ And he goes, ‘In our bed, where else?’ Then it’s, ‘Oops, did I say that?’ ”
Conventions change. A woman no longer earns a scarlet letter for having a child out of wedlock; divorce is not synonymous with scandal; and it is no surprise to find, when a marriage comes apart, that a third person was involved. But even in a sexually liberal culture, the home is still usually off-limits, as if protected by an invisible force field. And the marriage bed — a phrase that in itself seems quaintly out of date — remains a sacred object.
All but one of 18 marriage counselors and divorce lawyers interviewed for this article said they saw at-home adultery rarely, if ever, although the divorce lawyers saw it more often than the therapists. When it does happen, however, the consequences are usually dire: affairs are painful in a marriage, but affairs that take place in the marriage bed can be lethal.
In an informal, unscientific survey conducted at the request of The New York Times by the Web site CafeMom.com, which draws young married women, more than half of approximately 500 respondents said their marriages would “definitely not” survive if their partner made love to another person in the marriage bed. By contrast, less than a third of approximately 700 respondents to another question said that their marriages would “definitely not” survive an affair outside the home.
“It would hurt no matter where it happened,” one anonymous respondent wrote. But “if he did it in my own home,” she added, “it would feel more like a slap in the face.”
Few marriages survive such an affair — and even fewer marriage beds.
Richard Roane, 52, a divorce lawyer in Grand Rapids, Mich., said he had seen a dozen such cases in the estimated 2,200 divorces he has handled. He jokes that he always tells clients that at a minimum, they’ll have to get a new bed.
Mr. Roane recalled one betrayed spouse telling him to burn the bed, and another putting the bed on which her husband had cheated in the driveway of their house, which was in an upscale suburban neighborhood.
Mr. Roane said he also had a case in which the wife never found out that her husband, who was his client, had been cheating on the living room sofa — something Mr. Roane himself learned during a property settlement negotiation.
“The husband whispered in my ear: ‘She can have the sofa. I don’t want it,’ ” Mr. Roane said. “He was taking some pleasure in giving the sofa where he made love to his girlfriend to his wife. The wife didn’t know it, but he did. We see a lot of bad behavior in divorce.”
Randall M. Kessler, an Atlanta divorce lawyer who is the chairman elect of the Section of Family Law of the American Bar Association, has seen his share of rage around the marriage bed. He remembered an incident involving a local lawyer — not, he hastened to add, at his firm.
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