Although sexual infidelity is the stock in trade of Hollywood melodrama, in real life husbands and wives are overwhelmingly faithful to each other. Nine of every 10 spouses in America have had only one sexual partner during the course of their marriage -- their own husband or wife.
Where married couples admit to multiple sex partners, those liaisons were made typically before or between marriages, not while they were married to each other. While divorce has increased exponentially in America, infidelity within marriage remains a comparative rarity.
Moreover, three-fifths of couples who remain together reject the notion that children take the fun out of marriage. Half of couples reject the idea that fun ever leaves a marriage.
Fidelity tends to persist even when a marriage runs into serious difficulties. Between three-fifths and two-thirds of American marriages are, by the spouses' own estimation, very happy or very content. At any point in time, only one marriage in 10 is experiencing what the partners admit to being serious problems, while another one in four is only falling somewhat short of the couple's mutual expectations.
Ironically, happily married couples have been brainwashed by Hollywood to believe that most other peoples' marriages are troubled. Two-thirds of happy couples believe they are more faithful to each other than they assume other couples to be. Appallingly, only one couple in four "strongly agrees" that most married couples in America are faithful to each other.
How to account for this misperception? I suspect it stems from news and entertainment media depictions of casual sex, philandering, spousal abuse, divorce and serial marriage. Obviously, we can't peer into the living rooms or bedrooms of other real married people, so it's tempting to believe that married life for most other couples resembles a television soap opera.
Although more than a third of still-married couples admit they have considered divorce in the past, close to two-thirds of them now say that divorce is not at all likely. Reconciliation, incidentally, tends to take place most often among couples married more than 25 years who no longer have children at home. The possibility of such reunion rests on a troubled couple's ability to agree to disagree -- in short, to compromise with each other.
Fully 78 percent of troubled couples who admit their spouse is open to compromise succeed in reconciliation. Even when compromise is impossible on a number of issues, their willingness to disagree openly without rancor promotes reconciliation. Just talking to each other more often, rather than giving one's spouse the silent treatment, helps to heal a troubled marriage.
For those couples who share a religious faith, frequent prayer by both spouses is the most powerful motivator for reunion.
Statistics are drawn from Rutgers University's Marriage Project, Gallup surveys and the National Opinion Research Center.
(David Yount's new book is "Celebrating the Single Life: Keys to Successful Living on Your Own" (Praeger). He answers readers at P.O. Box 2758, Woodbridge, VA 22195 and dyount31(at)verizon.net.)
AMAZING GRACE
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