(sigh)
SHIRLEY GLASS, B. 1936
The Doctor of the Dalliance
By IRA GLASS
Published: December 28, 2003
Here's how it would usually go: I'd tell someone that my mom was an expert on extramarital affairs. ''Really?'' they'd say. ''Why's she so interested in that?''
Yeah, I'd think. Why?
My two sisters and I used to joke about which one of our parents must have cheated on the marriage, since the subject interested Mom so much, and over the course of three decades we made periodic attempts to interrogate each parent. We'd ask our dad about women he knew from work. ''You always seem so comfortable together,'' we'd say. ''Don't you think you two have a lot in common?'' He'd shoot us a look so lacking in guilt that it was hard to continue.
My mom, Dr. Shirley Glass, was a psychologist known as ''the godmother of infidelity research.'' She wrote a book; she was quoted regularly in the national media; she appeared on all sorts of TV shows whenever a public figure had trouble keeping it in his pants.
Mom explained her interest in the subject this way: Back in the 70's, she and my dad ran into a guy they'd known for years at a restaurant on a Saturday night. He was obviously on a date, cheating on his wife.
It just didn't make sense to my mom. She'd always believed the conventional wisdom, which was repeated in women's magazines and advice columns, that only people in unhappy marriages have affairs. This couple's marriage seemed exceptionally good, enviable even. Yet here he was.
This became the subject of my mom's research: figuring out what to think about marriages like this guy's. She handed out questionnaires at the airport to business travelers, to fill out on the plane and mail back anonymously. What she discovered in those first surveys was later confirmed in her work with the hundreds of couples she counseled: when a person cheats, it doesn't mean there's a problem in the marriage. Over half of the men and a third of the women who had had affairs said they were happy with their spouses.
This simple idea turns out to have interesting repercussions when it comes to counseling couples. Traditionally, therapists have assumed that an affair was a symptom of something going wrong in a marriage. And so traditionally, when they treated a couple in which one partner had cheated, they'd steer the couple to talking about root causes -- what had been malfunctioning in their marriage to lead to the affair. This isn't a bad idea for lots of these marriages, but Mom's research showed that for a sizable percentage, it's completely irrelevant. For them, talking about root causes is not just a waste of time; it distracts from the only thing that will save their marriage: talking about the affair itself.
This was her other big insight: that in therapy, the couple need to discuss the affair -- at length and in detail. In the past, when the cheated-upon spouse wanted to know the specifics about what happened, most therapists told them to let it go, to move on. My mom argued that it was more effective to think of the betrayed partners as suffering from a kind of trauma -- the breach in their world was that great -- and as with any severe emotional trauma, the first step in treatment should be to get the facts of what happened out in the open. When therapists denied them those facts, she said, it actually prevented them from getting what they'd need to lay the past to rest, trust their spouses again and heal their marriages.
As for what happened during affairs, she was utterly unromantic. Patients told her how their secret love felt fated and doomed all at once, how they'd never felt more alive. But to her, an affair was more like a medical condition: it followed predictable rules and was perfectly preventable, if you recognized the early signs. Sadly, not many people did. As more women made it into the workplace as equals with men, more than half of the affairs my mom encountered started on the job. Women and men in happy marriages, not intending to cheat, got close to someone at work, sharing confidences and intimacies, until they fell in love. The cheating spouses sometimes seemed as confused as their partners at how it happened.
When had they crossed the line? Not when they finally kissed, my mom said. In a sense the sex was just the endgame. They crossed the line when the married person began confiding in the friend at work. When you entrust what you really think to someone outside the marriage, when your friend knows more about your marriage than your spouse knows about your friend, you've gone too far.
For my sisters and me, the strange thing wasn't really that our mother specialized in extramarital affairs; it was that she was a psychologist at all. Like most therapists' kids, we were skeptical of our parents' supposed powers of observation and psychological insight. After all, we'd been teenagers in her house. As adults, we'd watch her on ''Oprah,'' and it was hard to understand how it all happened. We were proud, sure, but incredulous. People actually seemed to be listening to what she said.
She died in October. Many therapists have come around to her way of thinking, but her ideas are still disbelieved or disregarded by lots of them. In surveys of 465 therapists over the last decade or so, Mom found that about half of them still think that an affair always indicates a problem in a marriage and that half believe a therapist should actively discourage a couple from reviewing the details of what happened in the affair.
Mom's choice of specialty still gets me into some odd conversations. An acquaintance recently made a point of telling me how much he just loved Mom's book, how it was so interesting, he picked it up and read it cover to cover, couldn't put it down. Now, I love my mom, and it's a decent book, but the only way it could possibly seem so fascinating to someone is if, you know, it struck a chord. So I faced this awkward choice. Do I smile and tell him that he's kind to say all these things, that my mom would have been pleased? Or do I sit him down with the question that's really going through my mind: Whom are you sleeping with at your job?
Ira Glass is the host of the public radio program ''This American Life.''
SHIRLEY GLASS, B. 1936
The Doctor of the Dalliance
By IRA GLASS
Published: December 28, 2003
Here's how it would usually go: I'd tell someone that my mom was an expert on extramarital affairs. ''Really?'' they'd say. ''Why's she so interested in that?''
Yeah, I'd think. Why?
My two sisters and I used to joke about which one of our parents must have cheated on the marriage, since the subject interested Mom so much, and over the course of three decades we made periodic attempts to interrogate each parent. We'd ask our dad about women he knew from work. ''You always seem so comfortable together,'' we'd say. ''Don't you think you two have a lot in common?'' He'd shoot us a look so lacking in guilt that it was hard to continue.
My mom, Dr. Shirley Glass, was a psychologist known as ''the godmother of infidelity research.'' She wrote a book; she was quoted regularly in the national media; she appeared on all sorts of TV shows whenever a public figure had trouble keeping it in his pants.
Mom explained her interest in the subject this way: Back in the 70's, she and my dad ran into a guy they'd known for years at a restaurant on a Saturday night. He was obviously on a date, cheating on his wife.
It just didn't make sense to my mom. She'd always believed the conventional wisdom, which was repeated in women's magazines and advice columns, that only people in unhappy marriages have affairs. This couple's marriage seemed exceptionally good, enviable even. Yet here he was.
This became the subject of my mom's research: figuring out what to think about marriages like this guy's. She handed out questionnaires at the airport to business travelers, to fill out on the plane and mail back anonymously. What she discovered in those first surveys was later confirmed in her work with the hundreds of couples she counseled: when a person cheats, it doesn't mean there's a problem in the marriage. Over half of the men and a third of the women who had had affairs said they were happy with their spouses.
This simple idea turns out to have interesting repercussions when it comes to counseling couples. Traditionally, therapists have assumed that an affair was a symptom of something going wrong in a marriage. And so traditionally, when they treated a couple in which one partner had cheated, they'd steer the couple to talking about root causes -- what had been malfunctioning in their marriage to lead to the affair. This isn't a bad idea for lots of these marriages, but Mom's research showed that for a sizable percentage, it's completely irrelevant. For them, talking about root causes is not just a waste of time; it distracts from the only thing that will save their marriage: talking about the affair itself.
This was her other big insight: that in therapy, the couple need to discuss the affair -- at length and in detail. In the past, when the cheated-upon spouse wanted to know the specifics about what happened, most therapists told them to let it go, to move on. My mom argued that it was more effective to think of the betrayed partners as suffering from a kind of trauma -- the breach in their world was that great -- and as with any severe emotional trauma, the first step in treatment should be to get the facts of what happened out in the open. When therapists denied them those facts, she said, it actually prevented them from getting what they'd need to lay the past to rest, trust their spouses again and heal their marriages.
As for what happened during affairs, she was utterly unromantic. Patients told her how their secret love felt fated and doomed all at once, how they'd never felt more alive. But to her, an affair was more like a medical condition: it followed predictable rules and was perfectly preventable, if you recognized the early signs. Sadly, not many people did. As more women made it into the workplace as equals with men, more than half of the affairs my mom encountered started on the job. Women and men in happy marriages, not intending to cheat, got close to someone at work, sharing confidences and intimacies, until they fell in love. The cheating spouses sometimes seemed as confused as their partners at how it happened.
When had they crossed the line? Not when they finally kissed, my mom said. In a sense the sex was just the endgame. They crossed the line when the married person began confiding in the friend at work. When you entrust what you really think to someone outside the marriage, when your friend knows more about your marriage than your spouse knows about your friend, you've gone too far.
For my sisters and me, the strange thing wasn't really that our mother specialized in extramarital affairs; it was that she was a psychologist at all. Like most therapists' kids, we were skeptical of our parents' supposed powers of observation and psychological insight. After all, we'd been teenagers in her house. As adults, we'd watch her on ''Oprah,'' and it was hard to understand how it all happened. We were proud, sure, but incredulous. People actually seemed to be listening to what she said.
She died in October. Many therapists have come around to her way of thinking, but her ideas are still disbelieved or disregarded by lots of them. In surveys of 465 therapists over the last decade or so, Mom found that about half of them still think that an affair always indicates a problem in a marriage and that half believe a therapist should actively discourage a couple from reviewing the details of what happened in the affair.
Mom's choice of specialty still gets me into some odd conversations. An acquaintance recently made a point of telling me how much he just loved Mom's book, how it was so interesting, he picked it up and read it cover to cover, couldn't put it down. Now, I love my mom, and it's a decent book, but the only way it could possibly seem so fascinating to someone is if, you know, it struck a chord. So I faced this awkward choice. Do I smile and tell him that he's kind to say all these things, that my mom would have been pleased? Or do I sit him down with the question that's really going through my mind: Whom are you sleeping with at your job?
Ira Glass is the host of the public radio program ''This American Life.''