THE COST OF COMMITMENT
Tess Nichol talks to Laura Mucha about the truth when it comes to sex and cheating
Tess Nichol talks to Laura Mucha about the truth when it comes to sex and cheating
For a book about love, the opening pages of Love, Factually are a bit of a downer. A reader curious to learn about the life-affirming secrets of love will instead discover mere moments after cracking the spine that any coupled person they meet is more likely than not to have done the dirty on their partner.
Studies into infidelity have varied results but those at the higher end found nearly three quarters of men — and a similar number of women — admitted to cheating on a spouse. Studies at the lower end found just 14 per cent of men and 10 per cent of women confessed to cheating — but those numbers often rose again in therapy sessions, where, after gentle probing, partners admitted infidelity. The huge range in results is likely due to the fact people are unwilling to admit to cheating because of how culturally unacceptable it is. But before optimistically deciding the bleaker studies were outliers, you should know one of the most reliably representative studies in the United States found 66 per cent of 7236 married men admitted to sleeping with someone who wasn’t their spouse.
What the hell? Is love dead? Was it ever real to begin with? And why start with such grim numbers?
Laura Mucha, who interviewed hundreds of strangers for her book, Love, Factually, thinks first and foremost we need to get straight the difference between love and lust — two feelings people are apt to muddle. She says infidelity is a good starting point for discussing this. In fact, before she started the project Mucha says she didn’t really understand the distinction either.
“I think I often thought when I was in lust I was in love and then when it faded I thought ‘Ugh, no.’ And it happened enough times that you would thought I would have learned, but apparently not.”
The thrill of lust — the sexual intensity of a new lover, how intoxicated you feel by their smell and touch, is a drive we need to get us to reproduce, but it doesn’t necessarily stick around in a long term relationship. It might fade, or come and go over the years.
What is hopefully revealed when lust fades is romantic and companionate love, which involves intimacy, honesty, vulnerability and commitment. This kind of love is about fulfilling the desire most people have which is to partner with someone who is above all else kind — a nearly universal and rather comforting finding.
“All across the world people said kindness and understanding — more than intelligence or excitingness or whatever,” Mucha said.
Over 10 years Mucha interviewed somewhere between 300 and 400 people about their thoughts on love, the project spanning more than 30 countries and every continent, including Antarctica. That meant getting about three strangers a month to speak freely on a deeply intimate topic, every month for a decade. It’s an astonishing number, but talking to Mucha you get the feeling she may have struck up these conversations whether she was writing a book or not.
Bubbly, lively, endlessly curious and exceedingly thoughtful, Mucha possesses that trait all journalists would kill for: the knack for getting a total stranger to open up almost immediately and spill their guts. In the course of our two hour conversation I end up divulging a lot of my romantic hang ups — not because I have to, that’s well outside the remit of a normal interview, they just sort of slip out as we chat. I tell her how shocked I was by the cheating statistics. “The levels of infidelity were higher than I