How to Stay Faithful

The Faithful Man is a stranger among men. Among men, where it is an article of faith that no man is capable of sexual fidelity--that sexual fidelity is, in evolutionary terms, unnatural--the Faithful Man is considered suspect. Because infidelity is seen as entrepreneurial, he is seen as lacking in the drive and daring that make for compromised husbands and successful capitalists.

Go to a steak house: At the same table where an Unfaithful Man counts his latest conquest, the Faithful Man keeps a prim silence about his principled surrender. Even when a friend who avers that he could never stay faithful asks the Faithful Man how he does, the Faithful Man makes excuses for his success rather than boasts about it. "I dunno," he says. "I guess I have a great wife."

Among men, he accepts the moral equivalence of fidelity and infidelity, because moral judgment is one of the few deal breakers in male friendships. Among men, he presents his fidelity as a condition passively acquired--as something that just happened to him--because he doesn't want to present it as an ideal he has actively pursued. And so, among men, he has a secret, and the secret is this: He does judge. He does presume that fidelity is morally superior to infidelity. He does idealize it, and he does actively pursue it. Indeed, he knows fidelity wouldn't be worth the bother--it wouldn't even be possible--if he didn't tell himself it was the most important thing in the world.

In the absence of a sustaining mythology of male faithfulness, he has had to develop his own private one, wherein he struggles to be true not just to his wife and his family but also to himself. At issue is the question of choice, and choosing is the difference between surrender and defeat. Sure, the Faithful Man has surrendered to his vows and his marriage and, yes, his wife. But he has chosen to surrender, because the choice, as he sees it, is not between cheating and not cheating; it's between love and the utter desolation and meaninglessness of lies. He has had to draw the line in order to walk it, and he has had to give up some part of his volition in order to keep himself whole.

How does he know that he's chosen? Well, he knows he's chosen because he knows he chooses. Every day, when he wakes up to his home and his life and his wife's face on the pillow, he makes sure to say, "Yes, this," or more important, "Yes, her," because fidelity without active assent is just as futile and confining and absurd as other men say it is. Every day he chooses, every day he has to choose, every day he has to keep on choosing, every day until he's dead. And when one of his friends asks him how he does it, he's only trying to tell the truth when he mutters, "I dunno. I guess I have a great wife."

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