Fidelity, or Fantasy?

As you may have heard, here in New York State we recently lost our (married) governor, Eliot Spitzer, when he resigned after it was discovered he’d spent up to $80,000 on high-priced prostitutes over the past few years. No sooner had our new governor, David Paterson, taken office when he and his wife held a news conference and admitted that during a rough patch in their marriage, around 1999 to 2001, they had both had affairs. “There were a number of women,” Governor Paterson said, including a state employee, though no one that he directly supervised.

You’ve gotta admire the new governor’s honesty, but all this makes you wonder…is ANYONE out there being monogamous? According to my up-to-the-minute internet research, anywhere from 17% of women and 25% of men (http://www.infidelity-etc.com/index.php/4) to 40% of women and 60% of men ((http://www.dearpeggy.com/affairs.html) have had an extramarital affair at some point. I also remember reading an article a few years ago which stated that in 10% of all U.S. families, the father is not the true biological father of at least one child in the family, due to the woman having an affair and never admitting to her husband that the child is not his. (The woman herself may not always know for sure.) Interestingly, the same article stated that statistic drops to 3% in Utah, because Mormon couples are more likely to be monogamous.

It’s enough to make you wish you were a swan, or some other beautiful animal that mates for life. Oh, except they don’t either, really, according to a March 18 article by Natalie Angier in the New York Times entitled “In Most Species, Faithfulness is a Fantasy (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/science/18angi.html?ref=science). A lot of animals partner up to cuddle, groom each other, breed, and raise young, but genetic testing shows that “anywhere from 10 to 70 percent will prove to have been sired by somebody other than the resident male.”

Apparently, the only guaranteed-monogamous animal is the Diplozoon paradoxum, which is a worm that makes its home in a fish’s gills (ew). To quote David P. Barash, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle, “males and females meet each other as adolescents, and their bodies literally fuse together, whereupon they remain faithful until death. That’s the only species I know of in which there seems to be 100 percent monogamy.”

Geez. I think I’d like my body fused to someone else’s even less than dealing with their affair!