Sitting in the waiting area, topless but for a little robe, waiting to get my annual g-ddam mammogram last Friday, I listened to two women talking earnestly about Tiger Woods’ press conference as it blared on the t.v. “Nobody’s business”-lady debated with “sometimes it matters”-woman. They shared, it seemed, some common sense notion that having sex with another person outside of your marriage is always a problem of the worst kind.

As I later reflected on the topic, I did a Google search on infidelity and saw the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy’s infidelity consumer update that starts with the words…”After the devastating disclosure of infidelity….” Made me remember: eighteen years ago my boss at the time–a family therapist–made the point to me that there are a lot worse things than infidelity. She wasn’t saying that because she was casual about formal commitments or marriage, or about, say, the impact of divorce on children. What she was saying is that, well, there are a lot worse things that happen in relationships than infidelity. You can make your own list–I have mine.

Now my uncle–also a family therapist–would disagree; or at least would pipe in with more detail. But what he would be likely to say is that it isn’t the sex or the affair that is the problem nearly so much as the lying, the betrayal. Whether you are having an affair or discover or suspect your partner is having an affair, the stuff that is painful is the stuff about toying with reality, toying with truth, toying with your life and the lives of others while holding all the cards. He would say it is no way to work on your marriage–or yourself.

But the betrayal thing is complicated, which takes us back to “what’s worse than infidelity?” There are lots of betrayals. “You weren’t supposed to be like this, you were supposed to be like that” … “I thought you knew me” … “I thought you liked me” … “I thought we had similar values” … these are generalities: but I bet you have your own particular stories you think of when I list those. The betrayals against a shared reality accumulate, alongside those everyday resentments about housework and money. When couples lose touch with each other and don’t face up to the minor betrayals, the mountain of betrayal looks big and painful. Screwing around is the least of it. But we get kind of sex obsessed when we hear about this one particular kind of betrayal. Instead of a novel, the sex-tinged drama becomes a cartoon.

I’m not saying that any of the affairs we’ve been served up as dark comedy this past year–John Edwards, Governor Sanford, Tiger Woods–are okay, or are not okay. I’m not saying that the affair you are having, or your colleague is having, or that you heard about, is trivial, or not trivial. But all the histrionics about the “devastating impact” of infidelity actually does marriage, or any other kind of intimate union, a disservice. It turns it into a one-dimensional experience about “ownership” and “entitlement.” Moreover, seen through this lens, marriage takes on all the righteousness of the homemaker/provider arrangement between the sexes. There is this massive imagery of the “wronged woman” full of traditional virtues.

Tiger is a puzzle. But in his press conference Friday, he was responding in part to the dehumanizing (and sometimes simple-minded) way we get worked up about infidelity. Tiger’s case lets us notice that our freak-outs about infidelity are also moments to check on what our own values and taken-for-granted ideas are doing to our relationships.

–Virginia Rutter