Marriage Is Anyone Faithful Any More

American writer Pamela Druckerman knows all the rules of infidelity. She spent three years studying adulterers, from Paris to Tokyo. She tells Polly Vernon why she thinks us Brits are getting it wrong.

The Observer, Sunday July 8, 2007

Pamela Druckerman doesn't look like the world's leading authority on infidelity. She looks like the primary- school teacher all the dads fancy; or one of those second-generation yummy mummies, the kind who sets up a stall in a farmers' market selling fashionable cupcakes. She sits in the window of a patisserie in North London; a super-pretty, soft, smiley blonde, with a latte and a laptop.

She's involuntarily fixating on passing Bugaboos. 'My husband said he might walk by with our daughter,' she says. She's American, and even though her husband is British, and they have spent the past four years living in Paris, her accent endures. 'I can't help checking out all the prams. It's a reflex.' She smiles.

I expected something a lot less wholesome from someone who's spent the past three years immersed in the world of international adultery. Pamela Druckerman has written the definitive guide on it. Lust In Translation: The Rules Of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee is the result of a long study of the world's philanderers. Druckerman has crunched numbers, collated evidence, and acquainted herself with the lexicon of adultery in two dozen cities in 10 different countries across the world.

She has interviewed adulterers (one-off; serial; recovering; flagrant; and tortured) and cuckolds (or 'men who wear green hats' according to the Chinese) in Moscow, Kazakhstan, London, New York, Paris, Indonesia, South America and beyond... She discovered that the Japanese don't count it as infidelity if they've paid for it, and that the best thing that can happen to them in one of their famous sex clubs is 'oral sex without showering first'.

She discovered that 40 per cent of Russians surveyed think affairs are 'not at all wrong' or 'not always wrong', and that upper-class Muscovites think affairs conducted at beach clubs do not compromise wedding vows one iota.

She discovered that Indonesian women in extremely traditional Islamic marriages 'have affairs, and the reasons they give for them are exactly the same as the reasons my girlfriends in New York City gave: my husband doesn't listen to me, I need someone who'll make me feel smart and pretty again; my husband doesn't do that, but my boyfriend does...' She discovered that on average the British cheat more than the Americans - and the French.

Read More...