Another Kind Of Adultery

Toward the end of a course on professional ethics I had been teaching for pastoral counselors in training, one of the members reported on a recently completed session that she said had unnerved her to the point of making her dread its follow-up. Her case unnerved all of us, too, partly because at the time none of us, myself included, had dealt with anything like it. Over the years to come, all of us would be dealing with cases like it in abundance.

Our colleague's counselee was a 32 year old avowedly hetereosexual man who was terrified that his wife would discover his sexual activity outside the marriage relationship --- with a series of men --- and leave him. The more the man disclosed about himself, the more committed he seemed to be to his marriage, the less homosexually oriented he appeared to be, the more defensive he was about the innocence of his one night stands, and the more confused his therapist became, to some extent about her pre-conceived notions of what homosexuality is, but more especially about where her professional responsibility in this case lay. Whatever the course of treatment, her obligation to protect confidential disclosures would remain binding. However, the man's behavior was putting his wife at risk, and the counselor was feeling more identification with the partner who was not in therapy than with the partner who was.

With this case, and some of my own that soon followed, I first began my research into the psychologically murky waters of casual, gay sexual activity engaged in by men who are neither homosexual nor bi-sexual in orientation, and who see no reason why their behaviors should undermine their intimate and often deeply committed heterosexual relationships. I am no less startled by what I find in the literature now than I was then. For one thing, this pattern of behavior is disturbingly widespread. The Centers for Disease Control puts the number of straight men who often engage in secret sexual activity with other men at 3 million plus. In one recent survey, 10% of all the married men who participated reported engaging in same-sex behavior the previous year.

And secondly, most people who are writing about this issue continue to focus on therapeutic strategy rather than on ethical reflection. Typically, the discussions revolve around helping straight men whose forays into gay sex have become a problem to explore unresolved conflicts from childhood as the root of at least part of it, and to do this in an atmosphere of non-judgmental, empathic, supportive responses on the part of the therapist, with the patient's well-being and no one else's the principal concern throughout. Therapeutically speaking, the problem comes down to helping their clients appreciate the potentially self-destructive consequences of their activities, and on the basis of that insight-based appreciation, modify them in a healthier direction.

Ethically speaking, though, the problem lies elsewhere. As my supervisee pointed out in our group clearly and passionately, a husband who fools around with other men puts his wife at serious risk for life-threatening diseases, and a counselor who does not somehow (the big question is always: How?) intervene on her behalf is guilty of a serious moral offense, whatever her obligation may be to confidentiality as a standard of care. Gay men, of course, are not the only transmitters of AIDS in the population; a husband committing adultery with another woman also puts his wife at risk. Any and every kind of extra-marital sexual activity --- whether gay, lesbian, heterosexual, with one accomplice or many, in one night stands or in long-term relationships --- threatens the health of the marriage partner. But it also threatens the integrity of the marriage relationship to the core and compromises, sometimes fatally, the character of one who pledges himself or herself to another and then breaks the pledge by not keeping only to the other sexually.

Once upon a time, couples whose marriages were faltering because of adultery usually conceded that for the marriage to survive, the messing around had to stop. Further, most couples whose marriages did survive came to a deeper grasp of the reasons why this is so. Right now, though, it is unclear to me whether men who are adulterating their marriages by having sex with other men are at all cognizant of what the moral foundation of marriage is all about. I do know that what passes for therapy with this population is pretty discouraging on this score. My specific concern here opens out on a more general one, about the massive erosion across our culture of the understanding that committed relationships are intended to serve moral ends even more than utilitarian ones.