A recent article from New York Magazine made me by turns depressed, angry, and ultimately hopeful. The topic is why men cheat. The answer, according to the author, is that men cheat because they must:

An article of faith among the men with whom I discussed these issues (and an idea ignored, if not contested, by most of the women I know) was that the hunger for sexual variety was a basic and natural and more or less irresistible impulse. “I haven’t ever seen anyone who doesn’t deliver on every single demand their sexuality makes on them. We make the mistake of thinking some people have a stronger will, they don’t,” says a forward-thinking friend. “There is no more unnatural principle of social organization than sexual exclusivity.”

First the depression. If this is true, and men really can’t be trusted to push aside their sexual needs, then what chance does any marriage (or even dating relationship) even stand? I’m forced to wonder, is this just the attitude of the author and his friends? Or do most men feel this way and just not tell us lady-folk in order not to shatter our illusions? He cites the recent high-profile affairs of a handful of New York politicians as evidence that all men are programmed to cheat. And if this hypothesis is correct, then what can women like me hope for? Do we just pick a marriage partner as best we can and assume that he’ll cheat eventually? Because that seems like a terrible life to me, to be forever expecting betrayal.

Of course, the author goes on to blame the ridiculousness of women who view infidelity as a betrayal, laud the progressive and open European attitudes towards sex and marriage, and ridicule puritanical American notions of faithfulness in marriage.

At which point I start to get angry (which I generally do when some schmuck starts asking why America can’t be more like Europe). When I got to this point I was bordering on furious:

Nonetheless, the one strong impression I took away from interviewing peers is that American mores are evolving, especially among the affluent. An affair or two is handleable for the rich, says a friend, Jo Mango. “They’re more well read, better informed, and more tolerant. They say, ‘Get over it.’ It’s way costlier to break up. Because look what happens: You lose your living situation and your community in a divorce.” A sophisticated New Yorker made a similar point: “I don’t believe that straying diminishes your love or commitment to your partner. It’s not a zero-sum game. However, it does get complicated and hurtful when you start developing an emotional relationship with another woman.

Ah yes, being OK with infidelity is the “evolved” thing to do. Clinging to outmoded ideas of what we should expect from our marriage partners is for the less well read, the worse-informed.

Well, fine. Count me among the unsophisticated masses. Reading the entire article through a second time, I begin to realize that the whole thing is just a lengthy apologetic for a personal failing. In fact, the only evidence supporting his claim is the purely anecdotal. And as we all know, the plural of anecdote is not data. To be blunt, the author is an asshole who wants to justify his and his asshole friends’ behavior in an 8-page, navel-gazing manifesto.

And then comes the hopefulness. None of us are born with iron willpower. Maybe we don’t have a ready-made biological urge to be monogamous. But part of being human is having the free will to make our own choices and struggle against baser instincts. Willpower, as anyone who has ever tried to break a bad habit can tell you, starts out hard and gets easier the longer you work at it. Maybe you can’t expect men to leave the womb with the will power to be faithful husbands. But you can sure expect them to develop that will power as they grow into adults.

I’m really sick of this idea that men are naturally weak, and therefore cannot be expected to control themselves. It feeds into a lot of nasty sexual politics, and can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Men (and women) who tell themselves that they are incapable of fidelity will naturally have no reason to strive for it. If they end up cheating, they can always blame their biology, or stupid American mores for their fall.

As for me, I’m going to find myself a guy who, like Alan Jackson’s Small Town Southern Man, only loves one woman. (No joke, I love this song and this music video. It makes me smile).