Our Cheating Hearts by Kate Figes
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Blurb: Most of us manage to be monogamous, most of the time. But most of us also know that adultery is the ‘crime’ we could imagine ourselves committing. But does being ‘faithful’ mean the same to everyone? Why DO people have affairs?
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Using real-life testimony from those who have ‘cheated’ and those who have been cheated on, alongside the most up to date research, this book looks at the big questions around love and commitment. Kate Figes shows how in our progressive times monogamy has become the new ideal. Absolute fidelity in sexual love, above all, now stands as the primary symbol of commitment. But that has created new problems: increasing the allure of the affair, exacerbating the need for deceit; making trust harder; and highlighting the shame and the wounds of betrayal. This book lifts the taboos, asks the tough questions, suggests that we can survive an affair and that it can lead to a better understanding of ourselves and our relationships. Monogamy is possible and many couples manage it either throughout their relationship or for long periods of time. But for the countless others a more honest and humane public debate around the subject of infidelity is essential. Our Cheating Hearts, by the author known and respected for charting the emotional territory of relationships, is that book. (Virago)
The infidelity epidemic… | Kate Figes | Daily Mail
Juliet Gardiner, Financial Times
“This is a disappointingly old-fashioned book, with none of the penetrating and poignant personal testimonies that we have come to rejoice in with the documentaries of Steve Humphries or Fi Glover or studies based on Mass Observation archives, for example. In Our Cheating Hearts, the occasional remarks from Candy, Oliver, Rachel et al seem more like tags tied on to points that Figes wants to make than the insights of lived experience. Her writing lacks vigour and is repetitive and banal.”
Claire Harman, The Guardian
“Figes’s most surprising assertion is that monogamy is valued as never before, and that fidelity has “assumed more meaning as a marker of their commitment” in the current generation. She is unaccountably dogmatic about it (“Modern society has become so disapproving of all sexual infidelity that we find it hard to feel tolerance when a person strays,” she says at one point; “absolute monogamy is king”), but doesn’t seem to remember that she was equally dogmatic earlier in the book about a current “epidemic of infidelity”, quoting some evidently meaningless data from “a range of surveys” a decade old that suggest 25-75% of women, and 40-80% of men ”have engaged in at least one extramarital sexual activity”; in other words, almost everyone, or no one, has done something, or nothing, disloyal to their partner.”
Eleanor Mills, The Sunday Times
“While having an affair may set the pulse racing, though, this tome does no such thing. Written in dull therapese laced with cliché, the book is worthy, well-meaning, but often mindnumbingly dreary … The book is best when it explores the unfamiliar — for instance, how continental marriage counsellors are less likely to expect a relationship to end over an affair because they don’t expect the spouse to be lover, soul mate and best friend.”
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