A Conversation with Catherine Wallace,
author of For Fidelity, 1990 Knopf. $12.00 in trade paperback. This interview appeared on the website of Knopf Publishers.

Q: Why does fidelity matter? And why is it so hard?

A: Well, why does it matter whether we speak the truth? Why is honesty so hard? Fidelity matters because identity matters, because lying and cheating and pretending are in the end wildly self-destructive, because when you betray other people the very first loss is your own: you lose your own ability to trust others. That's a kind of moral solitary confinement, and we lock ourselves inside it. The alternative is to recognize that we need to trust one another. We have an immediate sexual need for fidelity, a profound psychological need for fidelity, and ultimately a deep-rooted spiritual need to believe that our lives mean something, our sacrifices are worthwhile, and our moral ideals are wise and true. I explain each of these three aspects in some detail. But all three come down to the same point: we need to trust each other. And that takes courage.

Q: How can people stay happily married and faithful to each other for decades and continue to grow and to develop as individuals?

A: That was one of my motivating questions in writing this book. I wondered that about my own marriage. Next July it will be twenty-five years for Warren and me. And you know, I'm not the woman he married. He married this small, quiet, scholarly woman mostly interested in theories of imagination and theories of creativity in the 18th century. But here I am, out in public talking about sex and marriage. Talking about our marriage. Gay marriage. Adultery. AIDS and sex education. Embarrassing our children. But the fact is that the marriage we have now is not the marriage we had twenty-five years ago. We've changed. That hasn't been a problem for us, and the more I thought about it the more I wondered why. So I talked to my friends and did some more thinking and eventually I realized that change as such is not necessarily a threat to any marriage. Change is inevitable. Personalities that are not continuing to grow are in fact then beginning simply to die. So the key thing in marriage is to recognize that fidelity is a deeply creative process. Only a process, and in fact only a creative process, can adapt so fluidly and so flexibly to the changes characteristic of living personalities, while yet maintaining coherence and integrity and meaning.

Q: What's wrong with having sex outside of committed relationships?

A: If a guy wants to get to know another guy better, they go shoot hoops or play some tennis or get involved together in one of those obscure projects that involve multiple trips to the hardware store. Women go out to lunch. The tendency is, then, for sex to function as a friendly compromise between basketball and brunch. It can become part of the ordinary process of getting to know one another. And I think that's a big mistake. I present with some care the psychological evidence that sexuality involves the very deepest levels of our identities, the very deepest vulnerabilities, the deepest acts of trust. The fundamental issue I explore is the choices we have in how we think about our own bodies. Absolute sexual repression or denial and absolute sexual indulgence reflect exactly the same attitude toward the body: the body doesn't matter. Sex is "just a physical thing," disconnected from our deepest identity. I think that's mistaken. Our deepest identity is not some disembodied cerebral flicker of pure intellectual light. And all of that suggests that casual sex can be self-denigrating and it can be exploitive, especially if it becomes chronic or deliberate or intentional. The decision whether or not to take your own sexuality seriously comes down to hard questions about self-respect and compassion. I'm trying to help people to think clearly and rigorously and with some philosophic precision about their own experience of their own bodies.

Q: Well, that raises another question. Does anybody have the right to tell another person what's right or wrong about anything so private and personal as sex?

A: You can hire someone to cut your hair or tune your car, but not to live your life for you. Everyone makes his or her own decisions about sexual behavior. What's wrong with a lot of the "sex ed" handed down to kids--and frankly, what's wrong with a lot of traditional religious moralizing--is that it's mindless authoritarian "Do What I Say", rather than careful, intelligent, sophisticated accounts of the evidence for the consequences of various kinds of choices we might make. I'm outlining one set of evidence, one consistent and carefully documented argument, about sexual fidelity as a specific form of the fidelity that ought to characterize life generally. At every point I specify the evidence for my definitions and point out the evidence for and against my major assumptions. I have a solid argument to make. There is no absolute proof, of course. There is no absolute objectivity and complete universality, not in ethics and not in engineering either. All we have is creative, responsible work, and reasonable approximations and best evidence.

Q: What does sexual fidelity contribute to the development and expression of a person's sexuality?

A: The first experience of sex is desire or appetite--of course. It's all focused on wanting someone else and on getting what you want. But what we want most of all is for our desire to be reciprocated--for someone to want us as much as we want them. So when you have that reciprocity in a secure and committed and mature way, sex becomes more than erotic desire. It becomes the embodied expression of who you most truly are in your heart, and an expression of your own absolute and courageous honesty both with yourself and with your partner. The more we realize what we have at stake in our own sexual desires, and the more willing we are to face that risk and to take that risk, the more easily we can begin to see that our own sexual needs and vulnerabilities are not liabilities but rather powerful, generative gifts.

Q: What's the difference between fidelity and repression or mere sexual exclusivity?

A: Repression is self-control for its own sake, as if sexual needs are a threat of some sort. And for much of Western cultural history, sexual ethics came down to one or another justification for repression. Sexual exclusivity all by itself is just a set of rules about who goes to bed with whom and under what circumstances. It's contract law for the organs of reproduction. Exclusivity doesn't say anything about motives or meanings. But fidelity is all about motives and meanings. Sexual fidelity is the sexual expression of honesty and integrity and honor. Sexual fidelity is the sexual expression of a capacity for commitment. And if you have all that--if you have what we used to call "character"--then sexual behavior follows all by itself.

Q: Does that mean you think adultery is a legitimate "character issue"?

A: Yes, I do. Absolutely. If a man can cheat on his wife, whom he knows and sees and to whom he has made specific promises, why do we imagine he will not cheat on other people, whom he does not know and see, and to whom his moral responsibilities are less clearly defined? Dishonesty is dishonesty. Betrayal is betrayal. If you can betray someone close to you, you will surely prove able to betray someone at a distance. When we trust public figures with public power, we are trusting them to have courage and fortitude and not to give way to temptations to abuse their power or exploit us. Adultery calls our trust into question. Adultery is distinct from simple casual sex, of course. Adultery is sex with someone not your spouse, which of course presumes you are married to begin with. Ordinary casual sex--simply sex outside of a committed relationship--is not a character issue in the same clear-cut way in most circumstances.

Q: Why is happy marriage such a difficult art?

A: Marriage is hard because integrity is hard. Honesty is scary stuff, and so is intimacy. Relationships can be confusing. You have to understand yourself, you have to know who you are and where you stand before commitment can have any substance. And then there's this other person you have to know. Marriage is hard because coping with someone else's successes and their failures, their triumphs and their troubles--all of that takes a lot of energy. It takes a lot of energy focused on somebody else, not on the self at all. When we marry, we don't know what we are getting into, nor with whom, not really--and that's before those mysterious guests called "children" are given into our care! That's why sex can contribute so very much to the happiness of a marriage. It's a "place" to which we bring all this paradox, all this mystery, all this sheer gutsy determination to live courageously and together, a place where we can fully encounter the risks and then resolve them into the deeply powerful pleasure of sexual release. Sex can be a way to enact both the risk and the delight of being open to one another, being naked to one another both physically and psychologically.

Q: How do we teach our kids about intimate relationships and the importance of commitment?

A: We teach our kids about sexual desire when we begin to help them to think about or to manage any sort of physical appetite, because over and over again we are teaching them to balance their appetites, to integrate them, to see how and why we keep the big picture in mind. "Yes it might feel great to mash your baby sister over the head with a block when she knocks down the castle you are building. Anger feels like that and of course you are angry. But consider the consequences..." Something like that. More or less. That's half of it. The other half is that we teach them about commitment and about intimate relationships by teaching them about the duties of friendship. A lot of traditional western sexual ethics is entirely focused on bodily self-control, but in fact we get much further, much more fruitfully, if we look to our ethical heritage about how we behave toward one another socially, as friends. Fidelity is an aspect of friendship. Intimacy is an aspect of friendship. And parents are guiding their children into friendships all the time. Above all, we teach them to be friends by example, by how we respond to them and how we relate to our own physical needs and our own social world.

Q: When and how do we start?

A: All of this begins at the very beginning. Psychologists and neurologists alike carry on at great length about how very many fundamental and powerful patterns are laid down during infancy and early childhood. By the time kids become teenagers, the foundation for their sexual ethics is already in place. One way or another. Adequately or inadequately. When they ask about sex, they are asking about the experiences and the reasoning and the facts behind our intuitive moral norms. When they ask about sex, they are struggling to make their moral intuitions fully conscious and fully consistent. That's why I put together the arguments I offer here: my kids needed it from me, and I couldn't find it anyplace, so I sat down and read the scholarship and worked it out for myself.

Q: How did you come to write this book?

A: As I explain in the first chapter, I wrote this book because my own kids started nailing me with questions about sex. One morning when my younger son was eight--he's sixteen now--he looked up at me over breakfast and asked, "Does Daddy use condoms? Every time? If you don't use condoms every day, you can get sick and die. So we want to know. Does he?" From an eight-year-old. Over breakfast. I said reassuring things--I hope--but it sounded as if sexual fidelity is some mix of contract rights and the fear of contagion. And I knew it was more than that. I knew there was something creative and dynamic and wonderful about the role of sexuality in my marriage. But I couldn't find words for it, not at six in the morning and not for an eight-year-old. I got them off to school and sat there really upset. I thought I should have done a better job. So I started reading. And talking to my friends. And then giving talks at their churches. And it just kept rolling along, because most of us feel that we don't know what to say. We may lead fine and decent lives, we may have good and happy marriages, but that doesn't mean we know how to answer the point-blank questions about sex that kids will ask when you have about fifteen seconds to answer. They do that deliberately, of course--ask these questions when you are four steps from the door to the dentist's office. So what I was figuring out for myself interested a much wider circle of people than I realized at first.

Q: Has writing it changed the way you view your own marriage?

A: Of course. The strangest part was the months I spent writing the long section on trust, in the chapter on intimate relationships. I felt some days as if being married was the craziest thing I have ever done. Or maybe that the odds of a happy marriage are roughly equivalent to the odds of winning $27 million in the lottery, so maybe I should set aside the manuscript and start thinking that divorce is inevitable. But I realized finally, as I worked through the evidence, through the readings in psychology and neurology and through the stories, through the analytical structure I had set out, that trust is fundamental and inescapable part of any relationship. What's at stake isn't luck or some kind of secret key to psychological compatibility. What's at stake is courage. Life takes courage. Relationships take courage. There's a line from Garrison Keillor that I like a lot: "Life is complicated and not for the timid." He has a point. I realized that the problem is the romantic fairy-tale stuff that suggests that marriage is supposed to be smooth and simple and happily ever after. And then I felt better. I am by character a very cautious person, finally. Thorough. Systematic. But feisty, very feisty. And passionate. So I feel better about myself when I can think that these cliffs I'm leaping off of are simply not avoidable, that there is no more cautious way to proceed. Warren and I are both much more aware of what we are doing or can do that helps the marriage. Writing this book has been fun, in short. Rewarding. Not easy, but fun.

Q: Infidelity is becoming the norm in our society (or so the media would have us believe), making serious discussion of the importance of fidelity more difficult than ever. How should parents counteract this cultural trend?

A: Just for starts, infidelity is not the norm. Not at all. Fidelity is the norm. The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago reported in 1994 that 89% of women have never committed adultery, and 79% of men have never committed adultery. Never. The sexual revolution aside, changing gender roles aside, almost 90% of women and almost 80% of men report that they have been faithful all of their lives. That's the norm. Marital fidelity is the norm, despite how casually TV and movies can show people falling into bed with one another. What's at stake here is not so much people's behavior as whether or not we can articulate or defend the moral norm involved. What we are facing is mostly a loss of nerve. A loss of voice. And that is indeed a trend, and it is worrisome. What's going on? I don't know. I'm not a sociologist. I can't account except anecdotally for this timidity. All I can say is what I've seen. And what I've seen, for years now, is that I can talk about condoms, and nobody blinks. I can talk about orgasm, and nobody blinks. Gay marriage disconcerts a few people, but not very many or not very deeply, not once they have thought about it for a while. But when I say that marital infidelity is morally wrong, when I say that casual sex is morally wrong, everybody freezes. It's not that they disagree. It's that they think lightning will strike. Or maybe the political-correctness cops. I worry that we are losing the nerve to speak in public about right and wrong, about good and bad as ordinary realities that can be reasonably defined and discussed without subsiding into fundamentalism. And if grownups are embarrassed to talk about right and wrong because of "what people might think," where do we get the idea that our kids will find the courage to stand up to their peers on matters like recreational drugs or casual promiscuity? So I think that as parents what we most need to do these days is to listen to our kids, take kids' stories with absolute moral seriousness--and then, of course, to realize that if we want to provide them with countercultural values, we need to have the confidence ourselves at times to confront our own "peer group pressures" and quietly, plainly, and objectively do our best to distinguish between right and wrong, good and bad, in the world that surrounds both us and our children.