Sometimes, Honesty Matters More Than the Rules: Rethinking Infidelity

What did a 2011 New York Times essay argue about marriage and cheating?

In the summer of 2011, with Congressman Anthony Weiner's sexting scandal dominating the news, the New York Times Magazine published an essay by Mark Oppenheimer titled "Married, With Infidelities." It made a deliberately provocative case: that the real threat to a marriage is not desire that wanders, but the dishonesty that usually surrounds it.

Oppenheimer opened with a domestic experiment. He asked his wife of six years which would upset her more — learning he was sending racy self-portraits to strangers online, or discovering an actual affair. She paused, he wrote, "scrunched up her mouth as if she had just bitten a particularly sour lemon," and said: "An affair is at least a normal human thing. But tweeting a picture of your crotch is just weird."

From that answer he built his argument: our revulsion at Weiner was real but hard to account for. The scandal was sordid — drawn out, layered with lies, impossible to look away from. But beneath the disgust, Oppenheimer suggested, was something uncomfortably familiar: the impulse to be someone other than who we are in our daily, monogamous lives. Weiner's flirtations were, in a sense, what many people might do if they were lonely and determined not to actually cheat.

Could honesty save a marriage that rules cannot?

The essay's deeper claim was philosophical. Citing writers like Dan Savage, who has long argued against the American obsession with strict fidelity, Oppenheimer proposed that marriages might survive — even strengthen — if couples replaced the ritual of perfect fidelity with a harder discipline: radical honesty about what they want, what they do, and what they can forgive.

It is an unsettling idea, and it was meant to be. Most couples will not — and should not — treat it as advice. But as a diagnostic question it has force: when a marriage collapses after infidelity, was it the betrayal of the body that killed it, or the months or years of lying that came with it? The essay's wager was that honesty is the load-bearing wall, and fidelity the decoration.

Fifteen years on, the Weiner episode looks less like a turning point than a preview — of a decade in which digital trails would make secrecy harder and honesty, by force if not by choice, the only viable policy. Oppenheimer's essay remains worth reading precisely because it asked the uncomfortable question first: what if the rule we are protecting is not the one that matters?