Adultery and the gender double standard in marriage

Adultery in marriage exposes a double standard that is not simply a difference in private conduct: it reflects a social order in which the husband is treated as master and the wife as dependent. In this account, a wife’s infidelity may become a bid to defy that dependence, a response to disappointment within marriage, or an attempt to recover sexual satisfaction. Yet the same act carries greater risks for her reputation and social position, while her husband’s affairs are more readily tolerated. The central contrast is between a theoretical possibility of reciprocal freedom and a lived reality still organized by unequal power.

Motives and the marital setting

After a period of fidelity, a wife may turn to another man from resentment and a desire to defy her husband. Her affair can assert that he is not the only man she can attract and that she is not his slave. In this pattern, the husband remains central even in the act of opposition: she may confide in her lover chiefly to have him regard her as a victim and help her humiliate her husband. If the lover does not respond as that role requires, she may turn back to her husband or seek another comforter. The affair contests marital authority, but its emotional terms can remain organized around the husband’s importance.

Resentment is not the only explanation. Disappointment may lead a wife to seek a lover because marriage has failed to give her the love, sensual pleasure, or joy she expected. The account rejects the claim that infidelity always springs from revenge and instead presents it as a possible consequence of a marital arrangement that frustrates women’s erotic satisfaction and limits the freedom of their feelings. Adultery then appears as an ironic outcome of a marriage that does not make room for those desires.

The different routes into adultery do not guarantee escape. A wife who hopes a lover will release her from the conjugal bond may find that he withdraws when she speaks of marriage. If the relationship becomes lasting, it can acquire familiar marital troubles—boredom, jealousy, caution, and deception—and she may begin to imagine another man as a rescuer from that routine. The lover is not necessarily a route to independence; a new relationship can reproduce the structures from which it seemed to offer relief.

Unequal judgments and social risks

The account identifies the sexual double standard as a product of patriarchal custom rather than a natural distinction between women and men. Historically, a wife’s adultery threatened the husband’s control over the family and the certainty of legitimate inheritance. Even as social change and birth control weakened those rationales, restrictions continued because women’s dependency was itself being maintained. The judgment of infidelity therefore outlasts some of the conditions used to justify it.

The asymmetry is sustained both by social surveillance and by women’s internalization of its rules. A husband may travel and pursue affairs with greater indulgence from the community; a wife risks losing her reputation and her standing as a married woman. In a small Portuguese town, young women are accompanied by a mother-in-law or sister-in-law when they go out, while a hairdresser rents rooms above his shop where lovers can meet discreetly. Such concealment makes an affair possible, but does not make it a free or candid relationship: secrecy and lies further erode what dignity remains in the marriage.

Women may also accept or even feel flattered by a husband’s affairs, while social morality does not permit them to imagine an equal liberty for themselves. That imbalance is not evidence of a natural difference in desire. The text argues that the erotic roles assigned by tradition make a woman’s sexual consent appear like surrender, while a man is permitted to seek sex outside marriage without the same loss of standing. The double standard shapes not only punishment after infidelity but also what each spouse can openly want and negotiate.

The possibility and limits of reciprocal freedom

The account distinguishes marriage as a shared life from marriage as a guarantee of sexual exclusivity. A husband may be a good partner in a common life while having other relationships; likewise, a wife may want to share her husband’s existence and build a home for their children while also desiring other embraces. In principle, a candid agreement could separate companionship from sexual possession and reduce the ambivalence produced by treating fidelity as a one-sided claim.

That possibility is sharply limited by the present social order. The familiar assertion that women are not treated the same as men retains force, not because women naturally need sex less, but because tradition makes a wife’s sexuality a service to her husband. Men can seek women of lower social standing without the same perceived degradation; a woman who gives herself to a man who is not her equal is more likely to be judged as lowering herself. Under these conditions, an agreement to reciprocal freedom cannot be understood apart from the unequal expectations that shape each partner’s consent and reputation.

The account also describes how sexual relations can be interpreted through possession. A husband may imagine that his wife, in being with another man, has become another man’s object or prey, and may feel that the stranger’s influence has entered the marriage. A wife who has been taught to reflect the man to whom she gives herself may experience her own infidelity as a more radical separation from her husband than his reciprocal affairs represent. This is one reason an affair can become a contest over status and ownership rather than a free relation between independent people.

The larger argument about women’s freedom

The discussion of adultery belongs to a broader analysis of women’s position as the Other: women are autonomous beings, yet are required to understand themselves in a world where men claim the role of essential subject and consign them to dependence. The double standard in marriage is one concrete expression of that conflict. A wife’s desire may be treated as secondary to her husband’s authority, while her attempt to act for herself is recast as a moral offense more serious than his comparable conduct.

The book’s measure of a just arrangement is not whether women in a constrained situation are said to be happy, but whether they have concrete opportunities to act freely and pursue their own projects. On that measure, neither secrecy nor a nominal permission for reciprocal affairs is enough. A relationship remains unequal when custom makes the wife bear the greater reputational cost, or when her choices are framed as surrender and the husband’s as entitlement. The discussion thus treats adultery not as an isolated breach of marital virtue, but as a revealing test of whether marriage can become a free association rather than a structure of mastery and dependence.