France’s most prominent female psychologist Maryse Vaillant has revealed that men who cheat are actually good for a marriage. She tells us how men and women need breathing space and binding them together in the concept of fidelity can ruin marriages. Instead, an amount of freedom is excruciatingly necessary, and in fact the idea of a man staying faithful to a wife can actually be detrimental to the system of marriage.
In her new book Les Hommes, L’amour, La Fidélité (“Men, love, fidelity”), she tells us that infidelity is inevitable and that the idea of a faithful man is idealized. This ideal cannot be lived up to by any one leading to a lack of self worth. Most men who cheat their wives are usually extremely monogamous from a psychological point of view, she observes.
She also reveals that men who did not have a father’s presence physically or psychologically can be more adulterous than men who had loving fathers. In any case, this could be seen as a sign of Psychology’s acceptance towards what the society terms “adultery”. Next time you accuse you a man or a woman of being promiscuous, I shall thump Les Hommes, L’amour, La Fidélité on the table and scream out Maryse Vaillant’s name.
