Razor

For the past few days – I have been trying to articulate my own responses to Tiger Woods’ infidelities. Tonight I stumbled upon a very thoughtful blog piece written about Woods’ infidelities from an “economic sociology” perspective that I would like to directly address here.

I stumbled upon the article Money for Monogamy (written by Brooke Harrington on her blog, Economic Sociology) while looking for articles or statistics about marriage and infidelity in different Socioeconomic classes. The article posed questions regarding prenuptial clauses regarding payments to a spouse in the case of the other spouse cheating. The two questions posed were “What are these payments supposed to mean to the wronged spouse?” and “Do financial penalties deter infidelity?” These questions deal with a couple that would have considered their beliefs about infidelity in the marriage and what that would mean to them prior to marrying. Couples that would do this would seem to be two rational individuals that married with prior agreements and conditions as to how the relationship would proceed and remain intact. Wouldn’t that be wonderful if we could do that?! I think the divorce rate would be much lower if each couple really thought out what issues were important to them prior to marriage, and laid out the rules for those issues.

However, as Brooke points out, “humans are boundedly rational” – that is that even though our intentions may be to make logical decisions, weighing out the pros and the cons of the consequences of that decision, we are limited in our ability to do that. In the case of many human relationships – especially marriage – I believe that most people enter marriage without a lot of prior thought about what occurrences in the marriage would make them want to leave it. And perhaps most people go into it believing that their marriage will be “happily ever after.” Also maybe for most, decisions to marry and stay in a marriage are primarily based on societal and cultural upbringing and pressures (and perhaps “cultural value” and “societal values” can be thought of as a substitute for “monetary value” in this case.)

So the questions that Brooke posed are not the questions for which I seek an answer:

But that just raises another set of questions, like: why would you want to marry on those terms? When one spouse seems so likely to cheat that it’s necessary to have a ‘bad boy clause’ in the pre-nup, and the other spouse spells out how s/he plans to exact retribution for any infidelity, I have to wonder why the couple are bothering to marry in the first place. The whole arrangement just has ‘train wreck’ written all over it.

Because the marriage described above sounds like two mature adults going into a relationship with no blinders – which sounds like the making of a successful partnership. The question that I have is “Which societal and economic pressures make someone stay in a marriage if they know their partner has extramarital relationships?” That seems to be the more likely case than a case where couples have a pre-nup agreement that handles instances of infidelity.

To put some context to this question, let me explain my interest in infidelities by men of power, wealth, and in the upper socioeconomic class. I am currently editing a novel based on a recent affair of Gregg Gordon (president and CEO of the Social Science Research Network) with a former employee (who was an employee of SSRN at the time of the affair.) Strip clubs, and other “transactional” exchanges with women are commonplace among particular groups of businessmen while on their business trips. They know of the others’ indiscretions – and keep those incidents sacred among themselves. However, I am at a loss for understanding how their spouses could be totally clueless to the activities of their husbands while on business trips.

This leads me to a hypothesis that I have formed:

Females from a high socioeconomic class base decisions to divorce or not to divorce on monetary economics more than females from a lower socioeconomic class.

I would be greatly interested on any studies or papers written about this particular issue. Also, I am interested in my readers’ responses to this – good or bad.