The Monogamy Myth: A Personal Handbook for Recovering from Affairs, Third Edition (Paperback)

by Peggy Vaughan (Author) "The first question most people ask when they learn of their mate's affair is, "Why?..." (more)
Key Phrases: online affairs, person whose partner, people having affairs, Monogamy Myth, Herb Goldberg, Patricia Neal (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Peggy Vaughn, who's been featured on Oprah! and CNN, has helped thousands of folks recover from affairs. As the extramarital-affairs expert behind AOL's "Ask Peggy" forum and as a woman who's been married for 40 years to her high school sweetheart--who cheated on her for seven years while she kidded herself that he was remaining faithful--she certainly knows what she's talking about. She says that to successfully overcome an unfaithful spouse or companion, you have to work through the myths of monogamy. It's not just men, or men who travel a lot on business, or women with supermodel good looks, who cheat. It's people of all ages, all occupations: from pastors to postal workers to, well, presidents. In other words, everyone is at risk for betraying or being betrayed.

Studies conservatively estimate, Vaughan reveals, that 60 percent of men and 40 percent of women will have an affair. "These figures are even more significant when we consider the total number of marriages involved, since it's unlikely that all the men and women having affairs happen to be married to each other," she says. "If even half the women having affairs (or 20 percent) are married to men not included in the 60 percent having affairs, then at least one partner will have an affair in approximately 80 percent of all marriages."

Vaughn outlines the societal causes and supporters of affairs, from the commercialization of sex in every visible nook and cranny of our world to our lifelong tendency to surround sex with secrecy. She also lists the common desperate measures that people take when they suspect they're being cheated on, and why they don't work. (Vaughn herself resorted to becoming a gourmet cook, wearing sexy underwear, and acting like a sex fiend in bed, all to no avail.) She also tells what to expect during a confrontation, and includes copious techniques for rebuilding self-esteem. There's also information about how to choose a marriage counselor or group therapist and, even more important, when to stop seeing one. For couples--especially those with children--debating whether to divorce or remain married, there's plenty of proven guidance to be found here. --Erica Jorgensen --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
A beautiful, personal, gentle, practical book. -- Diana Sollee, Director, Coalition for Marriage, Family, and Couples Education

An outstanding and wonderfully helpful book. -- Harriet Lerner, The Dance of Anger

This book saved my marriage, and probably my sanity—and maybe my very life. -- A letter from a grateful reader

Thorough and measured...An intelligent look at the experience of adultery, the healing process, and final outcomes. -- Booklist

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Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Newmarket Press; 3 edition (March 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1557045429
• ISBN-13: 978-1557045423
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #282,791 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars No one can understand this without living through it, July 10, 2000

By	"rosewolf-tg" (United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Monogamy Myth: A Personal Handbook for Recovering from Affairs (Paperback)

Advice during crisis or trauma can be well intended but infuriating. If you're going to give it or seek it, seems to me there should be a couple of important things present. 1) FIRST HAND EXPERIENCE and 2) Lots and lots of time spent involved with others going through the SAME predicament. In other words, information gathered from a number of sources. Then you've got my interest. I recommend this book if you are recovering from an affair. My heart goes out to you. Or if you are the unfaithful partner trying hard to reconcile and understand your own and your partner's very difficult task; to heal from the repercussions of your actions. This book lead me to BAN (Beyond Affairs Network) on the internet. Great resource for both partners.

26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars More good sense, less pretense to, April 30, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Monogamy Myth: A Personal Handbook for Recovering from Affairs (Paperback)

Peggy Vaughan is no marriage counselor (or psychotherapist) and it shows--she actually makes sense.

Ms. Vaughan has drawn insightfully from her extensive work with her Beyond Affairs Network. Unlike many self-styled or state-sanctioned (i.e., licensed mental health) experts, Ms. Vaughan actually uses more reality than dogma to inform her advice. For instance, her research shows that the leading variable in managing to stay together well after an affair is the willingness and ability to talk (and talk and talk and talk) about the affair for as long as needed to detoxify and demystify it. (Her research also shows that most people trying to deal with the aftermath of an affair find mental health types considerably les than informed or helpful, despite their beliefs in their great expertise. As a trained and experienced psychotherapist, and a well-respected scholar, I can tell you that the mainstream training and professional literature--not to mention self-help--on infidelity is mostly just dogma that mental health types have concocted out of thin air, not anything anyone has actually discovered through research.)

I do find a one thing a bit troubling. As I see it, she does not give due weight to issues of individual moral responsibility. There are two sides to this. First, she generally denies that adultery reflects personal failings, placing far more emphasis on social factors to explain why adultery takes place. She does not produce an argument, so far as I can see, against the idea of personal failings; rather she poses an alternative to that idea. But to pose an alternative to an idea is not to show the idea wrong.

Second, while she is surely right that our culture has come to glamorize affairs rather than condemn them, and while she is certainly right to place more emphasis on this than conventional "wisdom" allows, it is not all that clear just what causal role social factors play, or which is the chicken and which is the egg.

(1) The same social forces act on ALL of us, but only SOME of us cheat. Thus, the social forces cannot explain why cheaters cheat. Differentiating cheaters from others requires looking at variables on which they differ from others, not on forces common to all.

2) Ms. Vaughan's "evidence" that adultery has increased significantly in the last few decades, when sex has become more public and less closeted, depends to a great extent on generally-unrespected researchers like Shere Hite. Her figures on the rate of adultery are higher than others I've seen (and I've read a lot on this subject). So far as I can tell, we do not really know that there has been a meaningful rise in adultery to accompany the rise in glamorized sexuality (including glamorized icons of adultery).

3) Even if there is a rising rate of adultery, and even if it correlates the social forces Ms. Vaughan mentions and a rising rate of adultery, it does not follow that one causes the other. Alternative hypotheses can explain both. One such alternative would be that both are results of increasing egoism and hedonism, which could result from any of a number of factors--consumerism, the decline of Heaven-oriented religious belief, decline of community life, commodity-centered views of the person growing out of capitalist ideology, etc. Another might be that both reflect the decline of patriarchal social structures. Surely others could be framed. The point is that we just don't know.

I nonetheless think that, on balance, she is the wisest person writing on the subject. Ms. Vaughan possesses good data on the effects of adultery, and she possesses good sense. She also possesses a crusader's heart. If, maybe, she goes a bit overboard, as compared to us academic types--well, there never was a successful crusade led by timid generals.

I want to add that several months after I read this book and wrote the first version of this review, I called upon Ms. Vaughan for help in dealing with my own situation in dealing with my wife's adultery with my "best friend" of thirty years. Quite honestly, I believe she saved my marriage. My gratitude to her is beyond words.

And by bizarre coincidences, it turns out that we grew up in the same place, her dad and mine were fishing buddies, I used to buy gasoline at her dad's service station, my dad preached her dad's funeral, and our lives have run eerily parallel courses.

As a result, as you can imagine, I thought about removing from this review any criticism whatsoever. But I decided not to do so. I hope my heartfelt endorsement of this book means all the more precisely because I don't simply find it ratifying my own beliefs.

I am altogether certain that this book and Ms. Vaughan's counsel did more to save my marriage than all the dozens of other things I read in recovering from the most horrific devastation of my life.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Well written, while instructing and showing understanding, November 2, 1999

By	Donald P. "dnpilkey" (Georgia, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Monogamy Myth: A Personal Handbook for Recovering from Affairs (Paperback)

Peggy showed me how to better deal with my feelings and handle the situation in a thoughtful manner. The advice she gives is very timely. This book really illustrates what usually happens during an affair and how each individual can best cope with what is going on during this awful time. It has given me the ability to start moving ahead once again with my life.