Katie Roiphe: The Heart of the Matter

Katie Roiphe is the author of The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus (Little, Brown & Company, New York)

Tracy Quan: When did you first become aware of infidelity?

Katie Roiphe: At the age of 14 or 15 it occurred to me that it was conceivable that my father had had an affair because I was reading Anna Karenina Later, I asked my mother, "How can you possibly be faithful to one man?"

TQ: Do most young women assume they'll be sexually unfaithful?

KR: Actually, no. Even the most sophisticated urban teenagers believe that you fall in love with someone, and you might leave that person because you love someone else. But we don't think about loving more than one person at the same time. Love is more perverse and complicated than we think it is, in our conventional hearts.

TQ: Are you saying that the heart is basically a conventional organ?

KR: Mine is. I had a boyfriend whose parents were having affairs and it was shocking to me. I think my mother's first husband may have cheated on her, but it's not something I grew up with -- because my parents have a very happy second marriage. And in their world, affairs would be unthinkable. In this country we have the Hollywood love story ingrained in our make-up. This subject -- infidelity -- is a cesspool. I think about it constantly because I've always had intense friendships with men which were not sexual but which caused problems.

TQ: By disrupting your love life?

KR: Yes. The person whom you have the most to say to might not be your boyfriend, which is dangerous because these non-sexual friendships consume a lot of energy. There's always a certain amount of jealousy because it is a kind of cheating, I think. You are dividing yourself and having intimacy with more than one person. The idea of ending those friendships is very difficult.

TQ: Do women in their twenties kiss and tell?

KR: Recently, a single woman I know began telling me about a married woman she knows who is having an affair, and she was basically horrified. She herself has a somewhat wild sexual past, so her moral outrage came as a surprise. There is a lot of moralism about infidelity. Sexual infidelity is so unacceptable that most people I know won't even tell their friends.

TQ: Do you believe that men are polygamous by nature?

KR: Men are more noisy about their attractions than women are, but I don't think men are more polygamous than women. If anything, men are sometimes less capable of emotional duplicity than women.