Married and Dancing without Spouse

Lawndart said:
well… The only advice I can give is not to give advice. Or at least I would advise that if I could give advice... which I won't.

My wife has no problem with me going out dancing without her just as I have a problem with her doing the same. I'm much more interested in dancing that she is. So the only thing I struggle with is making certain that she doesn't feel neglected.

As to cheating be inevitable… Rubbish. I'm sure I can find books that can backup either side of this argument.

But I do think that David was right on. A friend of my would always say to me and situations such as this to check my motivations.
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You missed an important part of my response, I clearly specified that it's not necessarily cheating, married people could fall in love with other people again. Thousands of books written and millions of psychologists and psychiatrists could not define what really love is and you come along with "Rubbish"? that's your argument? So you cracked the complexities and the secrets of attraction without understanding the social factors that cause us to love or cheat?
Perhaps you could explain why we feel intoxicated when we are in love? since you're so knowledgeable about how love and relationships. Or maybe you can define what "regression love" is.

Are you trying to tell me if I introduce you to 10 000 person of your opposite sex, you will never ONCE, feel attraction or anything? What about 100 000 still nothing? can you guarantee me that you will never cheat?

Theoretical physicists now believe that the likelihood of alternate realities are plausible because they believe that even with the vastness of space, at some point even random events will repeat themselves thus creating multiple copies of you in different realities and you find this unfathomable for relationships? With only... rubbish?

Ok since you're not too strong on theories and not too big on facts allow me to share some of the stats:
(These numbers are based on stats Canada, which usually is pretty darn accurate)

Marriages that won't reach their 50th wedding anniversary in Canada : 43%
Current divorce rate: 40%
US, Australia: 46%
U.K: 43%
Sweden 55%

to name a few

Maybe this is no shocker to you, but the real stats that you will be interested in and should be concerned about how many of the remaining married ones are having affairs?

Would you like to take a guess? No? I thought not. In a recent survey conducted with married couple the percentage who "admitted" having extra marital affairs is a whopping 35%. We do not know in reality the exact number since most people would likely not answer to that question it is unlikely that they will tell a lie (in the sense telling that they are having affairs when they are not), so the number could well be in the range of 47%.

So if you have 100 couple, less let's say 40% of divorce which leaves 60, with a number let's say 40% of the remaining people who cheat, that give gives for every 60 couples 24 who are cheating or have cheated at least once.

Are you telling me that in Salsa communities the rate is not higher, you telling me that all the rubbing and grinding, impure ideas are being washed away? I know you going to tell me not that I know of, well it's not like this is something that will be announced on megaphones every time someone cheated in a small community as salsa.


Now of the remaining 36 who did not cheat because,we still did not address the inevitability issue, how many would re-fall in love if we apply simple stats....I say fall in love, because this is something that could happen to the most devout spouse or husband without being malignant.

Ah! so it's not so "Unlikely" and "rubbish" anymore, in fact it much more likely to happen in a salsa community when there is so much implicit sexuality....

Can you rebuke , scientifically and statistically, my response?
 
For it to be inevitable due to dancing, every regular dancer needs in one life time to end up cheating/splitting up, etc when they wouldn't otherwise had.

Your arguments, as good as they are suggest that that these things are quite possible, but don't get close to inevitable.
 
David said:
So I'm sure many of you have dealt with this. I was at a club tonight, and left just after 11 after a little over an hour of dancing. My wife knows dancing makes me happy and trusts me which means so much to me.

Tonight I met a fellow Salsero that told me he was also married but his wife thought he was at work. It was evident he was there to dance and not pick up girls, and I felt bad for him because he thought his wife would lose it if she found out he went out dancing.

My advice to him was to first be honest with himself there at the club. He is there to dance and he shouldn't be afraid to tell people he is married. Then as he gets more comfortable maybe he can start to get a plan to tell his wife or include her sometimes.

What are your thoughts/experiences?
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I woud strongly suggest that they get into couples counciling as they have some issues to deal with. He should Pre warn the councillor about the dancing thing and take professional advice as to how to progress.
 
Hmm I think if someone is going to cheat then it really doesn't matter if the spouse goes out dancing with them. It's not like seeing each other at the club is the only way people can come into contact with each other. It just comes down to do you trust your partner or not, and will they betray that trust or not. If you get in a relationship or even a marriage then you run that risk of betrayal by default, it's just a question of whether you feel like it is a high risk and whether you feel like it's worth tolerating the risk. I think that's why a lot of people have problems in relationships where one person dances and the other doesn't. For a lot of the non dancers, in the back of their mind that risk is higher because of the numbers game aspect that TwoCentsTipper has talked about. Heck, for a lot of dancers who are with other dancers, in the back of their mind the risk is higher. But if the good outweighs that risk then we tolerate it. People have to make their own decisions, though.

OP, the man is correct that his wife would lose it if she found out he was dancing. Because he has been HIDING IT FROM HER. There is a substantial chance of a bad ending either way here considering she'll either find out about it without his telling her, or he'll tell her and she'll have little reason to believe that he's only there for the dancing (because there's nothing to hide if that's the case, yet he has been hiding it). If he thought initially that he wouldn't be able to dance without her having a problem with it, then it should have been addressed at the point when he first started dancing. At this point he still should just come clean, but like I said there's a chance that it won't end well (a lower chance than if she finds out without his telling her himself, though).

Personally I'm in a relationship with someone who lives on the other side of the Pacific Ocean from me. Needless to say 99% of the time when one of us goes dancing it's without the other. She doesn't get to dance much because of her work schedule, but when she does go out I don't have a problem with it, nor does she have a problem with it when I go out. I am pretty sure that if I went hiding it when I go out it would be a problem, though. Like olamalam said, if you aren't doing anything wrong then it shouldn't be an issue to just tell your partner what you're doing (or it looks like you're hiding something nefarious). If they do have a problem with what you're doing, then you need to evaluate how important it is for you to do what you're doing and deal with the relationship accordingly.
 
I would like to reiterate and strongly emphasize that my argument is not about trust. I know many trust their better halves and came to a mutual understanding about doing whatever they please for fun. Trust is not questioned here. What im driving at is that its simple math, the likelyhood of this happening is extremely common and high. What i strongly disagree with is people flashing the morality badge when the reality is they have no clue that when this happens all this invincibility whom so many cling to will be thrown out the window. Thinking that it would never happen to them and that they could never do this to their partners when the simple fact is they have NO clue how often these things are happening regardless of the trust issue. I'm not the one talking its stats that is doing the talking for me.
 
I have been single for so long that all these relationship and dancing struggles seem alien to me. If I ever do any dating again, I wonder if my salsa passion will make a relationship awkward. I mean, if the other person would not like dancing.

Oh well, for now I dont have to worry. :)
 
Oh yea!!! <walks away with a smug smile happy in the knowledge that he got in the last word>

On a more serious note... Actually, I think I agree with you when you say that cheating is *not* inevitable and that divorce is not inevitable. (that is what the stats you quote say I believe)

TwoCentsTipper said:
You missed an important part of my response, I clearly specified that it's not necessarily cheating, married people could fall in love with other people again. Thousands of books written and millions of psychologists and psychiatrists could not define what really love is and you come along with "Rubbish"? that's your argument? So you cracked the complexities and the secrets of attraction without understanding the social factors that cause us to love or cheat?
Perhaps you could explain why we feel intoxicated when we are in love? since you're so knowledgeable about how love and relationships. Or maybe you can define what "regression love" is.

Are you trying to tell me if I introduce you to 10 000 person of your opposite sex, you will never ONCE, feel attraction or anything? What about 100 000 still nothing? can you guarantee me that you will never cheat?

Theoretical physicists now believe that the likelihood of alternate realities are plausible because they believe that even with the vastness of space, at some point even random events will repeat themselves thus creating multiple copies of you in different realities and you find this unfathomable for relationships? With only... rubbish?

Ok since you're not too strong on theories and not too big on facts allow me to share some of the stats:
(These numbers are based on stats Canada, which usually is pretty darn accurate)

Marriages that won't reach their 50th wedding anniversary in Canada : 43%
Current divorce rate: 40%
US, Australia: 46%
U.K: 43%
Sweden 55%

to name a few

Maybe this is no shocker to you, but the real stats that you will be interested in and should be concerned about how many of the remaining married ones are having affairs?

Would you like to take a guess? No? I thought not. In a recent survey conducted with married couple the percentage who "admitted" having extra marital affairs is a whopping 35%. We do not know in reality the exact number since most people would likely not answer to that question it is unlikely that they will tell a lie (in the sense telling that they are having affairs when they are not), so the number could well be in the range of 47%.

So if you have 100 couple, less let's say 40% of divorce which leaves 60, with a number let's say 40% of the remaining people who cheat, that give gives for every 60 couples 24 who are cheating or have cheated at least once.

Are you telling me that in Salsa communities the rate is not higher, you telling me that all the rubbing and grinding, impure ideas are being washed away? I know you going to tell me not that I know of, well it's not like this is something that will be announced on megaphones every time someone cheated in a small community as salsa.


Now of the remaining 36 who did not cheat because,we still did not address the inevitability issue, how many would re-fall in love if we apply simple stats....I say fall in love, because this is something that could happen to the most devout spouse or husband without being malignant.

Ah! so it's not so "Unlikely" and "rubbish" anymore, in fact it much more likely to happen in a salsa community when there is so much implicit sexuality....

Can you rebuke , scientifically and statistically, my response?
Click to expand...
 
TwoCentsTipper said:
I would like to reiterate and strongly emphasize that my argument is not about trust. I know many trust their better halves and came to a mutual understanding about doing whatever they please for fun. Trust is not questioned here. What im driving at is that its simple math, the likelyhood of this happening is extremely common and high. What i strongly disagree with is people flashing the morality badge when the reality is they have no clue that when this happens all this invincibility whom so many cling to will be thrown out the window. Thinking that it would never happen to them and that they could never do this to their partners when the simple fact is they have NO clue how often these things are happening regardless of the trust issue. I'm not the one talking its stats that is doing the talking for me.
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I so agree with you! I have seen it happen many times in the salsa scene. And like you say, it is human (which does not excuse it). Dancing salsa is not like e. g. going to the fitness center without your partner. Yes, you can also meet someone else outside the dance scene to whom you get attracted, e. g. in the fitness center or in the office. However, in the salsa scene it is much more likely that you fall in love or get attracted to someone else, even if you think it will never happen to you. I would say, there is so much more temptation, physical contact, flirtation etc. than in other surroundings.

It doesn't necessarily have to happen, but it can easily happen....
 
Salsa was the catalyst for ending my marriage, but it didn't involve cheating. I was addicted to the dancing, and just wanted to have fun and make friends. Eventually, I did get a girlfriend in the salsa scene, but that was two years after separating.

It seems like I see lots of married women who go dancing without their spouses, and most (but not quite all...) seem to just be doing it for dancing. There was one who I used to practice with in her kitchen, and her husband seemed totally cool with it. But, from talking to women, there appear to be married men who are not so innocent.:rolleyes: One story I've heard about two guys now is, "I'm separated, but still living together because we can't afford two households yet."
 
TwoCentsTipper said:
I would like to reiterate and strongly emphasize that my argument is not about trust. I know many trust their better halves and came to a mutual understanding about doing whatever they please for fun. Trust is not questioned here. What im driving at is that its simple math, the likelyhood of this happening is extremely common and high. What i strongly disagree with is people flashing the morality badge when the reality is they have no clue that when this happens all this invincibility whom so many cling to will be thrown out the window. Thinking that it would never happen to them and that they could never do this to their partners when the simple fact is they have NO clue how often these things are happening regardless of the trust issue. I'm not the one talking its stats that is doing the talking for me.
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Maybe there is "some" truth to this but it depends on the couple. I think we have to be selective about generalizing. If people are happy together, they tend to stay together. I can think of many couples who have been together for years and still dance without their spouse routinely.
 
That's exactly my point David. Statistics can be dangerous when taken out of context. I can look at the divorce rate and walk away with the notion that marriage is doomed to failure. Or I can use this statistic to help myself. If I see that 90% of the couples doing insert_random_activity_here end up with a failed marriage then I can ask the very valid question of "what did the 10% do right". :inlove"

I think I'll skip the alternate universe discussion though.;)


David said:
Maybe there is "some" truth to this but it depends on the couple. I think we have to be selective about generalizing. If people are happy together, they tend to stay together. I can think of many couples who have been together for years and still dance without their spouse routinely.
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Lawndart said:
That's exactly my point David. Statistics can be dangerous when taken out of context. I can look at the divorce rate and walk away with the notion that marriage is doomed to failure. Or I can use this statistic to help myself. If I see that 90% of the couples doing insert_random_activity_here end up with a failed marriage then I can ask the very valid question of "what did the 10% do right". :inlove"

I think I'll skip the alternate universe discussion though.;)
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Indeed there were once more restrictive laws that made dancing illegal in some places in the US. I did a little google search and see it is still illegal in Des Moines Iowa between 2 am and 6 am. I think the logic has something to do with people believing dancing leads to sin. In my book, dancing frees the soul and reduces the chances of a lot of other bad stuff from disease to anger issues.
 
Yet another reason why I am into shines more than anything else. The partner stuff seems draining.
 
David said:
Indeed there were once more restrictive laws that made dancing illegal in some places in the US. I did a little google search and see it is still illegal in Des Moines Iowa between 2 am and 6 am. I think the logic has something to do with people believing dancing leads to sin. In my book, dancing frees the soul and reduces the chances of a lot of other bad stuff from disease to anger issues.
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Then there's the old joke about <insert religious group here> can't have sex standing up because someone might see them and think that they're dancing.
 
The biology of human attraction is very complex. It is a fascinating topic, especially to those of us who have an interest in evolutionary biology.

Human babies are needier and take longer to develop (reach puberty) than any other animal so they do best when they have a lot of care and resources. So, a single parent is not an ideal situation for raising a child, especially when in modern society the extended family is often not around to help care for and educate the child, so people are forced to outsource the care of their children to strangers (babysitters, nannies, day care, etc.) even while the children are very young.

That said, sexual monogamy (as opposed to social monogamy--living with a partner) has never been "normal" for humans, no matter what we like to think. And it seems men especially :p are under the impression women want to "mate for life" assuming they find a "good man". Research has shown time and again that it is women, not men, who lose sexual interest in their long-term partners--it's not that they lose their libido or become "frigid" or get old--these are just things men like to tell themselves to reassure themselves that their wives are sexually faithful, because the consequences of infidelity for the man are pretty significant (supporting another man's child for 18+ years). In reality, women's libido is just fine, but a lot of them just get bored of having sex with the same man for years on end; of course, if they love and respect their husband, they will stay faithful, so they will (consciously or not) forgo what could be very satisfying relationships with other men (whether entirely sexual or involving an emotional connection as well). And they will come up with various "strategies" to "rekindle the passion". But the fact remains that for the majority of men and women, the excitement and level of "passion" they can experience with a new partner is very real despite all the positive emotional attachment they may feel for their long-term partner. And the effect of physical "boredom" with the long-term partner seems to manifest more strongly in women. And even those that do their best to stay faithful find it very hard to ignore the pull of attraction, especially around ovulation time when evolutionary forces have shaped women to unconsciously be attracted to those men who will give their children the "most handsome genes"--i.e. who are so attractive that they are very likely to father attractive children.

Note, this doesn't mean men and women go around looking for "good genes"--that's not how evolution works. Evolutionary forces make people attracted to those traits that have led to successful reproduction in the past--so, men are attracted to young pretty women because those are the women who in prior generations were most likely to get pregnant easily and give birth to healthy children; women's attraction is more complex: on the one hand they are attracted to "dependable" men who will stay with them in the long run and provide resources for them and their children (the "good guys"). But studies have shown that, while during most of their menstrual cycle women are attracted to men who have some feminine facial features (i.e. are more likely to be "good fathers"), around ovulation they are strongly attracted to men with more masculine features (given by more testosterone) -- they don't care if they will be good fathers or not, they just want a piece of them. Of course, some (maybe most) women don't want to cheat and actively suppress this "wrong" attraction when (if) it happens. Same for some men. But the fact that what drives people's attraction (both men and women) is so complex should lead us to accept the fact that lifelong sexual monogamy *may* not be the ideal situation in terms of people's happiness. It may be so for some people, but not necessarily for everyone. Some people may be happy staying single with occasional relationships or sexual liaisons, others engage in "polyamory" by having multiple long-term partners (with full acceptance from their primary partner), in some cultures having a mistress/lover is accepted as "normal" and almost expected (for both men and women) and is not considered unfaithfulness by the husband/wife, and yet in other cultures men and women will candidly say that they deeply love their wife/husband but that they have no moral problem having occasional extramarital sex if they meet someone with whom they have strong chemistry (the wife/husband is aware and engages in the same behavior, but they don't necessarily disclose all these sexual encounters because they see them as having nothing to do with their faithfulness to the marriage).

All these examples are simply meant to show the complexity of human attraction and romantic bonding and that things are rarely "black and white" even when we think we have the full right to "judge" or declare that "we are right/good people and they are wrong/bad people".

We can go ahead and judge some or all of these non-monogamous behaviors, but perhaps it is monogamy itself that should be "judged". I am not advocating for either pro- or anti-monogamy, simply trying to provide some food for thought :).

And in fact, one school of thought in the field of evolutionary biology hypothesizes that, despite modern cliche romantic comedies in which the woman dreams of marriage all her life, "marriage" may have come about not because women wanted to be assured of their partner's faithfulness, but because it was the men who wanted to be sure their children were really theirs so they used "marriage" to accomplish this (along with controlling women's lives and denying them the freedoms that men enjoyed).

I leave you with the following article presenting the "facts". (Especially if you've always wondered why you look nothing like your father)
 
Mommy's little secret

As we gather to mark the festive season, here's one juicy morsel mom won't be dishing up: that guy you call your dad may not be. DNA testing has revolutionized medical science, CAROLYN ABRAHAM reports, but it also has uncovered the myth of female monogamy. Now doctors are wondering how to break the news to men.

By CAROLYN ABRAHAM

They came to the hospital together, a husband, a wife and the little daughter they feared had been cursed by inheritance. Since birth, she had struggled to breathe, and all the signs pointed to cystic fibrosis.

If the girl truly had the incurable disease that clogs the lungs, she had to have received two copies of a CF gene, one from each parent. Tests at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto confirmed the family's worst fears -- and then some.

The girl was indeed afflicted. Her mom carried one of the culprit genes. But her dad, the doctors discovered, was quite a different story. His DNA showed no sign of a CF gene, which means he is not a carrier and he is not her dad.

Hospital staff have felt bound to keep the secret from him. But when they told the mom, it came as no surprise; it rarely does.
"It is probably true in a lot of families, that daddy is not who you think it is," says Steve Scherer, a senior scientist in department of genetics at the Hospital for Sick Children.

As families gather this festive season, here is a spicy fact that mothers might be loath to dish out at the holiday table: It's now widely accepted among those who work in genetics that roughly 10 per cent of us are not fathered by the man we believe to be dad.

Geneticists have stumbled upon this phenomenon in the course of conducting large population studies and hunting for genes that cause diseases such as cystic fibrosis. They find full siblings to be half-siblings, fathers who are genetic strangers to more than one of their children and uncles who are much closer to their nieces and nephews than anyone might guess. Lumped under the heading of "pedigree errors," these so-called mis-paternities, false paternities and non-paternities are all science jargon for the unwitting number of us who are chips off someone else's block.

The proverbial postman seems to be ringing twice in everyone's neighbourhood. Non-paternity is believed to cut across all socio-economic classes and many cultures. Factor it into genealogical attempts to trace ancestry and it can snap entire branches from a family tree. Considered in light of long-held views about sexual behaviour, it exposes the myth of female monogamy and utterly shakes the assumption that women are biologically driven to single-mate bliss.

The widespread use of DNA analysis has presented science and society with all sorts of new ethical problems, and now it's pulling this naked truth out of the closet and into the courtroom. Men who call themselves "Duped Dads" are looking for legal redress to protect themselves against paternity fraud, raising questions about the definition of fatherhood. Several U.S. states are considering legislation that could exempt non-biological fathers from having to pay child support.

Even the most learned among us are grappling with the implications. Last month, the 10-per-cent non-paternity rate was cited during a science seminar for judges in Halifax.

"The judges were just shocked; they really couldn't get over how many people this would affect," Dr. Scherer said. "They kept saying things about all those poor people who might be misled -- never realizing that one of them might actually be among them!"

The notion of a woman carrying the child of someone other than her partner is older than the Christmas story itself. No geneticist believes non-paternity to be purely the product of modern immorality; they have been tripping over the infidelities of earlier generations for decades.

Cheryl Shuman, director of genetic counselling at the Hospital for Sick Children, said that 15 years ago, when genetic tests were less powerful, researchers had to draw blood from a child, his or her parents and both sets of grandparents. "Sometimes we'd get a call from the grandmother, and she'd say, 'Listen, my son, or my daughter, doesn't know that their father is not their real father. . . .' "

In the interests of maintaining family peace, Ms. Shuman said, the tests would be dismissed as "uninformative."

Over the years, the hospital has relied on the advice of lawyers and ethicists to develop policies for handling the situation. For example, its consent form now warns what a genetic test can reveal. Parents "will sometimes giggle in the waiting room when they read the paragraph about non-paternity," Ms. Shuman said. "But then we get the phone call later, forewarning us as to what we might find."
When a test disqualifies a father, "most women do express some surprise, but then there is a resignation, or an acceptance that they were kind of half anticipating this was going to happen. But then all this is followed very quickly by panic and questions as to whether or not we will betray their confidentiality."

If the case involves an expectant mother, Ms. Shuman explained, the hospital's legal obligation is clear: The developing baby is considered part of the mother and the results of the tests therefore belong to her.

After birth, the course of action is less clear, she said, but lawyers advise that the child is to be considered the patient, whose needs trump those of the parents. Since telling the father could trigger a breakup and leave the child without proper support, the hospital keeps the secret. Sometimes it can be a whopper.

In one family with four daughters, the DNA analysis was so surprising that counsellors asked the mother to explain. "It turned out that the daughters had three different fathers," said Peter Ray, a scientist at the hospital. "We cannot make any conclusions based on the family structures as they are presented to us."

In the research world, when scientists come across a father in a mismatched family, they toss the sample. If pedigree errors are not caught, Dr. Scherer said, they can wreak statistical havoc with a study: "People have made careers designing software to catch these kinds of things."

Sample mix-ups can skew results, as can an extremely rare condition discovered in 1989 in which a child inherits two copies of the same chromosome from one parent, obscuring the contribution of the other. But as the number of gene hunts and diagnostic tests has grown and grown, the leading cause of these anomalies has proved to be mistaken fatherhood.

Some peg the range at 5 to 10 per cent; others, such as Jeanette Papp of the University of California at Los Angeles, feel that 15 per cent is reasonable for the Western world, even if there is no hard evidence. "It's hard to do studies on these things for ethical reasons," says Dr. Papp, director of genotyping and sequencing in UCLA's department of human genetics. "I mean, how do you tell people what you're really looking for?"

A British survey conducted between 1988 and 1996 by Robin Baker, a former professor at the University of Manchester, confirmed the 10-per-cent figure. That seems high to skeptics such as Dalhousie University geneticist Paul Neumann, although even he admitted that "my colleague, who's a woman, tells me women have no trouble believing it. . . . It's the men who can't."

Bernard Dickens, a specialist in health law and policy at the University of Toronto, said that in another British example, the non-paternity rate was three times that.

In the early 1970s, a schoolteacher in southern England assigned a class science project in which his students were to find out the blood types of their parents. The students were then to use this information to deduce their own blood types (because a gene from each parent determines your blood type, in most instances only a certain number of combinations are possible). Instead, 30 per cent of the students discovered their dads were not their biologically fathers.

"The classroom was, of course, not the ideal place to find out this information," said Prof. Dickens, who is often consulted on ethical issues by geneticists at the Hospital for Sick Children.

He feels, as do many researchers, that culture can determine whether false paternity is very high or very low. For example, in Muslim Egypt, the integrity of lineage is so important that neither sperm or egg donation nor adoption is permitted, let alone sexual indiscretion.
But false paternity causes obvious problems for anyone who values a clear pedigree and makes it a statistical impossibility to trace the true identity of our ancestors back more than a few generations.

Robert Moyzis, a molecular geneticist at the University of California at Irvine, recently had to break this news to a friend who had spent considerable energy and resources compiling a family history that stretched back 1,000 years. "I had to plug the numbers into a computer model and prove it to him. The chances that he was related to the ancestor he thought were zero."
 
Part 2

Logistically, it may seem that only men are naturally programmed for multiple partners. After all, they can produce sperm by the thousands 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and do it well into their retirement years.

Women, on the other hand, are limited to the eggs they were born with, maturing one a month and not much past their fourth decade of life. The precious few shots that women have at reproduction may drive them to seek the best mate for prospective offspring -- though the decision might be wholly unconscious.

This notion is bolstered by the "sperm wars" theory, in which Britain's Dr. Baker has noted that sperm of two different men can effectively battle over the spoils of fertilizing the egg in a woman's reproductive tract.

In 1999, a questionnaire in Britain found that most women tended to be unfaithful to their long-term partners around the time they were most fertile.

That same year, researchers at St. Andrew's University in Scotland concluded that women seem to desire different types of men at different times of the month. When they are most likely to conceive, they are attracted to men who have very masculine features, preferring more feminine men when they are not ovulating.

The researchers suggested that women may subconsciously feel that beefy men may make a better biological contribution to a baby, but softer features may signal a better father.

And strangers may have a biological advantage. "There is actually data from Britain," said sexual-behaviour expert Judith Lipton, "that suggests a woman may be more likely to conceive with a fresh partner because a woman can essentially develop antibodies against her regular partner's sperm, so that she may be more likely to be impregnated by fresh sperm."

Between 30 and 50 per cent of women cheat on their partners, compared with 50 to 80 per cent of men, said Dr. Lipton, a psychiatrist with the Swedish Medical Center in Washington who last year co-wrote The Myth of Monogamy with her husband, David Barash.

"This jibes with the idea that as many as 10 per cent of these relations may result in pregnancy," she said, explaining that women may cheat as an escape from a bad marriage, for revenge on a cheating partner, to find a better provider, or just for fun.

All this messing around might have been predicted by animal behaviour, but it has been only recently that researchers learned just how hard faithful females are to find in any species.

Dr. Barash, a zoologist and professor of psychology at the University of Washington, explained that while it was generally known that most mammals are rarely monogamous, certain species were held up as paragons of virtue. Scientists believed, for example, fidelity was definitely for the birds. "But not even the swans are monogamous, and they were the poster children for monogamy. Despite their waterfront property, they still sneak around with the neighbours."

With the 1980s advent of DNA fingerprinting, a quick molecular test that, among other things, tells scientists whether two creatures are genetically related, researchers have realized social monogamy has little bearing on sexual monogamy in the animal kingdom.
"A lot of hanky-panky goes on even if two creatures set up house together," Dr. Barash said.

Despite thousands of hours of observation, birds managed to fool not only their mates into thinking they were faithful, but their observers. Yet DNA tests show that 10 to 50 per cent of birds are fathered by a male other than the one sharing the nest.

"We always knew the possibility was there for males to be available and receptive to EPC -- extra-pair copulation -- but what was not known was that the mated females would do the same thing," Dr. Barash said.

In part, researchers figured females would be deterred from cheating since they had more to lose than a male by fooling around -- their mate might stop foraging to feed the hungry offspring, cutting off the animal equivalent of child support, or worse, turn violent. Yet this, he said, seems only to have inspired females to perfect the art of secrecy and deception: They persistently sneak off in search of stronger genes, better feeding grounds, good providers and protectors.

These trysts may have been overlooked, said Frances Burton, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto, because the researchers were often male. "There is a weird double feedback thing that goes on when it comes to observing animals, particularly non-human primates. We impose upon the observations human prejudices . . . it can obfuscate whatever truth there is."

Even the fact that female animals actually derive enjoyment from copulation wasn't fully accepted until 1971, when Prof. Burton showed that female monkeys stimulated with an electric toothbrush did in fact reach orgasm. "Though they rarely did with male monkeys," she added, "because the males did not engage them for long enough periods."

Now the hope that fidelity is compatible with wildlife has all but vanished. DNA testing is crossing one species after another off the list. Of 4,000 mammalian species, only 3 per cent are still considered candidates. Birds, bees, snails, snakes, fish, frogs . . . not even mites are monogamous. You have slide well down the food chain before Dr. Barash will put his money on a contender: Diplozoon paradoxum,a parasitic flatworm found in the gills of freshwater fish. The first time two worms mate, their bodies are fused together for life.

None of this should imply that humans are incapable of monogamy, he added. "Saying something is natural is often used to justify unacceptable behaviour. It's natural to poop on the floor, but we spend a lot of time becoming house broken."

His wife, however, said the moral transgression of infidelity cannot compare with the deception of lying about paternity. She thinks paternity fraud should be considered a crime of the highest order.

"Reproductive deception is morally similar to rape," Dr. Lipton said. "If you trick someone into raising a baby not his own, and he puts 20 years of his life into an endeavour based on a falsehood, that is appalling.

"If I were the queen of the world, birth control, of any form, would be available to any woman who wants it and DNA testing would be available for all the men so that they would know who their babies are."

There are certainly those -- the "Duped Dads" among them -- who would agree with her.
 
Part 3

Morgan Wise remembers how in 1999 the doctor rose from his chair, walked around the desk and sat down in front of him. Mr. Wise's youngest son had been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis years earlier, but a medical test showed Mr. Wise did not carry a CF gene.
"My first thought was that they must have misdiagnosed my son," the 40-year-old railway engineer from Big Spring, Tex., said in an interview this week.

But then the doctor looked him squarely in the eye and said: "Morgan, do you have any reason to think this boy might not be yours?"
The possibility seemed outlandish. He had been married to the same woman for 13 years and they had had three boys and a girl before they broke up in 1996. But for peace of mind, he decided to go ahead with paternity tests.

In March, 1999, the results arrived by mail -- a creased piece of paper telling him that not one of the three boys was his.
"I felt anger toward [my first wife] and sadness, and I felt so sorry for my kids," Mr. Wise recalled. "I told my boys, 'I love you all, you'll always be my sons, the only difference is now I'm not your birth father.' "

Despite this revelation, a district court judge ruled that Mr. Wise had to continue paying child support for the three boys. Based on a 500-year-old common law, most states operate on the presumption that a husband is the father of any child born to his wife during a marriage.

Mr. Wise took his case to the media, hoping to generate political support and contact other men in a similar situation. Instead, he angered the judge, who revoked his visitation rights to the children but left him responsible for $1,100 (U.S.) in monthly support.
"This," Mr. Wise warned, "could happen to anyone."

The Wise verdict has become a flashpoint for men who discover that their children are not their own. Many are actually eager to find out, ordering paternity kits over the Internet. (The American Association of Blood Banks reports that 30 per cent of men who suspect they are not biological fathers are right.)

Men have set up support groups and begun to lobby to change what they see as archaic laws. Three states have bills pending that would take paternity fraud into account and at least three others have already passed similar legislation.

The Wise case also has focused legal minds and ethicists on the definition of fatherhood, and the prevailing view appears to be that dad is the man who reads you bedtime stories, not necessarily the man who shares your DNA.

In Canada, there has been no case in point. But Prof. Dickens at U of T said a recent ruling suggests that Canadian courts would discount DNA evidence over the best interests of the child. A few years ago, he said, a man tried to win visitation rights for a child he believed he had fathered with a woman who had since married someone else.

The court ruled that the former boyfriend's biological contribution did not outweigh the risks of compromising the bond the child had forged with the mother's husband. "If you have acted in a fatherlike way toward a child, then you are the father," Prof. Dickens said. "Fatherhood is a social reality, not a genetic reality."

He firmly believes that people who undergo genetic tests to find out about paternity are entitled to such information. But those being tested for a genetic ailment or some other inherited trait cannot expect the same: "It's not for geneticists to spring this information upon them. The point is, when you are testing for a particular trait, it's either there or it's not there, and there is no need to say why it is or why it isn't."

Some fathers, of course, feel differently. Stacy Robb, founder and president of the support group DADS Canada, said that "it's unfair because the doctors come across this information and they don't tell the man listed as the father on the birth certificate. It's a disregarding of men's rights. The point is mothers and fathers are not treated equally."

And as the staff at Hospital for Sick Children are learning, keeping secrets can backfire. In one case, a father who tested negative for a gene that his sick child had inherited wrongly believes himself to be both a carrier of a genetic disorder and the child's natural father.
Ms. Shuman said counsellors have never told him otherwise, even after his marriage broke up. But recently, he contacted the hospital again to say he has a new partner and wants to come in for further testing. He assumes that any child produced in his new relationship also may be at risk.

Telling him there is no risk would reveal the truth about his first child. Going ahead with the test denies him the truth about his own DNA.

Prof. Dickens suggests testing the new partner. If she turns out to be a non-carrier, there is no need of further discussion. But Ms. Shuman said that also may leave counsellors with some unwanted "moral residue."

"He hasn't come back in yet," she added, "but we may have to reveal the results . . . It all gets messier than you might think. Welcome to my ethically charged world."
 
Something like this?

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