Sorry, Arnold: You Picked the Wrong Decade to be Unfaithful

Hollywood - both in the personal lives of its stars and in its movie scripts - would have us believe that monogamy is a bygone belief. Virtually any movie involving a wedding features at least one scene where the groom (or bride) laments drunkenly that he's not sure (or she's not sure) she can only have sex with one person for the rest of his (or her) life.

And honestly, nature is often on the side of Hollywood. There aren't a heck of a lot of animals that mate for life.

But here is where humans are distinctive: we have opposable thumbs and we see the virtue of fidelity. And apparently more of you agree with me now than in decades past: new research from the University of Virginia's National Marriage Project (a fabulous research initiative) says 78 percent of men and 84 percent of women say infidelity is "always wrong." In the 1970s, the numbers were 63 and 73 percent, respectively.

In other words, we're becoming less tolerant of infidelity. Sorry, Arnold.

Perhaps this isn't surprising: the 70s was the decade when average people thought key parties were a good idea. Hmph.

Cinnamon Rolls & Marriage

Knowing her own children might not buy a religious defense of marital faithfulness, my friend Cate Wallace set out to craft an intellectual argument for faithfulness in her wise book, For Fidelity. (Read excerpts and more about Cate here.)

Cate concludes that fidelity is an essential characteristic of marriage: without it, it's not really a marriage at all. To illustrate, she tells the story of her love of cinnamon rolls.

We all know a cinnamon roll when we see it: yeasty and sweet, varying in size but not in shape, preferably covered in a sticky icing that leaves you wanting to lick the leftovers directly from your plate.

Cinnamon scones - even delicious cinnamon scones with icing drizzled on top - just isn't a cinnamon roll.

Likewise, most of us feel marriage without fidelity just isn't marriage.

Sorry, Maria.

So What If ...

So what if your relationship is one of the 10 to 16 percent that experience infidelity? A recent article on CNN's website offered three tips that seem a reasonable place to start (not that any one would be feeling reasonable after discovering a spouse's unfaithfulness):

1) Don't rush to make any big decisions, especially irreversible ones.

2) Don't tell your children. Especially if they are small.

3) Take care of yourself. This will ensure the patience and calm you will need.

What happens from there is up to you. But the good news is that you don't have to look far to find examples of relationships that have done the impossible: turning cinnamon scones back into cinnamon rolls.