Just read this article in an Observer mag and found it quite intriguing.

Is anyone faithful any more?
American writer Pamela Druckerman knows all the rules of infidelity. She spent three years studying adulterers, from Paris to Tokyo. She tells Polly Vernon why she thinks us Brits are getting it wrong.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/woman

Lust In Translation is an excellent book. It's funny, it's compulsive, it's surprising, it's the million soap operas that make up other people's love lives. But it also raises an important issue. At the core of the book is a possibility: does fidelity matter that much? If we're all cheating, or thinking about cheating; if other countries and cultures have completely different attitudes towards it, if some of them honestly don't associate infidelity with guilt ('I'd ask them if they felt guilty about their affairs, and they actually couldn't understand the question!'), then why has it become so taboo in the UK, and are we doing ourselves a massive disservice in making it taboo?

Druckerman's book is written from the perspective of an American - and America is famously high-minded about infidelity. A 2006 Gallup poll discovered that Americans are more comfortable with polygamy and human cloning than they are infidelity; the whole Clinton-Lewinsky furore hinged on the idea that Bill Clinton had cheated on his wife, and that this automatically meant he was capable of all manner of depravities, and thus unfit to be president. But Druckerman thinks the UK increasingly embraces the American ideal on infidelity by buying into what she identifies as 'the American script'. The 'script' is our communal idea of affairs, and of how an affair and the aftermath of an affair should be played out; a blueprint, almost. It dictates our behaviour in an affair situation to a terrifying degree, even when it's contrary to how we actually want to act.

For the aftermath of an affair, the American script goes into overdrive. 'Well, there's the one-strike-and-you're-out rule: an affair, even a one-night stand, means a marriage is over. That's a very American and British idea. I spoke to women who, on discovering that their husbands had cheated, immediately packed a bag and left, because that's "what you do". Not because that's what they wanted to do - they just thought that was the rule. They didn't even seem to realise there were other options. And then - all those people who discover an affair, and then say: "It's not the cheating, it's the lies I can't stand!" I mean, really, like they're reading from a script!'

The coda to the American script - and, increasingly, in the UK - is the inevitable recourse to therapy. 'This idea that the only way to mend the relationship post-affair is through therapy, is unique to the American script,' says Druckerman.

Druckerman talks about the 'entrepreneurs' who build a business on the aftermath of infidelity - the therapists and couples counsellors. She points out that there's an entire industry with a serious financial stake in upholding the idea that cheating is desperately serious, a symptom of a deeply flawed marriage, of two people who need to be cured.