Many people claim infidelity as cause for divorce, but is it really?

Many are the incompatibilities that dog human relationships – sexual, psychological, temperamental; clashing ambitions, conflicting tastes, irreconcilable ideals. It’s a wonder we can come together at all. Maybe we wouldn’t if we didn’t have to, but we can’t live alone and so we form societies and families and do our best, with decidedly mixed results.

If sex were not reproductive – as increasingly it is not – would marriage have ever arisen? Eventually it may go the way of other once-venerable institutions – Japan’s neighborhood associations for instance, now nearing extinction. The increasing appeal of single life suggests as much. But the enduring appeal of marriage suggests the contrary. Then there are the failed marriages. What do they suggest?

Whether marriage’s joys outweigh its tribulations or vice versa is a question as old as marriage and will not be settled here. One thing we know: the form of marriage based on one man and one woman in love for life to the exclusion of other sexual partners is, probably always was, fantasy. Some indeed may wonder why it arose as an ideal in the first place. Whatever the reasons, when its wings are clipped it’s a long fall to a hard ground. Or it’s not. Soft landings do occur. Anything can occur. Spa (Oct 1-8) considers some instances.

When “Mika Ito” (names in quote marks are pseudonyms) met her ex-husband, he must have seemed all right to her; they married, had a daughter, he worked, she worked, she in insurance, he at we’re not told what but whatever it was, their combined income seems to have been adequate, so what went wrong?

The familiar conjugal downward spiral. Mika explains: “After our daughter was born he changed suddenly. He’d insult me in front of friends: ‘You call this house cleaning? You call yourself a mother?’ Meanwhile he did nothing around the house!” To vent her stress she took to papa-katsu, trolling online for older, preferably well-heeled and free-spending casual sex partners. She clicked with one, a 40-year-old investor (she’s 28) who proposed marriage. As far as he knew she was a single mother; he’d be a father to the little girl, he said. She put him off with this story and that. When the stories failed to add up, he hired a private detective and the truth came out.

He was enraged. His tenderest feelings had been trampled. He emailed the husband: “Your wife’s a whore.” Well, that was that. She left her husband, took their daughter with her, and became a single mother for real. “Absolutely not,” fumed the husband when she asked for child support payments. “Not a single yen. This is your doing, not mine.”

The case went to divorce court, where it languished for three years. The ruling when it finally came was in her favor, awarding her a lump sum of 300,000 yen plus 9,000 yen a month. The husband lashed back, suing her in civil court for “condolence money” in view of her infidelity. Tired of the whole thing, she settled with him out of court, paying him 1.5 million yen.

The end? Not yet. Her papa-katsu partner, still seething, was demanding compensation for psychological damage. With him too she settled for “a few hundred thousand yen” conditional on his leaving her alone thereafter.

Free at last. One twist remains to be told. “The child began saying, ‘I want to meet papa.’” Fair enough, thought Mika. A meeting was arranged. “We hadn’t seen each other in three years. For my part, I’ve always felt lingering regrets over my past mistakes. I can’t help thinking, ‘What if he were to say, “Let’s make a fresh start”?’” And Spa’s reporter, who’d been struck all along by Mika’s nonchalance, was touched to notice tears in her eyes.

Marriage and infidelity seem so inextricably bound together as to seem almost married themselves. You’d think one would end by canceling the other out, but it hasn’t happened. Explanations are various: psychological, social, economic – also, interestingly enough, genetic. There are genes that predispose us to certain kinds of behavior, infidelity included, says neuroscientist Tsuyoshi Nishi. The question remains open as to how forceful that “predisposition” is, and whether and to what extent there is something within us – the “I,” the “ego,” the “soul” – that can, given the will which is not genetically determined, prevail.

“He’d been a junior high school classmate,” says “Yuka Kijima” of her first husband – “a quiet type. Me, I’m the opposite. I love noise and excitement.” At 48 she looks back over a life of… noise and excitement; hers if anyone’s is the soft landing mentioned above.

She first married 20 years ago. Why defy clear differences of character that seemed to bode ill? “I was pregnant. I thought, ‘Well, all right, I want a child anyway, we’ll compromise, it’ll be fine.”

She’s a nurse and he an electrician, his work keeping him on the job from first train to last. “He was never home. I was lonely.” She took up with a doctor at her hospital, then with another, two years each. A careless failure to erase evidence from her phone tipped her husband off – “stupid of me; but he kept his cool, didn’t blame me, said ‘Well, I have my faults too, let’s let bygones be bygones.’ It was so good of him. I had to be worthy, and I tried; for five years I was a perfect wife.”

The strain must have shown. “Suddenly he says to me, ‘If you’re not happy with me we can separate.’” This was her chance. “I earn 6 million yen a year, I’m financially secure, I said, ‘Okay, let’s do it.’” He shouldered the housing loan and everything went smoothly – so much so one can’t help wondering if he might have had reasons of his own for making sure they did. It hardly matters. Kijima and their daughter living together “as close as can be,” three more years passed.

There’s wisdom in leaving well enough alone, but we’re a restless species. To make a long story short she married again, partly to give the child a father. It lasted a year. They broke up and for the past eight years she’s been seeing a married man with children of his own. “She follows the promptings of her heart,” says Spa, “and is, to all appearances, thoroughly pleased with herself.”

© Japan Today