The Face of Guilt

It appears to be frozen. The expression registers for a few precious seconds, revealing a hodge-podge of emotions: surprise, anxiety, fear, and puzzlement at how one’s hand was caught in the proverbial cookie jar. Such is the face of a guilty man or woman.

It is ironic that there is such purity in it, how untainted and how unadulterated (pardon the pun) the face seems, for those few fleeting moments, when it reveals itself immediately after one is caught and confronted, showing guilt in its most organic form, before defensiveness and the instinct for self-preservation kicks in.

So behold that face, mark that expression, because in the next breath it will vanish and in its stead will rise something you might have to battle yet never slay.

Jardine Libaire, writing for Bestlife magazine, notes in her February 2007 article on the subject of infidelity: “In America, a lapse in monogamy ruins marriages, bankrupts couples, and condemns families to divorce court hell. In Europe and elsewhere, infidelity is considered a bump in the road, if it’s considered at all.”

She cites the example of American couple Jane and Thomas, high school sweethearts whose kids are currently in high school. Thomas, 47, a financial officer at a large corporation, suddenly started volunteering to take his son to soccer practice on Sunday mornings and began using his laptop at home.

Jane noticed he seemed to hide the computer from her, and he never used it in front of her. He sought excuses to be alone; she became uneasy. One night, he made a hushed phone call downstairs while she was in bed. When he came upstairs, she asked who it was. He hemmed and hawed, and then said it was no one; told her she was “hearing things” and said it must have been the TV. His denial was all she needed. She asked right then and there if he was having an affair. And then there was that face — the frozen face. Soon enough he admitted that he was. Their world came crashing down.

The other woman was a fellow employee who reported to him. She was 14 years Jane’s junior and possessed, in Jane’s words, “a Victoria’s Secret body.” Thomas agreed that he must end the affair, but over the course of four months the evidence said otherwise. Jane discovered cryptic text messages on her husband’s cell phone and there were regular hang-up calls from a blocked number. Jane considered telling the other woman’s husband about his wife’s affair, but then she realized the other woman — out of revenge — could sue Thomas for sexual harassment. This quandary had the potential to bankrupt the family. So would divorce. Mean-while, every time Thomas stayed late at work, Jane couldn’t help but accuse him — even if it was only in silent looks —of having been unfaithful again. In their own home, Jane and Thomas were now deadlocked in marital misery, fighting tearfully and viciously.

Does it have to be this way? Must an affair lead a couple inexorably to annulment court or bankruptcy? Do other cultures handle the circumstance of infidelity with different protocol and ethics?

Libaire cites another example, that of Ana, 30, a European with 1960s Italian art-film looks: an almost decadent face, a slim, curvy body in a tweed pencil skirt. One night, Henri, a Parisian client of Ana’s company, came to town for a professional event. They flirted unapologetically throughout the evening. When she invited people to her place for late-night drinks, Henri stayed behind. Before anything happened, he held up his finger, “You see I’m wearing this ring,” he said. Ana said she did. “You know nothing will change,” he continued. She answered that she did, indeed, understand that.

“It was adult,” Ana says. “It was respectful to me, in a way, and to his wife, to ask that, and to make that statement. The next morning he was sweet and relaxed. We hung out for hours. He didn’t run away in shame.”

Libaire says “Henri is the fairy-tale adulterer: European, sensual, guiltless. He is a figure we Americans look upon with wonder and terror, wanting to believe and desperately not wanting to believe that he (or she) exists.” She adds that when Americans engage in hanky-panky, “We go into hysterics and confess, bawling to our spouses. We enroll in specialized infidelity therapy. We hate ourselves. We fall apart.”

According to Pamela Druckerman, author of a book on infidelity, Lust in Translation, which is based on her survey of married couples conducted over a period of several years worldwide, “Americans are the worst, both at having affairs and dealing with the aftermath. Adultery crises in America last longer, cost more, and seem to inflict more emotional torture than they do of anyplace I visited.”

She had not only charted the international styles and frequency of cheating, but also looked at each country’s capacity for guilt and shame (or anger and vengeance, depending on the party’s role) regarding infidelity. It seems to her that no other population suffers the same magnificent lavish of anguish that Americans do. She claims that “The Russians regard affairs as benign vices, like cigars and scotch. The Japanese have institutionalized extramarital sex through clubs and salary man lifestyles.”

The French, who don’t cheat as much, according to Druckerman, prize discretion over the occasional lie. In sub-Saharan Africa, even the threat of HIV hasn’t created a strong taboo on cheating. She adds that, “Even God-fearing and devout Christians, Muslims and Jews are still cheating and having affairs, still double-parking on their spouses.”

Druckerman says that in the grand scheme of infidelity around the world, “The United States remains junior varsity. We have affairs at about the same numerical rate as the French.” According to the General Social Survey, the most recent statistical examination of marital infidelity, about four percent of married men polled claimed at least one sexual partner outside his marriage in the previous year; around three percent for married women. Compare this with Africa’s Ivory Coast, where a reported 36 percent of married men strayed.

“Why is the fallout so brutal?” Druckerman asks. “In most other countries, an occasional affair is tolerated and even sanctioned,” at least for men.

How about right here at home? How do we Filipinos handle infidelity? Do couples slug it out? Do the wives scream bloody murder and fight tooth and nail for what is rightfully theirs? I think not. There may be a few exceptions but the majority suffer in silence. They cry upon the bosom of their closest friends and endure the pain and the humiliation of the betrayal. Why? Because in our country, as in others — most of Asia and Africa — women have fewer rights. Men cheat and women have hardly any leverage to stop them or to complain. It is not a matter of tolerance but of unequal freedoms. Let us not forget that, in some countries, women are still stoned to death for adultery.

In America, relationships often collapse immediately under the weight of a discovered infidelity because it is considered an affront to the partnership, something that must be addressed and fixed. In this, they turn to professionals: counselors and therapists who espouse utter and unveiled transparency, which are necessary for trust to be rebuilt.

In the Philippines, infidelity is a non-issue. Most wives lick the wounds of their martyred selves; husbands, whose motto it is to deny the indiscretion unto death and who wouldn’t be caught dead seeing counselors and therapists, add another feather to their cap and probably pat themselves on the back, sometimes in secret, sometimes out in the open or in the company of buddies, as they gloat over and glorify their “invincibility.”

Druckerman would have found, had she investigated our people’s capacity for guilt and shame regarding infidelity, that there is close to none. Even our nation’s leaders do nothing to hide their affairs; no guilt there, no shame.

And yet in some rare instances, if one is lucky, one just might glean the face of guilt worn by the erring partner at his most unguarded moment — a look that is guileless and earnest; one that says, “I have done wrong and I shall placate and make amends.”