为什么女人会背着老公出轨

One of the more interesting facts in Esther Perel's new book, State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity, comes near the beginning.

埃斯特·佩雷尔在新书State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity的开头描述了一个很有趣的事实。

Since 1990, notes the psychoanalyst and writer, the rate of married women who report they've been unfaithful has increased by 40 percent, while the rate among men has remained the same.

这位心理学家和作者提到，自1990年以来，结婚女性出轨的比例增长了40%，而男性出轨比例保持不变。

More women than ever are cheating, she tells us, or are willing to admit that they are cheating -- and while Perel spends much of her book examining the psychological meaning, motivation, and impact of these affairs, she offers little insight into the significance of the rise itself.

现在，女性出轨的人数比以往更多，她告诉我们，或者愿意承认出轨的人数增多--虽然佩雷尔书里的大部分内容都在考虑这些外遇的心理意义、动机和影响，但她也说出了对比例增长本身的想法。

So what exactly is happening inside marriages to shift the numbers? What has changed about monogamy or family life in the past 27 years to account for the closing gap? And why have so many women begun to feel entitled to the kind of behavior long accepted (albeit disapprovingly) as a male prerogative?

所以婚姻究竟发生了什么，这一数字又为何增长呢？过去27年来，一夫一妻制和家庭生活发生了什么变化，导致这一差距变小呢？为什么这么多的女性开始享受长期被认为是男性特权（虽然不被赞成）的行为呢？

These questions first occurred to me a few years ago when I began to wonder how many of my friends were actually faithful to their husbands.

几年前我第一次想到这些问题，当时我开始思考我的朋友中，究竟有几个人是对自己的老公忠贞不二的。

From a distance, they seemed happy enough, or at least content. Like me, they were doing the family thing. They had cute kids, mortgages, busy social lives, matching sets of dishes. On the surface, their husbands were reasonable, the marriages modern and equitable. If these women friends were angry unfulfilled or resentful, they didn't show it.

从远处看，她们看起来很开心，或者至少很满意。像我一样，她们也忙碌着家里的各种琐事。她们的孩子很可爱、要还贷款、社交生活很忙，还要配套餐具。表面上看，她们的丈夫明事理，她们的婚姻是现代的、平等的。如果这些女性朋友感到生气、不满足或怨恨，她们也不会表现出来。

Then one day, one of them confided in me she'd been having two overlapping affairs over the course of five years.

有一天，她们中有个人告诉我，她在过去5年出轨了两次。

Almost before I'd finished processing this, another friend told me she was 100 percent faithful to her husband, except when she was out of town for work each month. Not long after, another told me that while she'd never had sex with another man, she'd had so many emotional affairs and inappropriate email correspondences over the years that she'd had to buy a separate hard drive to store them all.

几乎在我消化这一信息之前，又一个朋友告诉我她对她丈夫百分百的忠贞，只不过她每周都要外出工作。不久后，有一个朋友告诉我虽然她从未和其他男人发生过性关系，但这几年来，她有多次精神出轨，而且还发了一些不雅信函，为此她不得不单买一个硬盘存储这些东西。

What surprised me most about these conversations was not that my friends were cheating, but that many of them were so nonchalant in the way they described their extramarital adventures. There was deception but little secrecy or shame.

在这些对话中，最让我吃惊的不是我的朋友都出过轨，而是她们在描述婚外情故事时的漠然。她们欺骗了自己的丈夫，但她们却并不觉得这是秘密，也不觉得羞耻。