Cheating Husbands Strengthen Marriage, Claims French Female Psychologist

A prominent female French psychologist has given the thumbs up to marital infidelity by men, claiming the practice is the sign of a “healthy marriage.”

In her book “Les hommes, l’amour, la fidélité” (Men, love, fidelity) Maryse Vaillant claims that extra marital affairs can have a positive effect on a marriage.

The endorsement of infidelity will come as welcome news to the estimated 39 per cent of France males believed to cheat on their spouses at some point during their marriage.

Ms Vaillant says: “They don’t do it because they no longer love them, they simply need breathing space. For such men, who are in fact profoundly monogamous, infidelity is almost unavoidable.”

Ms Vaillant goes on to claim that not taking a mistress could be construed as a sign of weakness and inflexibility in a husband, often because he has been emotionally scarred by the absence of a father figure during his formative years.

She says: “These mean have a completely idealised view of their father and the paternal function. They lack suppleness and are prisoners to an idealised image of a man of duty.”

However the theory is likely to be poorly received by the many French wives, some of them very prominent, who have been on the receiving end of their husband’s indiscretions.

Among those is Sylvie Brunel, ex wife of France’s immigration minister Eric Besson, whose warts and all memoir of her faithless marriage tells of the officials string of affairs, which Ms Brunel describes as “shameless”.