I WAS horrified this week to read that David Boreanaz had joined the ranks of celebrity apologisers and admitted to being unfaithful to his wife. At this point, your reaction will likely fall into two camps: first, disappointment, like mine. David, David. What were you thinking? Or, just as likely: David, David. Who the hell is David Boreanaz?*
I'm not horrified that he's had an affair and come out with a public admission. That's de rigueur for anyone who's anyone. It's more shocking these days if someone doesn't have an affair. I can see the front page of Who magazine now: ''Scandal! Celebrity keeps it in his pants! See the shocking photos!''
I'm also not astonished by the overwhelming need to tell the whole world about it, or the circumstances: waiting until the mistress tried to blackmail him for a reported six-figure sum before coming clean. Quelle surprise.
What's shocking is that DB's wife is the American model, actress and Playboy bunny Jaime Bergman. That's right. Being a Playboy bunny is no guarantee that your husband won't fool around. This is additional evidence, following the recent example of Sandra Bullock's husband, that spousal appearance counts for nothing in the fidelity stakes. Surely this means that we normal-looking women are doomed.
That's why I was fascinated to read an article in The New York Times this week about scientists researching fidelity.** The first group, scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, have studied 552 sets of twins and found a male gene that goes a long way to predicting marital stability. Men who have a particular type of gene were less likely to be married, and if they were married, were more likely to have had severe marital problems. And if you're a man with two copies of this gene, you're in even more trouble: it's twice as likely that you've experienced a serious relationship crisis in the past year.
Nature versus nurture debates have been with us since Mrs Darwin complained that her husband had the table manners of an ape, but I've yet to see this incorporated as an excuse in celebrity apology land. Imagine David/Tiger/Jesse saying, ''I deeply regret being born with a gene that has forced me, like a chromosomal gun against my head, to play around on the missus. I'm yet to determine if this gene has come from my mother or my father, but rest assured the culprit will be tracked down and punished.''
Other researchers, however, are approaching fidelity from a different angle. At Stony Brook University in New York, researchers don't believe relationship strength is related to your spouse's appearance or your genes, but instead to ''self-expansion'', or the amount of value a partner adds to your life. According to The New York Times, scientists measure this by asking questions such as: How much does your partner provide a source of exciting experiences? How much has knowing your partner made you a better person? How much do you see your partner as a way to expand your own capabilities?
If these researchers are right, a happy marriage might be built by excitement (''Remember that time in Barcelona/Kandy/KL when we almost missed the train/cuddled the baby elephant/ate those amazing prawn noodles?''), improvement (''thanks for encouraging me to volunteer/foster/donate'') and expansion (''and the voucher for the cooking/photography/jewellery-mak ing class for the two of us was a great idea'').
As a society, we've finally grasped the concept of preventive healthcare. Perhaps we're not that far away from preventive marriage care. Instead of relationship maintenance focusing on plastic surgery or weight loss, maybe those three areas of excitement, improvement and expansion can be addressed in a way that builds credit in our relationship ''bank''. No apologies required.
*Dear rock-dwellers, inter-planetary travellers and my husband: DB is the star of Channel 7's American comedy/drama Bones. I've heard he also does a nice line in sexy vampire, but that's not my thing.
**Just imagine writing the grant application for that.
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