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Once a Cheater, Always a Cheater?
The first time I strayed -- I messed around on one high-school boyfriend with the next one -- I called it "overlap." By college, I was overlapping all the time. My sister called me "boy crazy." Once, when I confided to my mother that I was torn between Peter and Matt, she barely contained her disapproval. "You have your father's sex drive," she said. Ouch, I thought. But then, a second later: Could this be a genealogical pattern? What happens when the right person comes along?

I got married nearly two years ago to exactly the right person. I fell in love immediately and -- cringe -- told him so on -- cringe, flinch, recoil -- our second date. On our wedding day, I missed my dad terribly, like any fatherless bride, but something else was bugging me: Would I be able to respect marriage in a way that my father never could?

The other night at a dinner party, I posed a question to the table: "Could there be a gene for infidelity?" I asked. "No," said my doctor friend Michael through a mouthful of pasta. There is no coil in DNA that makes a person cheat. Period. But surely not all of our proclivities are learned, I said. Some of us are born loving public speaking or being great at languages -- it just takes a few years to know it. So what if there is a libido gene? And a gene for impulsiveness? And what if a person has both?

"Sounds like an excuse," replied Michael.

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