According to Desmond Morris (whose books Lorraine and I adore and devour), Einstein with his string of love affairs with as many as ten mistresses concurrently being pursued or pursuing him, is more the norm than the exception of brilliant men . . . brilliant men always betray their wives . . . part of it is the nature of the risk taker and the creative man (John F. Kennedy went much further than Bill Clinton would ever have dreamed, insisting that if he did not make love during a day he would get a terrible headache, preferring two women at one time and also moving on from a woman once he had sex with her in three different ways).  While Morris focuses his essay on courage and risk taking as a function of man’s evolutionary past (to the point that men are more likely to have accidents, fifteen more likely to die from an accident than women) with women not developing the same traits in part because of species preservation), I would suggest that simple sex drive is also a function.  Many highly intelligent and creative individuals have much higher sex drives than most other folks.  Higly intelligent people, geniuses, also have a tendancy to have had highly sexed and very loving parents who displayed affection physically and often so the traits do seem to have rider effects and coincide.

While Morris characterized all this extramarital sex in terms of betrayal, some such men had and have a great deal of extramarital sex without such betrayal.  Carl Jung had sex with a large number of his fans, students, and colleagues and had a longtime live-in relationship with a woman who became a de facto extended family member.  Contemporary artists, philosophers, scientists, and more share similar expressions of the genius gene (as Morris describes the traits associated with genius, including highly developed sexual appetite, creativity, productive, varied sexual pursuits, risk-taking, and more) . . . more and more of them opting for consensual approaches to this expression of extending their understanding of their realtionships, albeit most do stick to traditional interpretations and do indeed cheat as it were.  Most of them do so repeatedly, like a sad repetition complex that must play itself out over and over and over and over again, ad infinitim . . . for their nature cannot and will not change regardless of the amount of will or wishful thinking they apply to it.

In any case, I’m not sure my wife would buy the "honey, I had to have an affair, I’m brilliant" defence.  My geniues gene made me do it, so to speak.  Then again . . . 🙂

All the best,
Brian