Black Women, Gender, and Families Spring 2011, Vol. 5, No. 1 pp. 66–89 ©2011 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois When Better Becomes Worse: Black Wives Describe Their Experiences with Infidelity Ebony A. Utley, California State University, Long Beach Abstract In addition to media representations that depict black sex as easy and free, main- stream research often normalizes infidelity as a black-community pathology. This essay counters the stereotypes by presenting black women’s first-person narrative experiences with infidelity, discussing the impact of a unique imbalanced sex ratio in the African American community, and considering the pertinent public-health implications of infidelity. Interviews conducted with twenty women yielded twenty- five hours of data and the following emergent themes: definitions of infidelity, infidelity discoveries, violations, responses, and making plans. Introduction I nfidelity has become an affair with capitalism within the black com- munity. In addition to visual images that depict black sex as easy and free, extramarital sex has become quite profitable in the literary realm. Consider these representative book titles: Cydney Rax’s My Husband’s Girl- friend (2006), Miasha’s Diary of a Mistress (2006), Karrine Steffans’s Confes- sions of a Video Vixen (2005), Joy Marie’s The Straight-Up Truth about the Down-Low (2008), HoneyB’s Single Husbands (2009), and Grace Octavia’s Take Her Man (2009). Essence sells magazines with prurient articles titled “Sex, Lies, and Infidelity” (April 2009), “What Makes a Black Man Cheat?” (October 2008), and “Confessions of the Other Woman” (April 2007). The profitability of selling black sex makes the sexual affairs of current cultural icons like Tiger Woods, Kobe Bryant, and Bill Cosby more public than the clandestine affairs of past icons like Paul Robeson and Martin Luther King Jr. (Robeson 1930, Powers 1995). Unsurprisingly, the infidelity narratives that sell well are shortsighted. They frequently normalize black infidelity by focusing on why men cheat,