Shirley Bernice Glass

Shirley Glass, 67, Expert on Infidelity, Is Dead By DOUGLAS MARTIN Published: October 14, 2003

The cause was cancer, said Ira Glass, her son and the producer of This American Life on public radio stations.

In magazine articles, a recent book and interviews on The Oprah Winfrey Show and other television programs, Dr. Glass examined how the emotional intimacy of the workplace and the Internet had led even people in successful marriages to slip into emotionally intense relationships that could easily lead to affairs.

Dr. Glass said that even if these intense relationships did not lead to sex they were a threat to marriages and part of what she termed the new crisis of infidelity. The reason, she said, is that the emotional intimacy with the friend gradually, almost invisibly, supplants that with the spouse. Still, some critics questioned the utility of changing the traditional definition of infidelity.

Dr. Glass also made an impact among marriage therapists by saying that betrayed partners in adulterous affairs often suffered from post-traumatic stress similar to that experienced by combat veterans.

She advocated a new means of dealing with the aftermath of an affair: absolute honesty about every detail, down to sexual details if the wronged partner wanted to know them.

But based on wide surveys of other therapists, Dr. Glass found that it was most common to exclude the extramarital affair from the therapeutic discussion. She described this as waxing a dirty floor.

Dr. John Gottman, a therapist and author who is executive director of the Relationship Institute in Seattle, said, This insight is threatening to everybody, but added that it was potentially very healing.

He said that Dr. Glass's achievement lay in taking the moral component out of discussions of infidelity and treating it as an everyday, if exceedingly difficult, problem.

But it is a different kind of problem than commonly assumed, Dr. Glass argued. One of her findings, based on her clinical research in Baltimore, was that the majority of men who have affairs characterized their marriages, including their sex life, as happy or very happy.

At the time of her death, Dr. Glass was beginning a more academic study to follow up her first book, Not 'Just Friends' (Free Press, 2003).

Shirley Bernice Politzer was born on March 1, 1936, in Richmond, Va. Her father ran a hardware store, and she grew up in the Pimlico section of Baltimore. She graduated from high school at 16 and from an honors course at the University of Maryland in three years.

She met Barry Glass, an accountant who became her husband of 48 years, at a swimming pool when she was 15. They married when she was 19.

In addition to her husband and her son, Ira, of Chicago, Dr. Glass is survived by two daughters, Randi Murray of Hillsborough, Calif., and Karen Glass Berry of Los Angeles, and two grandsons.

Dr. Glass taught high school math while earning a master's degree in psychology from Towson State University. Later, she was a psychologist in the Baltimore public school system. She became interested in the subject of infidelity after learning about a friend who was having an affair, and she pursued the subject in a doctoral program at Catholic University, where she earned her Ph.D. in 1980.

Mr. Glass said recently that he and his wife respected each other too much to have had an affair.

We were always the best of friends, he said.

Photo: Shirley P. Glass in 2002.

Although NOT "Just Friends" is the first book by Dr.Shirley Glass, she is considered one of the world's leading experts on infidelity. The New York Times has referred to her as "the godmother of infidelity research." She has written clinical chapters about treating infidelity and empirical research articles in professional journals about sex differences in Dr. Shirley Glass - NOT 'Just Friends'marital and extramarital relationships. She has also presented countless seminars on preventing and treating the trauma of infidelity at national conferences for therapists, counselors, and marriage educators. NOT "Just Friends" draws on more than two decades of original research and hundreds of clinical cases to chronicle the human story of what occurs, before, during, and after the trauma of betrayal. Dr. Glass is also preparing an academic book, The Trauma of Infidelity: Research and Treatment.

Shirley Politzer Glass was married at age 19 shortly before completing her undergraduate studies at the University of Maryland, and she had her first child 13 months later. Her husband, Barry, started out as a radio announcer but then became a CPA who founded a regional accounting and consulting firm, Glass Jacobson. Shirley and Barry have three adult children and two teenage grandsons. Their older daughter, Randi Glass Murray, is a literary agent based in San Francisco, specializing in literary fiction and narrative non-fiction; their son, Ira Glass, is host/producer of This American Life on public radio, and their younger daughter, Karen Glass Barry, is a senior vice president in film development at Disney Studios.

Dr. Glass began her doctoral studies at Catholic University of America the same year that Dr. Shirley Glass - NOT 'Just Friends'her oldest child, Randi, entered college. Prior to that, she was a school psychologist in the Baltimore City Public School system. She received her doctorate in clinical-counseling psychology the same year that her youngest child, Karen, entered college. She is a licensed psychologist with a Diplomate in Family Psychology and she is also a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist.

She is an elected Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA) based on unusual and outstanding contributions in media psychology and in the individual practice of psychotherapy. She founded and chaired the Media Watch Committee for APA's Division of Media Psychology to monitor how mental health professionals are portrayed in television, movies, and literature. This committee arose from her concern about the erroneous image that media portrayals of inappropriate therapist conduct could have on an uninformed public. Her sensitivity to this problem developed from her experience as Chair of the Maryland Board of Examiners of Psychologists and as a member of a Statewide Taskforce on Sexual Exploitation by Health Providers. She consults and lectures on ethical behaviors by psychotherapists. She frequently reviews and analyzes relationship issues and media portrayals of therapists for USA Today.

Dr. Shirley Glass--a media favorite for her relationship expertise, profound insights, and practical advice--is regularly cited in Newsweek, Redbook, Glamour, USA Today, Reader's Digest, LA Times, Psychology Today, and Men's Health. She has appeared on national TV programs including A & E Love Chronicles, Good Morning America, The Today Show, and Oprah. She has also been heard on Public Radio's Fresh Air, Morning Edition, The Diane Rehm Show and has been featured as a guest and "sexpert" on This American Life (hosted by her son, Ira).

She was a relationship columnist for Electra/Oxygen where she answered e-mail letters for an advice column, wrote editorial articles ("Reflections by Glass"), and hosted a chat room on relationship issues. She was a contributing author for Realage.com and is cited on websites such as Third Age, Salon, and ABCNews.

Both Dr. Glass and her husband, Barry, are survivors of breast cancer. She has presented workshops on coping with breast cancer at professional conferences and at community seminars for survivors and their loved ones. She is in private practice in the Baltimore area where she does individual and couples therapy. Her areas of specialization are sexual and relationship problems, anxiety and phobias, and trauma recovery.