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It's realistic to expect your partner to commit to you entirely when it comes to sex, if he or she has undertaken to do so. It's not a question of whether it's 'realistic', but whether one should do it. I do think the view of sex and marriage that the western world has inherited has been largely affected by christian beliefs, which are about as sex-negative as it's possible for a set of beliefs to be. Just as the christian view of the origin of the world, and the motion of the planets, and the origin of species, have, in my opinion, been shown by developments of science to be wrong, so their view of human sexuality is also wrong, for the same reasons. Christian thought holds that exclusive monogamous heterosexual marriage is the divinely ordained order of things sexual, and other sexuality is a distortion of human sexuality. In fact however, if we look at reality, those who marry as virgins, and live and die faithful to each other are in a small minority. It is the christian model that is a distortion of human sexuality. By far the most common pattern, world-wide, in all different cultures and ages, is for long-term one-on-one marriages or pair bonds with a bit on the side occasionally. When men sometimes complain that their wives don't want sex I have numerous times heard the retort "She wants sex. It's just that she doesn't want it *with her husband*."
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