Esther Perel Infidelity Quotes

We expect one person to give us what once an entire village used to provide, and we live twice as long.

The shift from shame to guilt is crucial. Shame is a state of of self-absorption, while guilt is an emphatic, relational response, inspired by the hurt you have caused another.

Monogamy used to mean one person for life. Now monogamy means one person at a time.

Sometimes, when we seek the gaze of another, it isn’t our partner we are turning away from, but the person we have become. We are not looking for another lover so much as another version of ourselves.

But when we reduce the conversation to simply passing judgment, we are left with no conversation at all.

Humans have a tendency to look for things in the places where it is easiest to search for them rather than in the places where the truth is more likely to be found.

Our partners do not belong to us; they are only on loan, with an option to renew—or not. Knowing that we can lose them does not have to undermine commitment; rather, it mandates an active engagement that long-term couples often lose. The realization that our loved ones are forever elusive should jolt us out of complacency, in the most positive sense.

The “symptom” theory goes as follows: An affair simply alerts us to a preexisting condition, either a troubled relationship or a troubled person.

The best ideas rarely arise in one isolated mind, but rather develop in networks of curious and creative thinkers.

Once we strayed because marriage was not supposed to deliver love and passion. Today we stray because marriage fails to deliver the love, passion, and undivided attention it promised.

Until now monogamy has been the default setting, and it sits on the premise (however unrealistic) that if you truly love, you should no longer be attracted to others.

When marriage was an economic arrangement, infidelity threatened our economic security; today marriage is a romantic arrangement and infidelity threatens our emotional security.

[I]nfidelity has a tenacity that marriage can only envy.

We seek connection, predictability, and dependability to root us firmly in place. But we also have a need for change, for the unexpected, for transcendence. The Greeks understood this, which is why they worshiped both Apollo (representative of the rational and self-disciplined) and Dionysus (representative of the spontaneous, sensuous, and emotional).

No woman should give any man the power to shatter her romantic ideals.

But one theme comes up repeatedly: affairs as a form of self-discovery, a quest for a new (or a lost) identity. For these seekers, infidelity is less likely to be a symptom of a problem, and is more often described as an expansive experience that involves growth, exploration, and transformation.

Today I am a woman torn between the terror that everything might change and the equal terror that everything might carry on exactly the same for the rest of my days. —Paulo Coelho, Adultery

Everyday in my office I meet consumers of the modern ideology of marriage. They bought the product, got it home, and found that it was missing a few pieces. So they come to the repair shop to fix it so it looks like what's on the box. They take their relational aspirations as a given－both what they want and what they deserve to have－and are upset when the romantic ideal doesn't jibe with the unromantic reality. It's no surprise that this utopian vision is gathering a growing army of the disenchanted in its wake.

When we select a partner, we commit to a story, yet we remain forever curious. What other stories could we have been part of? Affairs offer us a window into those other lives, a peak at the stranger within. Adultery is often the revenge of the deserted possibilities.

Affairs are always harmful and can never help a marriage or be accommodated. The only way to restore trust and intimacy is through truth-telling, repentance, and absolution. Last but not least, divorce affords more self-respect than forgiveness.

Once divorce carried all the stigma. Now, choosing to stay when you can leave is the new shame.

Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living. —Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

The person I once was, but lost, is the person you once knew.

What I can see, and she has not yet grasped, is that the thing she's really afraid to lose is not him -it's the part of herself he's awakened. You think you had a relationship with truck man, I tell her. Actually, you had an intimate encounter with yourself mediated by him.

The swiping culture lures us with infinite possibilities, but it also exerts a subtle tyranny. The constant awareness of ready alternatives invites unfavorable comparisons, weakens commitment, and prevents us from enjoying the present moment.

The honeymoon phase is special in that it brings together the relief of reciprocated love with the excitement of a future still to be created. What we often don't realize is that the exuberance of the beginning is fueled by its undercurrent of uncertainty. We set out to make love more secure and dependable, but in the process, inevitably we dial down its intensity. On the path of commitment, we happily trade a little passion for a bit more certainty, some excitement for some stability.

A woman’s sexuality depends on her authenticity and self-nurturance,” she writes. Yet marriage and motherhood demand a level of selflessness that is at odds with the inherent selfishness of desire.

Morin’s now-famous “erotic equation” states that “attraction plus obstacles equal excitement.”6 High states of arousal, he explains, flow from the tension between persistent problems and triumphant solutions.

At their peak, affairs rarely lack imagination. Nor do they lack desire, abundance of attention, romance, and playfulness. Shared dreams, affection, passion and endless curiosityーall these are natural ingredients found in the adulterous plot. They are also ingredients of thriving relationships. It is no accident that many of the most erotic couples lift their marital strategies directly from the infidelity playbook.

It is always astonishing how love can strike. No context is love-proof, no convention or commitment impervious. Even a lifestyle which is perfectly insulated, where the personality is controlled, all the days ordered and all actions in sequence, can to its own dismay find that an unexpected spark has landed; it begins to smolder until it is finally unquenchable. The force of Eros always brings disturbance; in the concealed terrain of the human heart Eros remains a light sleeper.

However authentic the feelings of love, the dalliance was only ever meant to be a beautiful fiction.

We are most intensely excited when we are a little off-balance, uncertain, “poised on the perilous edge between ecstasy and disaster.”7

Adultery is often the revenge of the deserted possibilities.

The historian and essayist Pamela Haag has written a whole book about marriages like Danica and Stefan’s, which she calls “melancholy marriages.” Analyzing the plight of these “semi-happy couples,” she explains: A marriage adds things to your life, and it also takes things away. Constancy kills joy; joy kills security; security kills desire; desire kills stability; stability kills lust. Something gives; some part of you recedes. It’s something you can live without, or it’s not. And maybe it’s hard to know before the marriage which part of the self is expendable . . . and which is part of your spirit.

By turning our backs on other loves, we confirm the uniqueness of our “significant other.” “I have found The One. I can stop looking.” Miraculously, our desire for others is supposed to evaporate, vanquished by the power of this singular attraction.

Almost everywhere people marry, monogamy is the official norm and infidelity the clandestine one.

affairs are less about sex than about desire: the desire to feel desired, to feel special, to be seen and connected, to compel attention. All these carry an erotic frisson that makes us feel alive, renewed, recharged. It is more energy than act, more enchantment than intercourse.

In our efforts to protect ourselves from intimate betrayal, we demand access, control, transparency. And we run the risk of unknowingly eradicating the very space between us that keeps desire alive. Fire needs air.

Often, when one partner insists that they don’t yet feel acknowledged, even as the one who hurt them insists they feel terrible, it is because the response is still more shame than guilt, and therefore self-focused.

sociologist Zygmunt Bauman writes, in modern life, “there is always a suspicion . . . that one is living a lie or a mistake; that something crucially important has been overlooked, missed, neglected, left untried, and unexplored; that a vital obligation to one’s own authentic self has not been met or that some chances of unknown happiness completely different from any happiness experienced before have not been taken up in time and are bound to be lost forever if they continue to be neglected.”8 He speaks directly to our nostalgia for unlived lives, unexplored identities, and roads not taken.

Terry Real, who has written extensively about men in relationships, describes a particular “unholy triangle” between “the powerful, irresponsible, and/or abusive father, the codependent, downtrodden wife, and the sweet son caught in the middle.” These sons, he expands, become unhealthily enmeshed with their mothers, and as adults, they “become afraid of their own range of emotions.”2 They are kind souls who feel they must curtail their own feelings and take responsibility for the happiness of Mom and the women who follow. Real calls this “intrusion trauma,” which lives not just in the psyche but in the body—hence its power to inhibit physical intimacy. Garth fits this pattern well, and it goes some way toward explaining why he feels so beholden to the women he loves, yet is unable to be aroused by them.

Because I believe that some good can come out of the crisis of infidelity, I have often been asked, "So, would you recommend an affair to a struggling couple?" My response? A lot of people have positive, life-changing experiences that come along with terminal illness. But I would not recommend having an affair than I would recommend getting cancer.

Big data analyst Seth Stephens-Davidowitz reports in the New York Times that Google searches for “sexless marriage” outnumber searches related to any other marital issue.3

despite its widespread denunciation, infidelity has a tenacity that marriage can only envy.

It is a radiant parenthesis, a poetic interlude in the prose of life.

if sex is something that you share with others, what is exceptional to the two of you

Поэтому теперь мы разводимся не потому, что чувствуем себя несчастными, а потому, что можем быть счастливее.

trust is also a leap of faith—“a risk masquerading as a promise,”7 as Adam Phillips writes.

Freud described eros as the life instinct, doing battle with thanatos, the death instinct.

In London alone, there are 80,000 prostitutes. What are they but . . . human sacrifices offered up on the altar of monogamy? —Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism

We have hundreds of virtual “friends” but no one we can ask to feed the cat. We are a lot more free than our grandparents were, but also more disconnected.

Q: Are there any secrets to long-lasting relationships?     A: Infidelity. Not the act itself, but the threat of it. For Proust, an injection of jealousy is the only thing capable of rescuing a relationship ruined by habit. —Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life The bonds of wedlock are so heavy that it takes two to carry them, sometimes three. —Alexandre Dumas

Infidelity promises “lives that could never be mine,” as journalist Anna Pulley writes in a beautiful essay about her affair with a married woman. “I was,” she writes, “a road she would never take. . . . Ours was a love that hinged on possibility—what we could offer each other was infinite potential. Reality never stood a chance against that kind of promise. . . . She represented a singular perfection, she had to because she contained none of the trappings of a real relationship. . . . She was perfect in part because she was an escape, she seemed always to offer more.”3

Infidelity hurts. But when we grant it a special status in the hierarchy of marital misdemeanors, we risk allowing it to overshadow the egregious behaviors that may have preceded it or even led to it.

He invites us to recognize that our values evolve as we mature and “move from an understanding of ethical and moral issues in black and white absolutist terms to comprehending the gray ambiguity of most matters.”6

fidelity and loyalty, desire and longing, jealousy and possessiveness, truth-telling and forgiveness. I encourage you to question yourself, to speak the unspoken, and to be unafraid to challenge sexual and emotional correctness.

It is ironic that some people, like Guy, will minimize the emotional involvement to lessen the offense (“It meant nothing!”), while others, like Charmaine, will highlight the emotional nature of the bond for exactly the same purpose (“Nothing happened!”).

Ours is a culture that reveres the ethos of absolute frankness and elevates truth-telling to moral perfection. Other cultures believe that when everything is out in the open and ambiguity is done away with, it may not increase intimacy, but compromise it.

Trust and truth are intimate companions, but we must also acknowledge that there are many kinds of truth. What are the useful truths, for us as individuals and as couples, in light of the choices we are likely to make? Some kinds of knowledge bring clarity; others just give us visions to torture ourselves with.

Revenge often looks petty, but I have come to respect the depth of hurt it conceals. Unable to reclaim the feelings we’ve lavished, we grab the engagement ring instead. And if that’s not enough, we can always change the wills. All are desperate attempts to repossess power, to exact compensation, to destroy the one who destroyed us as a means of self-preservation. Each dollar, each gift, each treasured book we extract from the rubble is meant to match a broken piece inside. But in the end, it’s a zero-sum game. The urge to settle the score corresponds to the intensity of the shame that eats us up. And the deepest shame is that we were stupid enough to trust all along.

infidelity is a direct attack on one of our most important psychic structures, our memory of the past. it not only hijacks a couple’s hopes and plans, but also draws a question mark over their history. if we can’t look back with any certainty and we can’t know what will happen tomorrow, where does that leave us? (…) betrayed by our beloved, we suffer the loss of a coherent narrative

Sometimes, when we seek the gaze of another, it isn't our partner we are turning away from, but the person we have become. We are not looking for another lover so much as another version of ourselves. Mexican essayist Octavio Paz describes eroticism as a thirst for otherness. So often, the most intoxicating other that people discover in the affair is not a new partner; it's a new self.

People often ask, Why is infidelity such a big deal today? Why does it hurt so much? How has it become one of the leading causes of divorce? Only by taking a brief trip back in time to look at the changes of love, sex and marriage over the last few centuries can we have an informed conversation about modern infidelity. History and culture have always set the stage for our domestic dramas. In particular, the rise of individualism, the emergence of consumer culture, and the mandate for happiness have transformed matrimony and its adulterous shadow. Affairs are not what they used to be because marriage is not what it used to be.

Le spun adeseori pacienților mei că, dacă ar putea să aducă în relațiile lor conjugale măcar o zecime din îndrăzneala, zburdălnicia și verva pe care le aduc în relațiile lor extraconjugale, viața de acasă ar fi complet diferită. Imaginația noastră pare să fie mai bogată în relațiile adulterine decât în cele oficiale. ... Partenerii noștri nu ne aparțin; sunt doar împrumutați, cu opțiunea de a reînnoi contractul... sau nu. Faptul că îi putem pierde nu trebuie să ne diminueze angajamentul; mai degrabă ar trebui să presupună o implicare mai vie, pe care cuplurile cu vechime uneori o pierd. ... Lucrurile cărora trebuie să te opui sunt automulțumirea, curiozitatea tot mai vlăguită, angajamentele lipsite de entuziasm, resemnarea necruțătoare, obiceiurile pietrificate. Moartea conjugală este o criză a imaginației. Rareori, din relațiile extraconjugale lipsește imaginația.

Pentru că sunt de părere că o criză de infidelitate poate avea rezultate pozitive, am fost adeseori întrebată: "Deci, în cazul unui cuplu care are probleme, îi recomandați o relație extraconjugală?" Răspunsul meu? În cazul bolilor terminale, mulți oameni au experiențe pozitive, care le schimbă viața. Dar nu recomand o relație extraconjugală, tot așa cum nu "recomand" să ai cancer. ... Când un cuplu vine la mine după ce membrii săi s-au confruntat cu un adulter, le spun adeseori următorul lucru: "Prima voastră căsnicie s-a terminat. N-ați vrea să întemeiați o a doua împreună?

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Dress up, even if you don’t feel like it. Let your friends cook you a beautiful dinner. Take that painting class that you’ve been meaning to take for so long. Do things to take care of yourself, that make you feel good, to counter the humiliation and your urge to hide. Many people feel too much shame to do these things when they’ve been cast aside, but that’s exactly what I urge them to do.

Anger may make her feel more powerful, temporarily. However, psychologist Steven Stosny observes that “if loss of power was the problem in intimate betrayal, then anger would be the solution. But the great pain in intimate betrayal has little to do with loss of power. Perceived loss of value is what causes your pain—you feel less lovable.

phlegmatic

It’s not necessarily a particular sexual or emotional behavior that comprises the betrayal; rather, it is the fact that the behavior is not within the couple’s agreement. Sounds fair enough. But the problem is that for most of us, these agreements are not something we spend much time explicitly negotiating.

Gay couples are sometimes an exception to this rule. Having lived for so long outside the standard social norms and fought valiantly for sexual self-determination, they are highly aware of the price of sexual confinement and not so eager to shackle themselves. They are more likely to openly negotiate monogamy than tacitly assume it.

More often than not, the version that one person files away in the inner cabinet is different from that of his or her partner.

Once we have found “the one,” we believe there should be no need for, no desire for, and no attraction to any other.

When relationships become abusive, transgression can be a generative force. Straying can sound an alarm that signals an urgent need to pay attention, or it can be the death knell that follows a relationship’s last gasp. Affairs are an act of betrayal and they are also an expression of longing and loss.

her identity and self-worth have been mortgaged to romantic love. And when love calls in its debts, it can be a ruthless creditor.

That being said, this is not just a book about infidelity. Affairs have a lot to teach us about relationships—what we expect, what we think we want, and what we feel entitled to. They offer a unique window into our personal and cultural attitudes about love, lust, and commitment.

If the affair needs to be ended so the marriage can survive, it should be done with care and respect. If the lover needs to break it off to regain her own self-esteem and integrity, she needs support, not judgment. If the marriage is to end and the hidden love is to come out of the shadows, it will need help to go through the awkward transition to legitimacy. Without the perspective of the third, we can never have more than a partial understanding of the way that love carves its twisting course through the landscape of our lives.

The Brazilian family therapist Michele Scheinkman says, “American culture has great tolerance for divorce—where there is a total breakdown of the loyalty bond and painful effects for the whole family—but it is a culture with no tolerance for sexual infidelity.” We would rather kill a relationship than question its structure.

This is poignantly illustrated in Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut. Bill and Alice have just returned from a lavish black-tie Christmas party that has sparked a conversation about sex. Bill has always assumed that Alice, like him, is essentially incapable of infidelity. “You’re my wife and my child’s mother and I’m sure of you. You’d never be unfaithful. I’m sure of you.” Alice, outraged at his presumption and emboldened by a joint they have just smoked, decides to enlighten him. She describes in agonizing detail just how powerful the presence of the other can be, even when it is nothing more than a mirage. She tells him of her febrile fantasy about a naval officer she desired from a distance. They never met; nonetheless, his instant hold on her was so strong she would have given up everything if he’d only asked. She also says that this happened on a day when she and Bill had just made love, and Bill had never been dearer to her. Bill is devastated by his wife’s revelation, and he spends the rest of the film trying to avenge the betrayal and restore order to his broken world. What struck me is that, for Bill, a fantasy could generate the same sense of violation as an actual affair. Bill is like many of the partners I meet. His security rests not only on what Alice does but also on what she thinks. Her fantasies are proof of her freedom and separateness, and that scares him. The third points to other possibilities, choices we didn’t make, and in this way it’s bound up with our freedom. Laura Kipnis says, “What is more anxiogenic than a partner’s freedom, which might mean the freedom not to love you, or to stop loving you, or to love someone else, or to become a different person than the one who once pledged to love you always and now…perhaps doesn’t?” If she can think about others, she might love others, and that is intolerable.

Trong cuộc sống hiện đại, ta luôn hoài nghi rằng ta đang sống sai lầm và dối trá, rằng có một điều cực kỳ quan trọng nào đó ta đã đánh mất, đã bỏ lỡ, đã làm ngơ, đã không thử, đã chưa từng khám phá, rằng có một điều gì đó có ý nghĩa sống còn với cuộc đời ta nhưng ta vẫn chưa thực hiện và chắc chắn điều ấy sẽ mất đi mãi mãi nếu ta tiếp tục từ bỏ chúng

Affairs have a lot to teach us about relationships—what we expect, what we think we want, and what we feel entitled to. They offer a unique window into our personal and cultural attitudes about love, lust, and commitment.

My role as a therapist is to create a safe space where the diversity of experiences can be explored with compassion.

Pascal Bruckner writes, “Freedom does not release us from responsibilities but instead increases them. It does not lighten our burden but weighs us down further. It resolves problems less than it multiplies paradoxes. If this world sometimes seems brutal, that is because it is ‘emancipated’ and each individual’s autonomy collides with that of others and is injured by them: never have people had to bear on their shoulders so many constraints.

Adultery has existed since marriage was invented, and so too has the taboo against it. It has been legislated, debated, politicized, and demonized throughout history.

Yet despite its widespread denunciation, infidelity has a tenacity that marriage can only envy.

What draws people outside the lines they worked so hard to establish? Why does sexual betrayal hurt so much? Is an affair always selfish and weak, or can it in some cases be understandable, acceptable, even an act of boldness and courage?

It is no longer a sin against God, a breaking of a family alliance, a muddying of the bloodline, or a dispersion of resources and inheritances. At the core of betrayal today is a violation of trust: We expect our partner to act according to our shared set of assumptions, and we base our own behavior on that.

Secrecy is the number one organizing principle of an infidelity. An affair always lives in the shadow of the primary relationship, hoping never to be discovered. The secrecy is precisely what intensifies the erotic charge. “Sex and subterfuge make a delicious cocktail,”7 writes journalist Julia Keller.

One of the powerful attributes of secrecy is its function as a portal for autonomy and control.

Being wrapped in duplicities can be isolating, and with the accumulation of time, can lead to corrosive shame and self-loathing.

These stories make a critical point—many affairs are less about sex than about desire: the desire to feel desired, to feel special, to be seen and connected, to compel attention. All these carry an erotic frisson that makes us feel alive, renewed, recharged. It is more energy than act, more enchantment than intercourse.

Emotional involvement is the third element that may play a role in infidelity. Most affairs register an emotional component, to one degree or another.

In the move from the village to the city, we became more free but also more alone. Individualism began its remorseless conquest of Western civilization. Mate selection became infused with romantic aspirations meant to counter the increasing isolation of modern life.

Today we have sex because we’re in the mood, we feel like it—hopefully, with each other; preferably, at the same time; and ideally, with unflagging passion for decades on end.

Intimacy is “into-me-see.” I am going to talk to you, my beloved, and I am going to share with you my most prized possessions, which are no longer my dowry and the fruit of my womb but my hopes, my aspirations, my fears, my longings, my feelings—in other words, my inner life. And you, my beloved, will give me eye contact. No scrolling while I bare my soul. I need to feel your empathy and validation. My significance depends on it.

Contained within the small circle of the wedding band are vastly contradictory ideals. We want our chosen one to offer stability, safety, predictability, and dependability—all the anchoring experiences. And we want that very same person to supply awe, mystery, adventure, and risk. Give me comfort and give me edge. Give me familiarity and give me novelty. Give me continuity and give me surprise. Lovers today seek to bring under one roof desires that have forever had separate dwellings.

When we imbue our partner with godly attributes and we expect him or her to uplift us from the mundane to the sublime, we create, as Johnson puts it, an “unholy muddle of two holy loves”4 that cannot help but disappoint.

Not only do we have endless demands, but on top of it all we want to be happy. That was once reserved for the afterlife. We’ve brought heaven down to earth, within reach of all, and now happiness is no longer just a pursuit, but a mandate. We expect one person to give us what once an entire village used to provide, and we live twice as long. It’s a tall order for a party of two.

We live in a culture that continually lures us with the promise of something better, younger, perkier. Hence we no longer divorce because we’re unhappy; we divorce because we could be happier.

It would take too long to explain the intimate alliance of contradictions in human nature which makes love itself wear at times the desperate shape of betrayal. And perhaps there is no possible explanation. —Joseph Conrad, Some Reminiscences