Esther Perel State Of Affairs Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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!”).

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.

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.

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.

The permanence and stability that we seek in our intimate connections can stifle their sexual spark, leading to what Mitchell calls “expressions of exuberant defiance,”3 otherwise known as affairs. Adulterers

pain gathering up its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night,” to borrow the words of Khaled Hosseini.3

To quote Rachel Botsman, “Trust is a confident relationship to the unknown.

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—all these are natural ingredients found in the adulterous plot.

Falling in love, as Francesco Alberoni writes, “rearranges all our priorities, throws the superfluous overboard, projects a glaring light onto what is superficial and instantly discards it.

At its best monogamy may be the wish to find someone to die with; at its worst it is a cure for the terrors of aliveness. They are easily confused. —Adam Phillips, Monogamy

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”9

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.

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.

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

When we channel all our intimate needs into one person, we actually stand to make the relationship more vulnerable.

they

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?

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.

marks on his firstborn son. More often than not, Garth chose to take the blows to protect his helpless mother and his younger brother. 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.

Varrónő lányaként nőttem fel, és gyakran érzem úgy, hogy a munkám egy ruhapróbához hasonlít. Nem kísérletezem azzal, hogy mindenkire ugyanazt a ruhát adjam.

Affairs are an act of betrayal and they are also an expression of longing and loss.

A Window into the Human Heart Affairs have a lot to teach us about relationships. They open the door to a deeper examination of values, human nature, and the power of eros.

All these discussions inevitably raise the thorny question of the nature of our erotic freedom. Do we expect our partners’ erotic selves to belong entirely to us? I’m talking about thoughts, fantasies, dreams, and memories, and also turn-ons, attractions, and self-pleasure. These aspects of sexuality can be personal, and part of our sovereign selfhood—existing in our own secret garden.

The revelation of an affair is eviscerating. If you really want to gut a relationship, to tear out the very heart of it, infidelity is a sure bet. It is betrayal on so many levels: deceit, abandonment, rejection, humiliation—all the things love promised to protect us from.

Adultery has always hurt. But for modern love’s acolytes, it seems to hurt more than ever. In fact, the maelstrom of emotions that are unleashed in the wake of an affair is so overwhelming that many contemporary psychologists borrow from the field of trauma to explain the symptoms: obsessive rumination, hypervigilance, numbness and dissociation, inexplicable rages and uncontrollable panic.

Couples therapist Michele Scheinkman emphasizes how important it is to hold a dual perspective that encompasses the differentiated experiences of the couple, something they are unable to do for themselves at this time.

Craig loved being loved by me more than he loved me.

Marriage has become a mythical castle, designed to be everything we could want. Affairs bring it tumbling down, leaving us feeling like there is nothing to hold on to. Perhaps this goes some way toward explaining why modern infidelity is more than painful. It is traumatic.

Monogamy is the sacred cow of the romantic ideal, for it confirms our specialness. Infidelity says, You’re not so special after all. It shatters the grand ambition of love.

Our individualistic society produces an uncanny paradox: As the need for faithfulness intensifies, so too does the pull toward unfaithfulness.

But in a culture that mandates individual fulfillment and lures us with the promise of being happier, never have we been more tempted to stray. Perhaps this is why we condemn infidelity more than ever even as we practice it more than ever.

I used to think I knew who I was, who he was, and suddenly I don’t recognize us, neither him nor me . . . My entire life, as I’ve led it up to this moment, has crumbled, like in those earthquakes where the very ground devours itself and vanishes beneath your feet while you’re making your escape. There is no turning back. —Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed

Instead, many of my patients describe swinging back and forth in a rapid succession of contradictory emotions. “I love you! I hate you! Hold me! Don’t touch me! Take your shit and get out! Don’t leave me! You scumbag! Do you still love me? Fuck you! Fuck me!” Such a blitz of reactions is to be expected and is likely to go on for some time.

It’s not our desires that are different today, but the fact that we feel we deserve—indeed, we are obligated—to pursue them. Our primary duty is now to ourselves—even if it comes at the expense of those we love. As Pamela Druckerman points out, “Our high expectations for personal happiness might even make us more likely to cheat. After all, aren’t we entitled to an affair, if that’s what it takes to be fulfilled?

Affairs have a lot to teach us about relationships—what we expect, what we think we want, and what we feel entitled to.

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.

Understanding infidelity does not mean justifying it.

Infidelity happens in good marriages, in bad marriages, and even when adultery is punishable by death. It happens in open relationships where extramarital sex is carefully negotiated beforehand. And the freedom to leave or divorce has not made cheating obsolete.

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

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.

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.

The quality of the relationship is now synonymous with the quality of the experience. What good is a stable household, a good income, and well-behaved children if we are bored? We want our relationships to inspire us, to transform us. Their value, and therefore their longevity, is commensurate with how well they continue to satisfy our experiential thirst.

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.

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.

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.

Defining adultery is at once quite simple and quite complicated. Today, in the West, relationship ethics are no longer dictated by religious authority. The definition of infidelity no longer resides with the Pope, but with the people. This means more freedom, as well as more uncertainty. Couples must draw up their own terms.

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.

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

By talking about sexual alchemy, I want to clarify that affairs sometimes involve sex and sometimes not, but they are always erotic.

As Marcel Proust understood, it’s our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.

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.

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?

Today in the West most of us are going to have two or three significant long-term relationships or marriages. And some of us are going to do it with the same person. When a couple comes to me in the aftermath of an affair, I often tell them this: Your first marriage is over. Would you like to create a second one together?

Did we really have to go through an affair just to be able to be truly honest with each other?” I hear this often and share their regret. But here’s one of the unspoken truths about relationships: for many couples, nothing less extreme is powerful enough to get the partners’ attention and to shake up a stale system.

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.

Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl distills a profound truth: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”9

Looking back, he asks himself, “How could I not see?” But it is human nature to cling to our sense of reality, to resist its possible shattering even in the face of irrefutable evidence. I assure him that his “cluelessness” is not something to be ashamed of. This kind of avoidance is not an act of idiocy but an act of self-preservation.

It is actually a sophisticated self-protective mechanism known as trauma denial—a type of self-delusion that we employ when too much is at stake and we have too much to lose. The mind needs coherence, so it disposes of inconsistencies that threaten the structure of our lives.

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. In the aftermath of betrayal, authentic guilt, leading to remorse, is an essential repair tool. A sincere apology signals a care for and commitment to the relationship, a sharing of the burden of suffering,

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. In the aftermath of betrayal, authentic guilt, leading to remorse, is an essential repair tool. A sincere apology signals a care for and commitment to the relationship, a sharing of the burden of suffering, and a restoration of the balance of power.5

As Maria Popova writes, “The dance of anger and forgiveness, performed to the uncontrollable rhythm of trust, is perhaps the most difficult in human life, as well as one of the oldest.

Only when the betrayed partner feels emotionally met will he or she be able to listen to explanations without hearing them as justifications.

The shift from shame to guilt is crucial. Shame is a state of self-absorption, while guilt is an empathic, relational response, inspired by the hurt you have caused another. We know from trauma that healing begins when perpetrators acknowledge their wrongdoing.

For me, infidelity includes one or more of these three constitutive elements: secrecy, sexual alchemy, and emotional involvement.

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

I thought I knew what love was, but I have never felt like this before” is a common refrain. People in this state talk to me about love, transcendence, awakening, destiny, divine intervention—something so pure that they could not pass it by, because “to deny those feelings would have been an act of self-betrayal.

So many “emotional affairs” are pulsing with sexual tension, regardless of whether genitals have made contact, and giving them a new label seems to me to promote erotic reductionism. Clearly, affairs can be sexual without involving a penis entering a vagina, and in such cases, it is more helpful to call a spade a spade.

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.

Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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.

in the absence of the old institutions, we are now each in charge of the making and maintaining of our own identity, and the burdens of selfhood have never been heavier. Hence, we are constantly negotiating our sense of self-worth. Sociologist Eva Illouz astutely points out that “the only place where you hope to stop that evaluation is in love. In love you become the winner of the contest, the first and only.”4 No wonder infidelity throws us into a pit of self-doubt and existential confusion.

The crisis of identity is not only reserved for the partner who was betrayed. When the veil on a secret is lifted, the shock is not only for the one who discovers the affair but also for the one who was engaged in it. Looking at his or her behavior through the newly opened eyes of the aggrieved, the protagonist of the affair confronts a self-image that is barely recognizable.

From his perspective, things are clear. “I want to rebuild with you, not rehash the same things over and over.” I have explained to him that repetition helps restore coherence and is intrinsic to healing;

infidelity is not just a loss of love; it is a loss of self.

Betrayed by our beloved, we suffer the loss of a coherent narrative—the “internal structure that helps us predict and regulate future actions and feelings [creating] a stable sense of self,” as psychiatrist Anna Fels defines it.

Betrayal in the digital age is death by a thousand cuts.

We are willing to concede that the future is unpredictable, but we expect the past to be dependable. Betrayed by our beloved, we suffer the loss of a coherent narrative—the “internal structure that helps us predict and regulate future actions and feelings [creating] a stable sense of self,” as psychiatrist Anna Fels defines it.

Consequently, what Proust called “the demon that cannot be exorcised” has simply gone in search of a socially acceptable vocabulary.9 “Trauma,” “intrusive thoughts,” “flashbacks,” “obsessiveness,” “vigilance,” and “attachment injury” are the modern vocabulary for betrayed love.

A definition I have found helpful is that envy relates to something you want but do not have, whereas jealousy relates to something you have but are afraid of losing. Therefore, envy is a tango between two people, yet the dance of jealousy requires three. Envy and jealousy are close cousins and often become intertwined.

My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart, concealing it, will break. —Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew

With the revelation of an affair, suddenly the scoreboard of a marriage is lit up: the giving and the taking, the concessions and the demands, the allocation of money, sex, time, in-laws, children, chores. All the things we never really wanted to do but did in the name of love are now stripped of the context that gave them meaning.

Hence, popular theory holds that women’s jealousy is primarily emotional, whereas men’s is sexual. Interestingly, the research shows the reverse among homosexuals: lesbian women tend to express more sexual jealousy than gay men, and gay men cop to more emotional jealousy than lesbians. Arguably, this reversal highlights that we feel most threatened where we feel least secure.

Revenge may not always be sweet, but occasionally it hits a sweet spot that empowers the hurt party and allows a couple to put the past behind them. We all have a need for justice. However, it is important to distinguish between retributive justice and restorative justice. The former seeks only punishment; the latter engages in repair.

I’ve observed an interesting connection between my patients’ responses to betrayal and the type of justice they are likely to seek. Some mourn the loss of the connection. “I’m hurt because I lost you.” Others mourn the loss of face. “I can’t believe you made such an idiot of me.” One is a relational injury; the second, a narcissistic one. Wounded hearts; wounded pride.

A Truth that’s told with bad intent Beats all the Lies you can invent. —William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence

Secrets and lies are at the heart of every affair, and they heighten both the excitement of the lovers and the pain of the betrayed.

No woman should ever give one man all the power to shatter her romantic ideals. There is a big difference between saying, “That one person let me down and I’m hurt,” and saying, “I’ll never love again.” But these two women are not ready to make that distinction. They see the world as offering two options—hurt or be hurt. As Lailani puts it, “I should’ve stayed the bitch. Nobody hurts the bitch.

Revenge often looks petty, but I have come to respect the depth of hurt it conceals.

Intimate betrayal feels intensely personal—a direct attack in the most vulnerable place. However, looking through the lens of the damage it caused the aggrieved partner, we see only one side of the story. Cheating is what they did to their partner, but what were they doing for themselves? And why?

People stray for a multitude of reasons, and every time I think I have heard them all, a new variation emerges. 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.

Imagination—that’s the key word here. With your affairs, the arousal starts on your flight over there. You don’t need the blue pill because what turns you on is the plot, the planning, the carefully chosen clothes. All the anticipation is what fuels the desire. When you come home and the first thing you do is take off your nice clothes and put on old sweatpants, nobody’s going to get turned

Imagination—that’s the key word here. With your affairs, the arousal starts on your flight over there. You don’t need the blue pill because what turns you on is the plot, the planning, the carefully chosen clothes. All the anticipation is what fuels the desire. When you come home and the first thing you do is take off your nice clothes and put on old sweatpants, nobody’s going to get turned on.

To doggedly look for marital causes in cases like these is an example of what’s known as the “streetlight effect,” where the drunken man is searching for his missing keys not where he dropped them but where the light is. Human beings 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.

forbidden love stories are utopian by nature, especially in contrast with the mundane constraints of marriage and family.2 A prime characteristic of this liminal universe—and the key to its irresistible power—is that it is unattainable.

What for Partner A may have been agonizing betrayal was transformative for Partner B. Understanding why the infidelity happened and what it signified is critical, both for couples who choose to end their relationship and for those who want to stay together, rebuild, and revitalize theirs.

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.1 So often, the most intoxicating other that people discover in the affair is not a new partner; it’s a new self.

Investigative questions recognize that the truth often lies beyond the facts. They include: Help me understand what the affair has meant for you. Were you looking for it, or did it just happen? Why now? What was it like when you would come home? What did you experience there that you don’t have with me? Did you feel entitled to your affair? Did you want me to find out? Would you have ended it if I hadn’t found out? Are you relieved it’s all in the open, or would you have preferred if it stayed hush-hush? Were you trying to leave me? Do you think that you should be forgiven? Would you respect me less if I were to forgive you? Did you hope I would leave so you wouldn’t have to feel responsible for breaking up the family? The investigative approach asks more enlightening questions that probe the meaning of the affair, and focuses on analysis rather than facts.

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.

Depression robs us of hope and joy. Dangerous circumstances like wars or disaster zones incite us to take unusual emotional risks. In the face of the helplessness and vulnerability we feel at such moments, infidelity can be an act of defiance. Freud described eros as the life instinct, doing battle with thanatos, the death instinct.

First, the institutionalization of relationships—a passage from freedom and independence to commitment and responsibility. Second, the overfamiliarity that develops when intimacy and closeness replace individuality and mystery. And lastly, the desexualizing nature of certain roles—mother, wife, and house manager all promote the de-eroticization of the self.

Do you love the blouseman more than all of us?” “No,” her mother replies. “But sometimes it’s easier to be different with a different person.

Love and desire do not have to be mutually exclusive. Many couples find a way to integrate their contradictions without resorting to compartmentalization. But it starts with the understanding that we can never eliminate the dilemma. Reconciling the erotic and the domestic is not a problem to solve; it is a paradox to manage.

Women cheat for love, the common assumption goes, but men? They cheat for sex. And this assumption is all the more strongly reinforced when the sex in question is anonymous, transactional, or commercial.

Home, marriage, and motherhood have forever been the pursuit of many women, but also the place where women cease to feel like women.

We interpret the lack of sexual interest as proof that women’s sexual drive is inherently less strong. Perhaps it would be more accurate to think that it is a drive that needs to be stoked more intensely and more imaginatively—and first and foremost by her, not only by her partner.

I explain to Garth that desire needs a certain degree of aggression—not violence, but an assertive, striving energy. It’s what allows you to pursue, to want, to take, and even to sexualize your partner.

The emotional resonance between his relationship with his parents and his relationship with his wife is so strong that it leads to an unfortunate cross-wiring. Hence, the feeling that sex is “wrong,” almost incestuous. When a partner starts to feel too familial, sex will inevitably be the casualty. Ironic as it may seem, at that moment the taboo of infidelity feels less transgressive than sex at home.

In fact, I can imagine that the level of dissociation that they bring to their sexual fixes is a direct response to all these uncomfortable emotional pulls. I would suggest that precisely because male sexuality is so relational, many guys seek sexual spaces that are the exact opposite, where they don’t have to confront the litany of fears, anxieties, and insecurities that would render the biggest stallion limp.

You reconnected with an energy, a youthfulness. I know that it feels as if in leaving him, you are severing a lifeline to all of that, but I want you to know that over time you will find that some of this also lives inside of you.

The quest for the unexplored self is a powerful theme of the adulterous narrative.

As children we have the opportunity to play at other roles; as adults we often find ourselves confined by the ones we’ve been assigned or the ones we have chosen. 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 peek at the stranger within. Adultery is often the revenge of the deserted possibilities.

Transgression is at the heart of human nature. Moreover, as many of us remember from our childhood, there is a thrill in hiding, sneaking, being bad, being afraid of being discovered, and getting away with it. As adults, we can find this a powerful aphrodisiac.

the moment the affair is revealed, the narrative will irrevocably switch. It will no longer be a story of self-discovery, but one of betrayal. I am not sure what they have to gain from that.

The one theme that I hear above all else from those who have bitten into the forbidden apple is this: It makes them feel alive.

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.

When you ask people if they are monogamous, I suggest you ask them first what their definition of monogamy is.

When do you feel most drawn to your partner?” One of the most common answers I hear is “When others are attracted to him or to her.” The triangular gaze is highly erotic, which is why stories like Kyle and Lucy’s are much less unusual than you may expect.

monogamy should be an “opt-in.” If people were given more opportunity to choose, he offers, maybe some of them wouldn’t have opted in and then they wouldn’t be in trouble for adultery. Rather than penalize those who fail monogamy’s standardized test, we should recognize that the test is disproportionately difficult.

While emotional transparency is touted everywhere as the crux of modern intimacy, I am amazed at the paucity of real sexual communication between partners. Part of my work in post-infidelity involves direct coaching as to how, why, where, and when to talk about sex.

Sexual honesty isn’t just about divulging the details of your infidelities. It’s about communicating with your partner in an open and mature way—revealing core aspects of yourself through your sexuality.

It’s not “just sex” that they share with many partners—it’s also love, not to mention domestic life. Polyamorists tend to characterize their lifestyle as a serious endeavor, involving mindfulness, maturity, and a lot of talking—hence the common joke in poly circles, “Swingers have sex. Polys have conversations.

A term used by Terry Real is quite apt for such affairs: stable ambiguity. These are relationships of undefined status but well-established patterns, hard to break out of but just as hard to depend on. By remaining in a diffuse state, people avoid both loneliness and commitment. This strange mix of comforting consistency and uncertainty is increasingly common to relationships in the age of Tinder, but it’s long been characteristic of extramarital liaisons.

If the painful disclosure of a parallel love is to lead to a more honest future—for either one of the relationships involved—the other woman needs to be treated as a human being. She needs a voice and a place to dignify her experience. 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.

We explore their erotic templates, how their emotional history expresses itself in the physicality of sex. “Tell me how you were loved and I will know a lot about how you make love” is one of my guiding questions. Unearthing these issues helps to release the sexual blocks.

She is his selection, part time. You know the story too! Look, When it is over he places her, Like a phone, back on the hook. —Anne Sexton, “You All Know the Story of the Other Woman

Clearly Andrea prefers to be the adored other woman than the avoided wife. Yes, there are trade-offs, but there are also benefits.

Being a mistress suited Rose—in the words of novelist Susan Cheever, “I had my freedom and I was someone else’s fantasy.

I have met plenty of men who were the lovers of married women (or married men, for that matter). But I have yet to meet a man who was single and gave his love to another man’s wife for thirty years, hoping that she would leave and come and make a family with him.

These are not simply naive, lonely, desperate women who’ll take love in whatever form they can get it. In fact, they are pragmatic about their reasons for choosing to not only live with a secret but be a secret.

As for the general public, we tend to judge the “other woman” far more harshly than the cheating husband.

And when we haven’t been touched in years, we are more vulnerable to the kindness of strangers.

Before, I trusted too much and was naive. Now I realize that even the best people can’t always get it right and end up acting out. We are all human and anyone is capable of doing what Anais did, even me.

forgiving doesn’t mean giving the other a free pass. It’s a gift one gives oneself.

For those affairs that do stay alive past the altar, there is the pressure to “make it seem worth the cost,

To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.