Author: Esther Perel
ISBN: 978-1473673557
Self-explanatory title.
EXCERPTS
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.
Contemporary discourse about the topic can be summed up as follows: Infidelity must be a symptom of a relationship gone awry. If you have everything you need at home, there should be no reason to go elsewhere. Men cheat out of boredom and fear of intimacy; women cheat out of loneliness and hunger for intimacy. The faithful partner is the mature, committed, realistic one; the one who strays is selfish, immature, and lacks control. 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.
Infidelity includes one or more of these three constitutive elements: secrecy, sexual alchemy, and emotional involvement.
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.
But some people view everything sexual as a domain that must be shared. Discovering that their partner masturbates or still has feelings for an ex is tantamount to betrayal. In this view, any independent expression of sexuality—real or imagined—is a breach. From another perspective, however, making space for some degree of erotic individuality can convey a respect for privacy and autonomy, and is a token of intimacy. In my decades of working with couples, I’ve observed that those who are most successful in keeping the erotic spark alive are those who are comfortable with the mystery in their midst. Even if they are monogamous in their actions, they recognize that they do not own each other’s sexuality. It is precisely the elusiveness of the other that keeps them coming back to discover more. Every couple has to negotiate each other’s erotic independence as part of the larger conversation about our individuality and our connection. 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.
When it comes to infidelity, like most things in life, human beings commit what social psychologists call the actor-observer bias. If you cheat, it’s because you are a selfish, weak, untrustworthy person. But if I do it, it’s because of the situation I found myself in. For ourselves, we focus on the mitigating circumstances; for others, we blame character.
Never before have our expectations of marriage taken on such epic proportions. We still want everything the traditional family was meant to provide—security, children, property, and respectability—but now we also want our partner to love us, to desire us, to be interested in us. We should be best friends, trusted confidants, and passionate lovers to boot. The human imagination has conjured up a new Olympus: that love will remain unconditional, intimacy enthralling, and sex oh-so-exciting, for the long haul, with one person. And the long haul keeps getting longer.
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.
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.
As much as we hopeless romantics hate to admit it, marriages based on attraction and love are often more fragile than marriages based on material motives. (Although that’s not to say the old, steady marriages were happier.)
The men and women I work with invest more in love and happiness than ever before, but in a cruel twist of fate, the resulting sense of entitlement is precisely what’s behind today’s exponential rise of infidelity and divorce. 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.
In our consumer society, novelty is key. And the couple is indeed no exception to these trends. 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 minute we get what we want, our expectations and desires tend to rise, and we end up not feeling any happier. 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.
Culturally, young adults have increasingly come to see marriage as a ‘capstone’ rather than a ‘cornerstone, that is, something they do after they have all their other ducks in a row, rather than a foundation for launching into adulthood and parenthood. The evidence suggests, however, that the capstoners are more than a little naïve if they imagine that a rich set of premarital life experiences will serve as an inoculation against infidelity.
These days, most of us arrive at the altar after years of sexual nomadism. By the time we tie the knot, we’ve hooked up, dated, cohabited, and broken up. We used to get married and have sex for the first time. Now we get married and we stop having sex with others. The conscious choice we make to rein in our sexual freedom is a testament to the seriousness of our commitment.
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.
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.
The affair marks the passing of two innocent illusions—that your marriage is exceptional, and that you are unique or prized.
When marriage was an economic arrangement, infidelity threatened our economic security; today marriage is a romantic arrangement and infidelity threatens our emotional security.
It is uncanny how the fear of loss can rekindle desire.
Today, courtesy of technological memory, Gillian is more likely to burrow into the excruciating details of her husband’s duplicity. She can study her own humiliation, memorizing pages of painful electronic evidence. Betrayal in the digital age is death by a thousand cuts.
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?
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”.
We are meaning-making creatures and we rely on coherence.
We would love to think that pain is pain, democratic and universal. In fact, an entire cultural framework shapes the way we give meaning to our heartbreak. In my conversations with a group of Senegalese women, several of whom had been cheated on by their husbands, none talked about having lost their entire identity. They described sleepless nights, jealousy, endless crying, outbursts of anger. But in their view, husbands cheat because “that’s what men do,” not because their wives are mysteriously inadequate. Ironically, their belief about men underscores their ongoing oppression but protects their sense of identity.
If he brings it up on his own and invites conversation about it, then he communicates that he is not trying to hide or minimize it. If he volunteers information, he frees her from the constant rehashing.
Most of us today take for granted that we will not be the first lover of our chosen partner, but we hope to be the last. We can accept that our beloved has had other relationships, even other marriages, but we like to think of them as transient and past. They are over, for they were not the real thing. We know we have not been the only one, but we believe we are the one. Because of this, one twist in the infidelity narrative that is particularly painful is the relighting of an old flame.
Is jealousy hardwired, forged deep in the recesses of our evolutionary past? Or is it a learned response, a socialized construct born of outdated ideas about monogamy? Evolutionary psychologists recognize the universality of jealousy in all societies. They posit that it must be an innate feeling, genetically programmed.
In a world where so many long-term relationships suffer much more from monotony and habituation than from unsettling feelings like jealousy, this erotic wrath may serve a purpose, if we are willing to bear the attendant vulnerability.
Like many couples or groups that choose more open configurations, they do not subscribe to the evolutionary psychologists’ view of jealousy as innate and inevitable. They believe that it is a learned response that can be unlearned. But it is difficult to unlearn the jealous response, especially if you live in a society that encourages possessiveness and jealousy.
To get back at the other is not a way to get the other back.
Honesty requires careful calibration. Is there such a thing as too much? Is it ever better to keep the affair concealed? What about the old saying that what you don’t know can’t hurt you? For some, the answer is simple: Secrecy is lying, lying is wrong. The only acceptable course of action is confession, complete transparency, repentance, and punishment.
On more than one occasion, I’ve seen honesty do more harm than good, leaving me to ask, Can lying sometimes be protective? To many, this notion seems unfathomable. But then again, I’ve also heard informed spouses scream, “I wish you’d never told me!”
Sometimes silence is caring. Before you unload your guilt onto an unsuspecting partner, consider, whose well-being are you really thinking of? Is your soul-cleansing as selfless as it appears? And what is your partner supposed to do with this information?
Modern intimacy is bathed in self-disclosure, the trustful sharing of our most personal and private material—our feelings. From an early age, our best friend is the one to whom we tell our secrets. And since our partner today is assumed to be our best friend, we believe, “I should be able to tell you anything, and I have a right to immediate and constant access to your thoughts and feelings.” This entitlement to know, and the assumption that knowing equals closeness, is a feature of modern love.
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.
As we consider these contrasts, we also have to take into account the difference between privacy and secrecy. As psychiatrist Stephen Levine explains, privacy is a functional boundary that we agree on by social convention. There are matters that we know exist but choose not to discuss, like menstruation, masturbation, or fantasies. Secrets are matters we will deliberately mislead others about.
Hence, the refrain echoes from private bedrooms to public hearings: “It’s not that you cheated, it’s that you lied to me!” But would we really feel better if our partners gave us advance notice of their indiscretions?
Don’s surprise is giving way to relief. “I love my wife, but I also love other women. That’s who I’ve always been.
So often, in the wake of an infidelity, I hear repentant partners promise never to be attracted to another again. This simply engenders more fibs. It would be more realistic to say, “Yes, I may feel attractions, but because I love you and I respect you, and I don’t want to hurt you again, I will choose not to act on it.” That’s a more honest—and more trustworthy—statement.
Over the years I have come to find love letters a lot more conducive to healing than the more common therapeutic practice of having the unfaithful partner create an exhaustive inventory of offenses—hotels, dates, trips, gifts.
The idea that infidelity can happen in the absence of serious marital problems is hard to accept. Our culture does not believe in no-fault affairs. So when we can’t blame the relationship, we tend to blame the individual instead.
Why do happy people cheat?
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.
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.
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.
The fact that a couple has “issues” doesn’t mean that these issues led to the affair.
The indeterminacy, the uncertainty, the not knowing when I’ll see you again—feelings we would never tolerate in our primary relationship—become kindling for anticipation in a hidden romance. Because we cannot have the lover, it ensures that we keep wanting, for we always want that which we cannot have. It is this just-out-of-reach quality that lends affairs their erotic mystique and ensures that the flame of desire keeps burning. Reinforcing this segregation of the affair from reality is the fact that many choose lovers who either could not or would not become a life partner. By falling for someone from a very different class, culture, or generation, we play with possibilities that we would not entertain as actualities.
Infidelity promises “lives that could never be mine”.
In my experience, most affairs end, even if the marriage ends as well.
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 risk of being caught doing something naughty or dirty, the breaking of taboos, the pushing of boundaries—all of these are titillating experiences. As sexologist Jack Morin observes, most of us retain an urge from childhood to demonstrate our superiority over the rules. “Perhaps,” he suggests, “this is why encounters and fantasies with a flavor of violation so often leave the violators with a sense of self-validation or even pride.”
This insight into our human propensities helps to shed light on why people in happy, stable relationships are lured by the charge of transgression.
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.
What she is telling me, in effect, is: I need to end this, but I don’t want to. What I can see, and she has not yet grasped, is that the thing she is really afraid to lose is not him—it’s the part of herself that he awakened.
The quest for the unexplored self is a powerful theme of the adulterous narrative. Priya’s parallel universe transported her to the teenager she never was. Others find themselves drawn by the memory of the person they once were. And then there are those whose reveries take them back to the missed opportunities, the ones that got away, and the person they could have been.
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.
It is a given that many people go outside to find things they cannot find at home. But what about those who go looking elsewhere for things they don’t really want at home?
As Mitchell suggests, it is much more risky to unleash those forces with the person upon whom we depend for so much. In such cases, people’s extramarital adventures are not motivated by a disregard for what they have at home; quite the contrary, they value it so much that they don’t want to tamper with it. They are loath to disturb the stability of their domestic lives with the intemperate energy of eros. They may want to escape the cozy nest temporarily, but they sure don’t want to lose it. Infidelity beckons as a neatly segmented solution: the risk and the rush in the lover’s bower; the comfort and closeness in the marital abode.
She challenges the common assumption that women’s sexuality is primarily dependent on relational connectedness—love, commitment, and security. After all, if these assumptions were true, then sex should be thriving in marriages like Danica’s.
In fact, “women may be just as turned on as men by the novel, the illicit, the raw, the anonymous, but the arousal value of these may not be important enough to women to trade in things they value more (i.e., emotional connectedness).” As I have often said, our emotional needs and our erotic needs do not always neatly align. For some, the security they find in the relationship gives them the necessary trust to play, to take risks, and to safely lust. But for many others, the nesting qualities that nurture love are the same ones that slowly stifle desire. When forced to choose, what do women do? Meana posits that “women choose good relationships over sexual pleasure.”
In the transition to marriage, too many women experience their sexuality as shifting from desire to duty. When it becomes something she should do, it no longer is something she wants to do. By contrast, when a woman has an affair, she brings a self-determination to her pleasure. What is activated in the affair is her will—she pursues her own satisfaction.
Reconciling the erotic and the domestic is not a problem to solve; it is a paradox to manage.
In the past, going to a prostitute was often considered less egregious than cavorting with the neighbor’s wife. It hurt, but it didn’t endanger the marriage because he wasn’t going to leave his wife for her. In fact, many people didn’t even count sex workers as cheating, and some went so far as to declare that hookers exist so that men won’t stray. Today, however, many women view cheating with a prostitute as worse than a noncommercial affair. It immediately raises much broader and more distressing questions about the kind of men they are married to.
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.
Love always entails a feeling of responsibility and worry about the well-being of our beloved. But for some of us, these natural feelings can take on an extra weight, especially when a child has had to parent his parents. Finely attuned to the fragility and brittleness of the one he loves, he carries a sense of burden that impedes the letting go necessary for erotic intimacy and pleasure.
Many boys who were beaten by their fathers promise themselves they will never be like that and try very hard to repress any form of aggression. The problem is that in attempting to control this disavowed emotion, they end up stifling their ability to be sexual with the ones they love. 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 prominent sexuality researcher Robert Stoller describes this kind of objectification as an essential ingredient of sexuality—not treating the other as an object, but seeing the other as an independent sexual being. It creates the healthy distance that allows you to eroticize your partner, which is essential if you want to remain sexual with a person who becomes family. For men who are afraid of their own aggression and seek to segregate it, desire becomes alienated from love. For them, the greater the emotional intimacy, the greater the sexual reticence. Men with extreme versions of this split often end up affectionate but sexless with their partners, while avidly consuming hard-core porn or engaging in various forms of transactional sex. In these emotionless contexts, their desire can manifest freely without the fear of hurting a loved one.
Some may associate the love-lust split with Freud’s madonna-whore complex, and they are certainly related. However, the way I conceptualize the divide is not only about how the woman is perceived but also about a split in the man’s identity. The part that loves, that feels intensely attached and responsible, is the good boy. The part that lusts becomes the bad boy—ruthless, subversive, irresponsible. I could sum it up as follows: They can say “fuck me” sexually only when they have said “fuck you” emotionally. Callous as that may sound, every man who has lived with this relational framework recognizes it on the spot.
The obvious explanation is that he’s after her physical assets. But is this really the primary draw? What they highlight in our conversations is not her looks but her attitude. Her act presents a woman who is anything but fragile. She is sexually assertive, even demanding, and never reminds him of his victimized mother or his overwhelmed wife. Her confidence and availability are a turn-on that frees him from any caretaking responsibilities. As psychoanalyst Michael Bader has written, her lustfulness allays the fear that he’s imposing his primitive, even predatory, urges on her. Hence, his inner conflict around his own aggression is temporarily lifted. He can safely let go in ways that he is unable to do with the wife that he loves and respects.
However it occurs, the over-familialization of an intimate partner spells disaster for sex. The person becomes divested of his or her erotic identity. The relationship may be very loving, affectionate, and tender, but it is devoid of desire.
For Scott, masculinity is equated with sexual performance, and he carries a whole set of expectations about love, men, and women that are impossible for him to live up to. Meanwhile, his girlfriend has her own expectations: She wants him to be more tender, communicative, and open about his feelings. But he doesn’t want to be a puddle, either. This leaves him with a bunch of competing ideologies about what it means to be a man.
Men are finding it ever more difficult to squeeze themselves and their erections into the shrinking maneuvering space between being a wimp or being a rapist.
When I hear the pressure Scott puts on himself to please his girlfriend, the way he grades himself by the number of her orgasms, and his fear that she liked it better with previous boyfriends, I hear shame, performance anxiety, and fear of rejection.
Men’s sexuality is dependent on their inner life. It’s more than just a biological urge. Sex, gender, and identity are deeply interrelated for men. If a man has low self-esteem or feels depressed, anxious, insecure, ashamed, guilty, or alone, it has a direct effect on how he feels about himself sexually. If he feels dissed in his job, too small, too short, too fat, too poor, it can directly impact his ability to become aroused.
“But how come I was still interested in sex anywhere but with my girlfriend?” This is where men and women differ. Men are much more likely to soothe their inner rumblings by turning to less emotionally complicated forms of sex, including solitary pleasures and paid ones. 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. The degree of freedom and control they seek in their anonymous encounters is often proportional to the depth of their relational entanglements.
Perhaps it should not be surprising at all that in a world where men are receiving such conflicting messages about who they are and who they should be, so many of them prefer porn, paid sex, or anonymous hookups over relational intimacy. I don’t think it’s an accident that I’ve observed an increase in emotionally disengaged acts of infidelity in tandem with the rise of the emotionally engaged man. Sitting in a strip club, hiring a hooker, swiping right, or watching porn, guys can take a break from the tightrope of modern masculinity.
Part of the appeal of paid sex in particular is the promise that, at least for the sixty minutes the hooker is on the clock, she’ll take away these complexities. And the girl on the screen is irresistible because he never has to seduce her and she never rejects him. Neither does she make him feel inadequate, and her moans assure him that she is having the best of times. Porn entices with a momentary promise to shield men from their basic sexual vulnerabilities. A lot can be said about the differences between prostitutes, strip clubs, full body massage, and porn, but in this sense they all yield common emotional dividends. They put men at the center of the woman’s attention, relieved of any pressure to perform and in a position where they can fully receive.
When he prefers to pay to play or opts for a solo porn session, he buys simplicity and a seemingly uncomplicated identity. He purchases the right to be selfish—a brief hour of psychological freedom before hopping on the commuter train home.
Even so, can we really call it “just sex” when the entire enterprise is set up to avoid certain emotional pitfalls and fulfill a host of unspoken emotional needs? When a man feels lonely or unloved; when he’s depressed, stressed, or disabled; when he’s caged by intimacy or unable to connect, is it sex he buys or is it kindness, warmth, friendship, escape, control, and validation all delivered in a sexual transaction?
For his part, Jonah had felt affirmed as a man by this powerful, sexy woman, and hoped she would redeem him from his geeky self-image. What a surprise, then, when he slowly realized that she wanted him to remain that guy. He had been recruited for a role he was all too good at—taking care of a woman’s needs, which was exactly what he’d done when he supported his mom through her divorce. But secretly he resented the hegemony of her wants. To be clear, neither Danielle nor his mother had ever asked for such sacrifice, but this is what loving boys do.
And where does this leave his wife? Danielle too had been sexually unsatisfied in the marriage. The twist is that while her husband pursued his own sexual awakening in the socially condemned environment of the massage parlor, she had been lying at home reading the socially sanctioned Fifty Shades of Grey. I’m not making these a moral equivalent, but in the world of fantasy they have something in common, as I point out to the couple. She’s reading about the guy that he is trying to be somewhere else—the guy she doesn’t want him to be at home.
You may eventually discover that you needed a nuclear explosion like an affair to blow your previous construction apart and allow a healthier, more conscious and mature version to take its place.
“I miss whatever part of me was stimulated by the secrets, the danger, the thrill. But I have decided that the great place you and I have arrived at is too valuable to put at risk.” His honesty, rather than scaring her, calms her. She understands him better now, and their trust is buttressed by a freedom to share their thoughts and desires truthfully, without shame. The growing sense of acceptance they both feel is one of the strongest protectors against future betrayal.
An entire industry has sprung up in response, including expensive rehab and treatment centers. Some clinicians welcome the label as evidence that what was once considered “men just being men” is no longer normal or acceptable. Others point out the lack of scientific evidence, and see the sex-addiction diagnosis as a medicalized mask for therapists’ judgments about what kind of sex is or is not healthy.
Interestingly, women are rarely diagnosed with sex addiction; we prefer to see them as being addicted to love—a no less slippery slope, I would say, but a more flattering one.
The bonds of wedlock are so heavy that it takes two to carry them, sometimes three. —Alexandre Dumas
Working in the trenches of couples therapy has cautioned me not to impute moral superiority to a guy like Dexter just because he didn’t stray. His brand of fidelity borders on vindictiveness and codependence, and his years of treating his wife so poorly also spell betrayal with a capital B. Indeed, too many partners whose behavior is subpar will eagerly vilify the one who cheats and claim victimhood, confident that the cultural bias is in their favor. 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. Betrayal comes in many forms, and sexual betrayal is just one of them. I regularly encounter those for whom sexual faithfulness is the easiest faithfulness to sustain, even as they break their vows daily in so many other ways. The victim of the affair is not always the victim of the marriage.
Why is one form of diverted attention an indisputable violation of trust, while another gets couched in nicer words? While it appears that each of these seekers was looking for sex, they were also looking for depth, appreciation, lingering gazes—all the other forms of penetration that don’t involve physical intercourse. Call it intimacy, call it human connection—it’s what makes us feel that we matter.
When one partner unilaterally decides there will be no (or very little) sex, that is not monogamy—it’s enforced celibacy.
I have received countless letters from famished lovers across the globe who feel desperate, raging, sad, defeated, self-doubting, lonely, unseen, and untouched. Some manage to turn the tide. But others, despite their best efforts, are unable to bring back the erotic rush. Are these couples just meant to accept that they can’t have it all—that sometimes sex is the price of preserving a family? Or is sex such a fundamental part of life that its absence warrants dismantling an otherwise loving marriage? How good can a relationship be when the sexual intimacy is gone? I’m not just talking about sex, the act: foreplay, penetration, orgasm, sleep. I mean the sensual, erotic energy that separates an adult romantic relationship from one among siblings or best friends. Does a sexless marriage inevitably set us up for infidelity? As long as both partners are okay with the situation, love can flourish and stability abounds. But when one person is filled with unmet longings that stretch from one life stage to the next, they become like dry brush waiting for a spark. Given this dual mandate of sexual fidelity and sexual abstinence, we needn’t be surprised when the lustful urge finally bursts free.
Gradually her interest gave way to resistance, and his wanting morphed into neediness. That was such a turnoff that it made her double down on her withdrawal. The more he begged, the more put off she was. And the more closed she was, the more clingy he became. In a classic pursuer-distancer dynamic, each of them would reinforce in the other the very behavior they abhorred.
He is no longer faithful, but he is as loyal as ever. After fourteen months in this sexual haven, both lovers are happy that they have found a way to break out of their sexual incarceration without having to break up their respective families. This is not uncommon.
Many people have affairs not to exit their marriages, but in order to stay in them.
His affair is a stabilizer, a way to take the pressure off his primary relationship, not destroy it.
As analyst Irwin Hirsch points out, “infidelity sometimes provides an emotional spacing that may allow imperfect love, sex, and family relationships to persist or endure over time.”
Our inflated modern expectations of coupledom, they argue, make it inevitable that “a large portion of married people will feel that marriage has let them down in one way or another.” When some parts of a marriage work very well while others do not, one response is to segment off those parts that do not work. And that often means sex. This eases the burden on one partner to fulfill all of our needs.
Consensual nonmonogamy means that both partners have equal say in the decision to take unfulfilled hankerings elsewhere. In contrast, infidelity is a unilateral decision, in which one person secretly negotiates the best deal for themselves.
For most people, the mention of sexually open relationships sets red lights flashing. Few subjects within the realm of committed love evoke such a visceral response. What if she never comes back? Can’t he appreciate the good we have and accept that he can’t have it all? What if she falls in love? Marriage is compromise! The idea that one can love one person and have sex with another makes some of us shudder. We fear that transgressing one limit leads to the potential breach of all limits. That may be so. But as too many people discover, closed marriage is hardly a bulwark against disaster.
Whether the ending is done in person or in writing, it must be responsible, mature, caring, and clear. I coach Jim in great detail on what to say, working through several iterations. He needs to acknowledge the reciprocity of their feelings, appreciate the depth of what they shared, apologize for the false promises, set clear boundaries, and give her closure. These are the essential elements of a goodbye. And once it is done, it needs to be definitive; he can’t leave her any threads of hope to grab on to. There is no way for this not to be painful, but it makes a world of difference if Lauren knows that she’s not the only one feeling heartbroken.
“Isn’t the extent of infidelity proof that monogamy is simply not human nature?”
As with any illicit trade, when adultery becomes legalized, the black market suffers a slump. But it never ceases to intrigue me that even when we have the freedom to direct our gaze toward other sexual partners, we still seem to be lured by the power of the forbidden. Monogamy may or may not be natural to human beings, but transgression surely is.
“I have been faithful to you for twenty-five years. The first twenty-four were happily monogamous. The last one was happy, with the addition of another woman. That said, my loyalty has never wavered. I’ve been there for you. When your brother lived with us for a year while he was in alcohol recovery, when you had breast cancer, when your father died, I was always there. I am so sorry. I never meant to hurt you. But when you measure my allegiance only by where I stick my dick, it’s as if the rest doesn’t count for anything.”
What if we were to consider fidelity as a relational constancy that encompasses respect, loyalty, and emotional intimacy? It may or may not include sexual exclusiveness, depending on the agreements of those involved.
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.
Today’s intimate commitment is predicated on love. The austerity of duty has been replaced by fluctuating emotions. If we get too close to others, one of us might fall in love with someone else and leave. It’s pure dread that loosening the grip on monogamy, even in the slightest, could unravel the strongest bond. What the vanguardists are trying to tell me (and perhaps themselves) is that the opposite is true. They believe that if they subject themselves to the constraints of monogamy, they’re more likely to bolt. The more freedom they have, the thinking goes, the more stable their relationships will be.
“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.”
Opening up a relationship does not always deplete the intimacy of the couple; sometimes it serves to replenish it. The fantasy of inviting in a third comes in many variations—imagining, enacting, watching, joining in, waiting at home, listening behind a door, enjoying the detailed report.
Sex with others isn’t only about being with others. “It is perhaps more accurate to consider it a rather intricate, perhaps dangerous, method of teasing and arousing the primary partner.”
Consensual nonmonogamy requires both sexual diversity and intimacy, crossings and barriers.
In order for commitment to take on new meaning beyond sexual exclusivity, we need to talk about boundaries. Nonmonogamists don’t just indulge in a sexual free-for-all. Rather, many create explicit relational agreements with as much precision as a legal document. Common features include stipulations around honesty and transparency; where and how often liaisons with other lovers can take place; who those lovers can be and which specific sex acts can and cannot be shared with them; degrees of emotional involvement; and of course, rules about protection.
Boundaries vary greatly from one relationship to another, and they may also vary between partners. Partner A may feel fine about Partner B having intercourse with someone else, but prefers no kissing, while Partner B may be comfortable with Partner A doing whatever she likes. Partner C doesn’t want to know much at all—just a text so he’s not caught unawares. Partner D wants to be told the granular details in person, while he is holding her.
“a monogamy of the heart” [Why stop here? What if also heart can be non-monogamous?]
Nonmonogamy requires equal footing and trust. A couple needs shared agency when they are going to enter an open relationship. Both parties need to feel that they are choosing from a position of parity.
I told him that one day he would understand that forgiving doesn’t mean giving the other a free pass. It’s a gift one gives oneself.
But just because he fell in love with another woman doesn’t mean their entire past together was a fraud. Such a summation is cruel and shortsighted.
I would no more recommend having an affair than I would recommend getting cancer. What many people want to know, then, is what they can learn from affairs without necessarily having to go through one. It comes down to two questions: How can we better fortify our relationship against infidelity? And how can we bring some of the erotic vitality of illicit love into our authorized unions? The answer is counterintuitive. The impulse to protect your marriage is natural, but if you take the common “affair-proofing” approach, you risk heading back down the narrow road of stifling constraints. Outlawing friendships with the opposite sex, censoring emotionally intimate confidences in others, nixing water-cooler conversations, curtailing online activity, banning porn, checking up on each other, doing everything together, cutting off exes—all of these homeland security measures can backfire.
When a couple tries to safeguard their relationship through various forms of surveillance and self-policing, they risk setting themselves up for the exact opposite: the “enhanced eroticization of transgressions.” The more we try to suppress our primal longings, the more forcefully we may rebel.
Rather than insulate ourselves with the false notion that it could never happen to me, we must learn to live with the uncertainties, the allures, the attractions, the fantasies—both our own and our partners’. Couples who feel free to talk honestly about their desires, even when they are not directed at each other, paradoxically become closer. The explorers model this. Their marriages may or may not be “open” in structure, but all of them are open in their communication. They are having conversations they never had before the breach: open-ended, vulnerable, emotionally risky conversations that elicit curiosity about someone who is at once familiar and also entirely new. When we validate each other’s freedom within the relationship, we may be less inclined to go looking for it elsewhere. Moreover, when we acknowledge the existence of the third, we affirm the erotic separateness of our partner. We admit that as much as we may want it to, their sexuality does not revolve solely around us. They may choose to share it only with us, but its roots are far-reaching. We are the recipients, not the sole sources, of their unfurling desires. This recognition of the other as an independent agent is part of the shock of infidelity, but it is also what can reignite the erotic spark at home. While it may be a scary proposition, it is also exquisitely intimate.
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 current of aliveness, once awoken, is a force hard to resist. What must be resisted are the dwindling curiosity, the flaccid engagements, the grim resignation, the desiccating routines. Domestic deadness is often a crisis of imagination.
