The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity

by Esther Perel

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

Love is messy; infidelity more so. But it is also a window, like none other, into the crevices of the human heart.

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?

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

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

Affairs blossom in the margins of our lives, and as long as they are not exposed to broad daylight, their spell is preserved.

Eroticism is such that the kiss we only imagine giving can be as powerful and exciting as hours of actual lovemaking.

Desire is rooted in absence and longing.

“I’ve never been so aroused. It was like he was touching me without touching me.”

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.

Others don’t see sex as a big deal and give each other freedom to play—so long as there are no feelings involved. They call it “emotional monogamy.”

an inappropriate emotional closeness that should be reserved for one’s partner and that is depleting the primary relationship.

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.

Affairs are not what they used to be because marriage is not what it used to be.

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

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.

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.

Hence we no longer divorce because we’re unhappy; we divorce because we could be happier.

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.

“I want to rebuild with you, not rehash the same things over and over.”

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.

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

“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.”6

Perceived loss of value is what causes your pain—you feel less lovable.”

“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

it’s not especially helpful to measure the legitimacy of the reaction by the magnitude of the offense.

jealousy—“that sickening combination of possessiveness, suspicion, rage, and humiliation [that] can overtake your mind and threaten your very core as you contemplate your rival,”

jealousy has a built-in paradox—we need to love in order to be jealous, but if we love, we should not be jealous.

Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.

affairs as a form of self-discovery, a quest for a new (or a lost) identity.

and is more often described as an expansive experience that involves growth, exploration, and transformation.

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.

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

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.

This distinction between the person and the experience is crucial in helping people to extricate themselves from their affairs.

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.

We all have multiple selves, but in our intimate relationships, over time, we tend to reduce our complexity to a shrunken version of ourselves. One of the essential components of recovery is finding ways to reintroduce the many pieces that were abandoned or exiled along the way.

The awakened describe a sense of movement when they had felt constricted, an opening up of possibilities in a life that had narrowed down to a single predictable path, a surge of emotional intensity where everything seemed bland. I have come to think of encounters like these as existential affairs,

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“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.4

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.

“Erotic silence” is the term psychotherapist and author Dalma Heyn uses to describe this predicament—an “unexpected, in-articulable deadening of pleasure and vitality”8 that happens to some women after they tie the knot.

Their findings identify three core themes that “represent dragging forces on sexual desire.” 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.10

“Rather than being anchored in the ‘safe side’ of the continuum,” they conclude, “female sexual desire requires a balance between opposing impulses . . . of comfort and freedom, of security and risk, of intimacy and individuality.”11

If this marriage is to recover, not just emotionally but erotically, Danica needs to find a way to be different with the same person she has lived with for so long.

but seeing the other as an independent sexual being.

It creates the healthy distance that allows you to eroticize your partner,