What about trust? Trust is at the center of the marital plot, and affairs are a violation of that trust. Many of us feel that in order to trust, we need to know. We conflate trust with safety, as a rational risk assessment to ensure we won’t get hurt. We want a guarantee that our partner has our back and would never be so selfish as to put their needs ahead of our feelings. We demand certainty, or at least the illusion of it, before we are willing to make ourselves vulnerable to another.
