The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity

by Esther Perel

the relationship, in the poetic words of Marguerite Yourcenar, like “an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish.”

Sometimes departing spouses are reluctant to shift their focus to the good things in their relationship because they are afraid it will take the wind out of their sails. It’s as if they feel the need to trash what they had to justify leaving. What they don’t realize is that by doing

so, they simultaneously degrade their own past and all the people they shared it with—leaving a trail of angry children, parents, friends, and exes. We need a concept of a terminated marriage that doesn’t damn it—one that helps to create emotional coherence and narrative continuity. Ending a marriage goes beyond the signing of divorce papers. And divorce is not the end of a family; it’s a reorganization. This kind of ritual has caught the public imagination in recent years, dubbed “conscious uncoupling” by author Katherine Woodward Thomas.

I invite couples to write goodbye letters to each other. Letters that capture what they’ll miss, what they cherish, what they take responsibility for, and what they wish for each other. This allows them to honor the riches of their relationship, to mourn the pain of its loss, and to mark its legacy. Even if it is done with a cooled heart, it can nonetheless provide solace.

No one else will ever share the particular meanings these everyday things hold for them. She listed the connections she’d miss: “feeling protected, safe, beautiful, loved.” Her final category was simply “You”: “Your scent. Your smile. Your enthusiasm. Your ideas. Your hugs. Your big strong hands. Your balding head. Your dreams. You, next to me.” When she finished reading, we were all in tears and there was no need to trample the tenderness with any extraneous verbiage. But it is important for the scribe to hear her own words read back to her, so I asked Clive to do so. Then he read his own pages.

This cathartic closure proved to be the right ritual for this couple. But sadly, many spew out a long list of curses rather than a list of sweet memories. Wherever I can, I try to help people create narratives that are empowering rather than victimizing. It doesn’t always involve forgiveness, it makes room for anger, but hopefully it is an anger that mobilizes rather than keeps them trapped in bitterness. We need to go on with life—hope again, love again, and trust again.

In my work I have identified three basic post-infidelity outcomes for couples who choose to stay together (with thanks to Helen Fisher for the typology): those who get stuck in the past (the sufferers); those who pull themselves up by the bootstraps and let it go (the

builders); and those who rise above the ashes and create a better union (the explorers).

Couples like these live in a permanent state of contraction. To the unfaithful, the betrayed spouse becomes the sum total of her vengeful fury. To the

betrayed spouse, the unfaithful becomes the sum total of his transgressions, with few redeeming qualities. Marriages like these may survive, but the protagonists are emotionally dead. In any case, when past infidelity becomes the hallmark of a couple’s life, whatever was broken can’t be pieced back together. The relationship wears a permanent cast.

Madison does not talk about “When you did this to me.” Rather, they both talk about “When we had our crisis,” recounting a shared experience. Now they are joint scriptwriters, sharing credit for what they produce. What started outside the relationship is now housed within. For Madison and Dennis, the affair has become a landmark integrated into the broader geography of their lives together. Above all, they know there are no clear-cut answers, so they’re able to discuss the betrayal with a fundamental acceptance of their human flaws. Madison and Dennis’s relationship feels much richer and more interesting, but it also can feel less secure. They have added novelty to the enduring, mystery to the familiar, and risk to the predictable. “I’m not sure at all where this is going to take us, but dull it certainly is not,” Dennis says. If before they were facing dead ends, now they don’t know where they’ll end up. But that very fact is more exciting than frightening, and they are in it together. To repair is to re-pair.

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. Katherine Frank argues persuasively that the “marital safety narrative” creates its own demise. 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.”4 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.

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.

But there’s another way of looking at trust: as a force that enables us to cope with uncertainty and vulnerability. To quote Rachel Botsman, “Trust is a confident relationship to the unknown.”6 If we accept that the certainty we long for is something we may never truly have, we can reframe the notion of trust. Yes, trust is built and strengthened by actions over time, but by the same token, trust is also a leap of faith—“a risk masquerading as a promise,”7 as Adam Phillips writes. An affair throws a couple into a new reality, and those who are willing to venture forward ...

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. 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. They are also the ingredients of thriving relationships. It is no accident that many of the most erotic couples lift their marital strategies directly from the infidelity playbook.