The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity

by Esther Perel

My role as a therapist is to create a safe space where the diversity of experiences can be explored with compassion.

The raw material for this book has come from my therapy sessions, trainings, lectures around the world, informal conversations, and from the hundreds of people who have sent me letters and left comments on my website, my blog, my TED Talks, and my Facebook page.

Curiously, our insistent disapproval keeps infidelity’s vigor in check without revealing how rife it really is. We can’t stop the fact that it happens, but we can all agree that it shouldn’t.

While the poets speak of lovers and adventurers, most people’s preferred vocabulary includes cheaters, liars, traitors, sex addicts, philanderers, nymphos, womanizers, and sluts.

Generally, there is much concern for the betrayed, and detailed repair advice for the unfaithful to help his or her partner overcome the trauma.

To be clear, not condemning does not mean condoning, and there is a world of difference between understanding and justifying. But when we reduce the conversation to simply passing judgment, we are left with no conversation at all.

But more often, what I see are scores of committed men and women with shared histories and values—values that often include monogamy—whose stories unfold along a more humble human trajectory. Loneliness, years of sexual deadness, resentment, regret, marital neglect, lost youth, craving attention, canceled flights, too much to drink—these are the nuts and bolts of everyday infidelity.

The risk is that in the throes of pain and humiliation, we too hastily conflate our reactions to the affair with our feelings about the whole relationship.

The rush to divorce makes no allowance for error, for human fragility. It also makes no allowance for repair, resilience, and recovery.

nothing less extreme is powerful enough to get the partners’ attention and to shake up a stale system.

We have nothing to gain from breeding bitter, vengeful, and divisive sentiments.

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.

And many fingers point to women as being responsible for the increase, as they rapidly close the “infidelity gap” (research indicates a 40 percent jump since 1990, while men’s rates have held steady.2)

When she walked into Jared’s study and caught him watching a panting blonde on his screen, she just rolled her eyes and joked that he needed a new hobby. But when the woman said, “Where’d you go, Jared? Did you finish?” she realized that he was on Skype. “The worst part of it is that he’s trying to convince me it isn’t cheating,” she tells me. “He calls it customized pornography.”

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.

Does feeling hurt entitle one to claim ownership over the definition?

And yet the concealment that is frowned upon in one corner of our planet is reframed as “discretion” in others. In the stories I hear there, it’s a given that affairs come with lying and hiding. It’s the fact that the person didn’t hide it well enough that is humiliating and hurtful.

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

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.

We may debate what is real and what is imagined, but the alchemy of the erotic is unmistakable.

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.

There may be no feelings attached to a random fuck, but there is plenty of meaning to the fact that it happened.

Our model of romantic love is one in which we expect our partner to be our principal emotional companion—the only one with whom we share our deepest dreams, regrets, and anxieties.

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.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, amidst the societal sea change of the Industrial Revolution, marriage was redefined.

In the move from the village to the city, we became more free but also more alone.

First we brought love to marriage. Then we brought sex to love. And then we linked marital happiness with sexual satisfaction. Sex for procreation gave way to sex for recreation. While premarital sex became the norm, marital sex underwent its own little revolution, shifting from a woman’s matrimonial duty to a joint pathway for pleasure and connection.

“My needs aren’t being met,” “This marriage is not working for me anymore,” “It’s not the deal I signed up for”—these are laments I hear regularly in my sessions. As psychologist and author Bill Doherty observes, these kinds of statements apply the values of consumerism—“personal gain, low cost, entitlement, and hedging one’s bets”—to our romantic connections.

For many, love is no longer a verb, but a noun describing a constant state of enthusiasm, infatuation, and desire. The quality of the relationship is now synonymous with the quality of the experience.

“I’d want to live with someone and enjoy being a couple before we became parents.” Some refer to this cohabitation period as “beta testing” a relationship.

The boomers separated sex from marriage and reproduction; their children are separating reproduction from sex.

“Culturally, young adults have increasingly come to see marriage as a ‘capstone’ rather than a ‘cornerstone,’” say the researchers at the project Knot Yet, “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.”8

Is this also the reason younger millenials cant afford to get out of their parent's homes? Spending their 20s partying instead of building wealth and stability with a partner?

who will bestow upon her the deep experience of recognizing her carefully crafted identity.

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Couples who marry young are expected to struggle and to come out stronger for it. Hence, the cornerstone model “doesn’t condone infidelity so much as it concedes its near-inevitability.” In contrast, he observes, “The capstone model is much less forgiving of sexual betrayal because it presumes that those who finally get around to marrying should be mature enough to be both self-regulating and scrupulously honest. . . . 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.”

(Of course, in the continuing evolution of this most elastic institution, there are now some who bring multiple partners inside marriage as well.)

In a world where it is so easy to feel insignificant—to be laid off, disposable, deleted with a click, unfriended—being chosen has taken on an importance it never had before.

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

Too often their impulsive responses, while meant to be protective, can destroy years of positive marital capital in an instant.

I divide post-affair recovery into three phases: crisis, meaning making, and visioning.

Journal writing provides a safe place to purge, unrestricted. Letter writing is a more deliberate, carefully edited process.

She was a stark contrast to the women of his childhood, whose strength was often measured by how stoically they endured lifelong mistreatment by their philandering husbands.

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.

“You’ve known this history for eight years, she just caught on. And she’s got a lot of catching up to do.” If she is still incessantly interrogating him three years from now, then it will be a problem.

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.

Ironically, their belief about men underscores their ongoing oppression but protects their sense of identity. Gillian may be socially more emancipated, but her identity and self-worth have been mortgaged to romantic love.

He describes how he had begun to feel irrelevant, his own business struggling and the salary gap between them steadily growing. Gillian was busy with everybody else. “And then she started talking about retirement plans and long-term care, and I felt like she was burying me alive!” Enter Amanda, who offered him a way “to loosen up and reconnect with passion.”

He sees how bad she feels, but it makes him feel bad about himself (shame), which prevents him from feeling bad for her (guilt).

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.

“I have cheated once and I have lied many times about that one thing,” he insists, “But I am not a cheater or a liar.” Her pain mirrors back an image of himself that he can’t tolerate, so he gets mad.