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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 loss of power was the problem in intimate betrayal, then anger would be the solution. But the great pain in intimate betrayal has little to do with loss of power. 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.”
Infidelity always takes place within a web of connections, and the story started long before the acute injury.
This kind of avoidance is not an act of idiocy but an act of self-preservation. It is actually a sophisticated self-protective mechanism known as trauma denial—a type of self-delusion that we employ when too much is at stake and we have too much to lose. The mind needs coherence, so it disposes of inconsistencies that threaten the structure of our lives.
Everyone seems to know exactly what to do. Friends offer their couch, to help pack his things, to change the locks, to take the kids for the weekend.
Darlene can’t even attend a support group because she can’t afford a babysitter for her kids. She doesn’t say, “I’m done.” She says, “I’m trapped.” She isn’t ready to leave, despite the urging of a number of therapists and members of her congregation.
“Recognized all over the world as a motivation for crimes of passion, jealousy is construed in some cultures as a destructive force that needs to be contained, while in others it is conceived as a companion of love and gatekeeper of monogamy, essential for the protection of a couple’s union.”
Our cultural ideals are sometimes too impatient with our human insecurities. They may fail to account for the vulnerability inherent in love and for the heart’s need to defend itself.
To acknowledge jealousy is to admit love, competition, and comparison—all of which expose vulnerability.
therefore, it is also the means of relighting the fire. “Jealousy is the shadow of love,” writes Ayala Malach Pines in Romantic Jealousy: Causes, Symptoms, Cures, because it affirms to us that we value our partner and our relationship.
Anthropologist Helen Fisher, who has done fMRI studies of the brain in love, tells us that romantic love literally is an addiction, lighting up the same areas of the brain as cocaine or nicotine.
Like a ricochet effect across time, one breach in the present can trigger the resonance of all the breaches of the past.
In clinical parlance, this kind of homeopathic intervention is called prescribing the symptom. Since symptoms are involuntary, we can’t erase them, but if we prescribe them, we can take control. In addition, staging a ritual gives new meaning to an old suffering.
The classic map has men anchoring it in the risk of uncertainty about paternity, and women, in the loss of commitment and resources needed to care for children. Hence, popular theory holds that women’s jealousy is primarily emotional, whereas men’s is sexual.
Arguably, this reversal highlights that we feel most threatened where we feel least secure.
Others work hard to transcend it altogether. Many of those who identify as polyamorous claim that they’ve developed a new emotional response called compersion—a feeling of happiness at seeing one’s partner enjoy sexual contact with someone else.
When the time is right, in the course of therapy, couples need to engage in a two-way examination. But in this process, one distinction must always be made: taking responsibility for creating conditions that may have contributed to the affair is very different from blaming oneself for the affair. In a state of shock, it’s too easy to confuse the two.
When infidelity robs us of the future we were working for, it invalidates our past sacrifices.
All are desperate attempts to repossess power, to exact compensation, to destroy the one who destroyed us as a means of self-preservation.
The fact that Bart strayed first makes Jess feel fully justified in her own corrective cheating.
revenge can in fact keep the unpleasantness of an offense alive. The exultation of self-righteousness is a shallow pleasure that traps us in an obsession with the past.
one would think that their own transgressive behaviors would make them more empathic toward their cheating partners. But people often have their own inner scales of justice, convinced that what was done to them was worse than what they did—an interesting double standard.
No woman should ever give one man all the power to shatter her romantic ideals.
Their commitment lies with each other; their bodies are free to lie elsewhere.
They have set clear boundaries: no lovers within the small and incestuous world of dance, and no falling in love. “If that starts to happen, we’ll talk.”
More biology than psychology, anger temporarily eases loss, self-doubt, and powerlessness.
To get back at the other is not a way to get the other back.
Lodged within the sanctuary of our minds or written in a private journal, fantasies can be a way to purge the slanderous thoughts and the murderous rage that fill us up.
It’s no accident that the cuckolded heroes of the great dramas and operas tend to kill their beloved rather than give her the freedom not to choose them.
in the process of getting even you end up hurting yourself more than you punish the other, you gain nothing. The art of restorative justice is to elevate yourself rather than simply denigrating those who hurt you.
When counseling her patients about the wisdom of truth-telling, my colleague Lisa Spiegel uses a simple and effective formula: Ask yourself, is it honest, is it helpful, and is it kind?
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?
I see the decision to reveal or not to reveal as part of the therapy itself, not as a precondition for therapy.
This entitlement to know, and the assumption that knowing equals closeness, is a feature of modern love.
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.
In many cultures, respect is more likely expressed with gentle untruths that aim at preserving face and peace of mind. This protective opacity is seen as preferable to disclosure that might result in public humiliation.
don’t deny the erotically muting effects of domesticity. But sex with his wife stands no chance when all his energy is devoted to his wanderings.
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.
I make a distinction between two kinds of inquiry—the detective questions, which mine the sordid details, and the investigative questions, which mine the meanings and the motives.
The investigative approach asks more enlightening questions that probe the meaning of the affair, and focuses on analysis rather than facts.
“You can’t ‘prevent’ someone from betraying you again. They either choose to be faithful or they don’t. If they want to be unfaithful, all the monitoring in the world won’t stop them.”9
Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living. —Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Cheating is what they did to their partner, but what were they doing for themselves? And why?
knew that because of her parents’ open marriage, her sense of morality is weaker. It’s hereditary!”
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.
She was perfect in part because she was an escape, she seemed always to offer more.”3
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. “You think you had a relationship with Truck Man,” I tell her. “Actually, you had an intimate encounter with yourself, mediated by him.”
Adultery is often the revenge of the deserted possibilities.
These retrospective encounters occupy a place somewhere between the known and the unknown—bringing together the familiarity of someone you once knew with the freshness created by the passage of time.
