The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity

by Esther Perel

Infidelity brings us face-to-face with the volatile and opposing forces of passion: the lure, the lust, the urgency, the love and its impossibility, the relief, the entrapment, the guilt, the heartbreak, the sinfulness, the surveillance, the madness of suspicion, the murderous urge to get even, the tragic denouement.

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

Relationships are a patchwork of unspoken rules and roles that we begin stitching on the first date. We set out to draft boundaries—what is in and what is out. The me, the you, and the us. Do we get to go out alone or do we do everything together? Do we combine our finances? Are we expected to attend every family reunion?

For many couples, the extent of the discussion is about five words: “I catch you, you’re dead.”

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 are a pathway to risk, danger, and the defiant energy of transgression.

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

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.

Do we expect our partners’ erotic selves to belong entirely to us? I’m talking about thoughts, fantasies, dreams, and memories, and also turn-ons, attractions, and self-pleasure. These aspects of sexuality can be personal, and part of our sovereign selfhood—existing in our own secret garden.

From another perspective, however, making space for some degree of erotic individuality can convey a respect for privacy and autonomy, and is a token of intimacy.

In my decades of working with couples, 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.

In our efforts to protect ourselves from intimate betrayal, we demand access, control, transparency. And we run the risk of unknowingly eradicating the very space between us that keeps desire alive. Fire needs air.

People in this state talk to me about love, transcendence, awakening, destiny, divine intervention—something so pure that they could not pass it by, because “to deny those feelings would have been an act of self-betrayal.”

Marriages have always been strengthened when partners can vent to others or find multiple outlets for emotional connection.

When we channel all our intimate needs into one person, we actually stand to make the relationship more vulnerable.

On the other hand, deep emotional relationships with others are legitimate outlets for feelings and needs that can’t all be met in the marriage.

In fact, historian Stephanie Coontz makes the intriguing point that when marriage was primarily an economic alliance, adultery was sometimes the space for love.

For women, venturing outside the marital bed was highly risky. They could end up pregnant, publicly humiliated, or dead. Meanwhile, it is old news that in most cultures, men had the tacitly sanctioned freedom to roam with little consequence, supported by a host of theories about masculinity that justified their predilections for tasting widely. The double standard is as old as adultery itself.

And above all, fidelity remained a sine qua non, at least for the female of the species.

In The Transformation of Intimacy, Anthony Giddens explains that when sex was decoupled from reproduction, it became no longer just a feature of our biology but a marker of our identity.

Our sexuality has been socialized away from the natural world and has become a “property of the self” that we define and redefine throughout our lives.3 It is an expression of who we are, no longer merely something we do.

In our corner of the world, sex is a human right linked to our individuality, our personal freedom, and our self-actualization. Sexual bliss, we believe, is our due—and it has b...

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. And you, my beloved, will give me eye contact. No scrolling while I bare my soul. I need to feel your empathy and validation. My significance depends on it.

Once we strayed because marriage was not supposed to deliver love and passion. Today we stray because marriage fails to deliver the love, passion, and undivided attention it promised.

Hence we no longer divorce because we’re unhappy; we divorce because we could be happier. We’ve come to see immediate gratification and endless variety as our prerogative.

The constant awareness of ready alternatives invites unfavorable comparisons, weakens commitment, and prevents us from enjoying the present moment.

It is all these new prerogatives that drive the story of contemporary infidelity. It’s not our desires that are different today, but the fact that we feel we deserve—indeed, we are obligated—to pursue them.

Our primary duty is now to ourselves—even if it comes at the expense of those we love. As Pamela Druckerman points out, “Our high expectations for personal happiness might even make us more likely to cheat. After all, aren’t we entitled to an affair, if that’s what it takes to be fulfilled?”

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.

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

Our individualistic society produces an uncanny paradox: As the need for faithfulness intensifies, so too does the pull toward unfaithfulness.

“perhaps robbing someone of his or her story is the greatest betrayal of all.”

Men whose wives turned elsewhere were more likely to express rage or embarrassment than sadness. They were allowed to grieve the loss of face, not of self.

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.

Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl distills a profound truth: “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

And for others, it shatters the image they had of their partner: “I picked you because I was so sure you were not that kind of person.”

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.

Sometimes the corrosive torment of doubting a partner’s fidelity is made worse by the cruel practice of gaslighting.

The collective voice of condemnation ranges from mild criticism to full blaming of the victim—for “allowing” it to happen, for not doing enough to prevent it, for not seeing it when it was happening, for letting it go on so long, and of course, for staying after everything that happened.

The deliberateness implies that the unfaithful partner has weighed his or her desires against their consequences and decided to proceed anyway.

Furthermore, the significant investment of time, energy, money, and ingenuity point to the conscious motivation to pursue the selfish motives at the expense of the partner or family.

At the center of many of these works lies one of the most complex emotions, 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,”1 as evolutionary anthropologist Helen Fisher describes it.

“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.”

I am grateful to the work of Scheinkman for shedding new light on this exiled emotion and for reminding me that, after all, infidelity is not just about broken contracts, it is about broken hearts.

Of course, jealousy can sometimes go too far—consuming and undermining us, and in extreme cases, leading to aggression or even blows. But in other cases, it may in fact be the last glowing ember of eros in an otherwise burned-out relationship—and therefore, it is also the means of relighting the fire.

My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart, concealing it, will break. —Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew

Some people turn the dagger inward; others direct the blade toward the culprits, in real life or in fantasy. We swing from depression to indignation, from lifelessness to roaring rage, from collapse to counterattack.

When infidelity robs us of the future we were working for, it invalidates our past sacrifices.

there’s a spirit of abundance and love that breeds generosity. “I did it for us” makes sense as long as there is trust in that basic unit called “us.” But intimate betrayal turns these graceful accommodations into a farce.