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Men cheat out of boredom and fear of intimacy; women cheat out of loneliness and hunger for intimacy.
To be clear, not condemning does not mean condoning, and there is a world of difference between understanding and justifying.
Affairs are an act of betrayal and they are also an expression of longing and loss.
What is clear is that all characterizations of modern infidelity involve the notion of a breach of contract between two individuals.
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.
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.
Because for many today, marriage is wedded to the concept of emotional intimacy and naked honesty, when we open our inner life to someone else, it can feel like a betrayal. 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.
If you cheat, it’s because you are a selfish, weak, untrustworthy person. But if I do it, it’s because of the situation I found myself in. For ourselves, we focus on the mitigating circumstances; for others, we blame character.
Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Because marriage was a political, economic, and mercenary event, many people believed that true, uncontaminated love could only exist without it.”
When women married, they relinquished their individual rights and property, and indeed, they became property themselves.
It’s worth remembering that until recently, marital fidelity and monogamy had nothing to do with love. It was a mainstay of patriarchy, imposed on women, to ensure patrimony and lineage—whose
As much as we hopeless romantics hate to admit it, marriages based on attraction and love are often more fragile than marriages based on material motives. (Although that’s not to say the old, steady marriages were happier.) They leave us more vulnerable to the vagaries of the human heart and the shadow of betrayal.
Hence we no longer divorce because we’re unhappy; we divorce because we could be happier.
FOMO drives what is known as the “hedonic treadmill”—the endless search for something better. The minute we get what we want, our expectations and desires tend to rise, and we end up not feeling any happier.
The more sexually active our society has become, the more intractable its attitude toward cheating. In fact, it is precisely because we can have plenty of sex before marriage that exclusiveness within marriage has assumed entirely new connotations.
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.
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.
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.
A definition I have found helpful is that envy relates to something you want but do not have, whereas jealousy relates to something you have but are afraid of losing.
All are desperate attempts to repossess power, to exact compensation, to destroy the one who destroyed us as a means of self-preservation. Each dollar, each gift, each treasured book we extract from the rubble is meant to match a broken piece inside.
Anger is an analgesic that temporarily numbs the pain and an amphetamine that provides a surge of energy and confidence. More biology than psychology, anger temporarily eases loss, self-doubt, and powerlessness. While it can at times be a positive motivator, more often, as psychologist Steven Stosny cautions, “Bouts of anger and resentment always drop you down lower than the point at which they picked you up.”
In moments when one is flooded with emotion, it’s important to know how to self-regulate. Breathing exercises, soothing hot showers, bracing cold lakes, walks in nature, singing and dancing to music, and active sports can all be helpful. Stillness and movement can both be sources of relief.
