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by
Esther Perel
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December 12, 2023 - January 21, 2024
The State of Affairs tracks the trajectory of desire when it goes looking elsewhere.
I would like to stimulate a conversation between you and your loved ones about issues such as fidelity and loyalty, desire and longing, jealousy and possessiveness, truth-telling and forgiveness. I encourage you to question yourself, to speak the unspoken, and to be unafraid to challenge sexual and emotional correctness.
la casa grande y la casa chica—
Contemporary discourse about the topic can be summed up as follows: Infidelity must be a symptom of a relationship gone awry. If you have everything you need at home, there should be no reason to go elsewhere. Men cheat out of boredom and fear of intimacy; women cheat out of loneliness and hunger for intimacy. The faithful partner is the mature, committed, realistic one; the one who strays is selfish, immature, and lacks control. Affairs are always harmful and can never help a marriage or be accommodated. The only way to restore trust and intimacy is through truth-telling, repentance, and
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balanced, unbiased dialogue is rare.
The intricacies of love and desire don’t yield to simple categorizations of good and bad, victim and culprit.
“Is it still called cheating when your wife no longer knows your name?” “My wife has Alzheimer’s,” he explained. “She has been in a nursing home for the past three years, and I visit her twice a week. For the past fourteen months, I have been seeing another woman. Her husband is on the same floor. We have found great comfort in each other.”
The motives for straying vary widely, as do the reactions and possible outcomes. Some affairs are acts of resistance. Others happen when we offer no resistance at all. One person may cross the border for a simple fling, while another is looking to emigrate. Some infidelities are petty rebellions, sparked by a sense of ennui, a desire for novelty, or the need to know one still has pulling power. Others reveal a feeling never known before—an overwhelming sense of love that cannot be denied. Paradoxically, many people go outside their marriages in order to preserve them. When relationships become
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Motives are varied
We need a bridging narrative to help real people navigate the multifaceted experience of infidelity—the motives, the meanings, and the consequences.
Farrah and Jude, a lesbian couple in their mid-thirties, have been together six years. Jude is trying to understand why Farrah had a secret affair after they’d agreed to open up their relationship. “We had an arrangement where it was okay to sleep with other women, so long as we told each other,” Jude recounts. “I thought being open would protect us—but she lied anyway. What more can I do?” Even an open relationship is no guarantee against deception.
these conversations are part and parcel of any adult, intimate relationship. For most couples, unfortunately, the crisis of an affair is the first time they talk about any of this.
Probably a better idea to discuss these early on in the relationship.
But then they ask, “Did we really have to go through an affair just to be able to be truly honest with each other?” I hear this often and share their regret. But here’s one of the unspoken truths about relationships: for many couples, nothing less extreme is powerful enough to get the partners’ attention and to shake up a stale system.
no amount of statistics, however accurate, can give us real insight into the complex reality of infidelity today. Therefore, my focus is stories, not numbers. For it is the stories that lead us into the deeper human concerns of longing and disenchantment, commitment and erotic freedom.
when one partner decides that the other person’s behavior is a betrayal, and the reaction is “It’s not what you think,” “It didn’t mean anything,” or “That’s not cheating,” we enter more nebulous territory.
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.
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.
As philosopher Aaron Ben-Ze’ev pertinently states, “The move from passive imaginary reality to the interactive virtual reality in cyberspace is much more radical than the move from photographs to movies.” We may debate what is real and what is imagined, but the alchemy of the erotic is unmistakable.
Do we expect our partners’ erotic selves to belong entirely to us?
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.
But is sex ever really just sex? There may be no feelings attached to a random fuck, but there is plenty of meaning to the fact that it happened.
Emphasizing the “emotional” as infidelity never even occurred to earlier generations, whose concept of marriage was not organized around emotional exclusiveness. It is still foreign in many parts of the world. Is it a helpful concept for couples today? 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.
But in reality, many of us may find ourselves in several positions, and our perspective on the meaning of it all will shift as we do, depending on the situation.
When it comes to infidelity, like most things in life, human beings commit what social psychologists call the actor-observer bias. 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.
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.
For millennia, matrimony was less a union of two individuals than a strategic partnership between two families that ensured their economic survival and promoted social cohesion. It was a pragmatic arrangement in which children were not sentimentalized and husbands and wives dreamed of productive compatibility.
“Most societies have had romantic love, this combination of sexual passion, infatuation, and the romanticization of the partner,” she writes. “But very often, those things were seen as inappropriate when attached to marriage. Because marriage was a political, economic, and mercenary event, many people believed that true, uncontaminated love could only exist without it.”
Very western take
“I love you. Let’s get married.” For most of history, those two sentences were never joined. Romanticism changed all that. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, amidst the societal sea change of the Industrial Revolution, marriage was redefined. Gradually it evolved from an economic enterprise to a companionate one—a free-choice engagement between two individuals, based not on duty and obligation but on love and affection. In the move from the village to the city, we became more free but also more alone.
In one of our conversations, I asked Silvia if she was monogamous. She looked at me, surprised. “Yes, of course. I’ve been monogamous with all my boyfriends and both my husbands.” Did she realize the cultural shift implicit in the words she had so casually uttered? Monogamy used to mean one person for life. Now monogamy means one person at a time.
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.
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.
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.
We still want everything the traditional family was meant to provide—security, children, property, and respectability—but now we also want our partner to love us, to desire us, to be interested in us. We should be best friends, trusted confidants, and passionate lovers to boot. The human imagination has conjured up a new Olympus: that love will remain unconditional, intimacy enthralling, and sex oh-so-exciting, for the long haul, with one person. And the long haul keeps getting longer.
Not only do we have endless demands, but on top of it all we want to be happy. That was once reserved for the afterlife. We’ve brought heaven down to earth, within reach of all, and now happiness is no longer just a pursuit, but a mandate. We expect one person to give us what once an entire village used to provide, and we live twice as long. It’s a tall order for a party of two.
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 swiping culture lures us with infinite possibilities, but it also exerts a subtle tyranny. The constant awareness of ready alternatives invites unfavorable comparisons, weakens commitment, and prevents us from enjoying the present moment.
Marriage, as philosopher Alain de Botton writes, went “from being an institution to being the consecration of a feeling, from being an externally sanctioned rite of passage to being an internally motivated response to an emotional state.”
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.
In the immediate aftermath, feelings do not lay themselves out neatly along a flowchart of appropriateness. Instead, many of my patients describe swinging back and forth in a rapid succession of contradictory emotions. “I love you! I hate you! Hold me! Don’t touch me! Take your shit and get out! Don’t leave me! You scumbag! Do you still love me? Fuck you! Fuck me!” Such a blitz of reactions is to be expected and is likely to go on for some time.
Being emotionally affected is natural, but projections are unhelpful.
(It is uncanny how the fear of loss can rekindle desire.)
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.
“perhaps robbing someone of his or her story is the greatest betrayal of all.”
as for many, many others, infidelity is not just a loss of love; it is a loss of self.
The shift from shame to guilt is crucial. Shame is a state of self-absorption, while guilt is an empathic, relational response,
In the aftermath of betrayal, authentic guilt, leading to remorse, is an essential repair tool.
