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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.
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.
In our consumer society, novelty is key. The obsoleteness of objects is programmed in advance so that it ensures our desire to replace them. And the couple is indeed no exception to these trends. We live in a culture that continually lures us with the promise of something better, younger, perkier. Hence we no longer divorce because we’re unhappy; we divorce because we could be happier.
“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.”
When marriage was an economic arrangement, infidelity threatened our economic security; today marriage is a romantic arrangement and infidelity threatens our emotional security.
Anger may make her feel more powerful, temporarily. However, psychologist Steven Stosny observes that “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.”
People stray for a multitude of reasons, and every time I think I have heard them all, a new variation emerges. But one theme comes up repeatedly: affairs as a form of self-discovery, a quest for a new (or a lost) identity.
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.
As psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell has insightfully pointed out, we crave security and we crave adventure, but these two fundamental needs spring from different motives and pull us in different directions throughout our lives—played out in the tensions between separateness and togetherness, individuality and intimacy, freedom and commitment.
Reconciling the erotic and the domestic is not a problem to solve; it is a paradox to manage.
In my work I have identified three basic post-infidelity outcomes for couples who choose to stay together (with thanks to Helen Fisher for the typology): those who get stuck in the past (the sufferers); those who pull themselves up by the bootstraps and let it go (the builders); and those who rise above the ashes and create a better union (the explorers).
I began this book with the analogy that while many people have positive, life-changing experiences as a result of terminal illness, I would no more recommend having an affair than I would recommend getting cancer.
