The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity

by Esther Perel

infidelity has a tenacity that marriage can only envy. So much so that it is the only sin that gets two commandments in the Bible, one for doing it and one just for thinking about it.

Affairs are an act of betrayal and they are also an expression of longing and loss.

For me, infidelity includes one or more of these three constitutive elements: secrecy, sexual alchemy, and emotional involvement.

Adulterous love resides in a self-contained universe, secluded from the rest of the world. Affairs blossom in the margins of our lives, and as long as they are not exposed to broad daylight, their spell is preserved.

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.

Andy Stanley says something similar.

Sometimes, however, the term “emotional affair” is applied to relationships that are genuinely platonic but are perceived to be “too close.”

We fulfilled our conjugal responsibilities in return for a much-needed sense of security and belonging. Love might arise, but it certainly was not essential. In any event, it was too flimsy an emotion to support such a weighty institution.

Monogamy used to mean one person for life. Now monogamy means one person at a time.

Emotional closeness has shifted from being the by-product of a long-term relationship to being a mandate for one.

Never before have our expectations of marriage taken on such epic proportions. 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.

The perfection we long to experience in earthly love used to be sought only in the sanctuary of the divine. When we imbue our partner with godly attributes and we expect him or her to uplift us from the mundane to the sublime, we create, as Johnson puts it, an “unholy muddle of two holy loves” that cannot help but disappoint.

Funny enough, this is EXACTLY what Tim Keller writes. If you look to anything - even a spouse - to provide what only God can, you will be disappointed.

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.

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

infidelity casts its shadows far beyond the triangle of lovers.

Every relationship, from the most stringent to the most lenient, has boundaries, and boundaries invite trespassers.

Sometimes the affair was better off in its clandestine form, because when it became a marriage, the fantasy was lost.

What many people want to know, then, is what they can learn from affairs without necessarily having to go through one. It comes down to two questions: How can we better fortify our relationship against infidelity? And how can we bring some of the erotic vitality of illicit love into our authorized unions?