The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity

by Esther Perel

Some people will dismiss these as irrelevancies. Only the facts matter, they tell me. The plane is down; grab the survivors and run. But more and more people come to me because they want to know what happened, why it crashed, and whether it could have been prevented. They want to understand it, learn from it, and fly again.

At this very moment, in all corners of the world, someone is either cheating or being cheated on, thinking about having an affair, offering advice to someone who is in the throes of one, or completing the triangle as a secret lover.

universally forbidden yet universally practiced?

The echoes of secrets and lies resound across generations, leaving unrequited loves and shattered hearts in their wake. Infidelity is not merely a story of two or three; it binds entire networks.

Of course, I’ve come across my share of narcissists, sexual omnivores, and careless, selfish, or vengeful people. I have seen extreme acts of deceit, where unsuspecting partners have been blindsided by the discovery of second families, covert bank accounts, reckless promiscuity, and elaborate schemes of duplicity. I’ve sat across from men and women who brazenly lie to me for the entire duration of the therapy. But more often, what I see are scores of committed men and women with shared histories and values—values that often include monogamy—whose stories unfold along a more humble human trajectory. Loneliness, years of sexual deadness, resentment, regret, marital neglect, lost youth, craving attention, canceled flights, too much to drink—these are the nuts and bolts of everyday infidelity.

Paradoxically, many people go outside their marriages in order to preserve them. When relationships become abusive, transgression can be a generative force. Straying can sound an alarm that signals an urgent need to pay attention, or it can be the death knell that follows a relationship’s last gasp. Affairs are an act of betrayal and they are also an expression of longing and loss.

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.

Susie’s message is full of righteous anger, on her mother’s behalf. “She was a saint who stayed with my father until death despite his long-standing affair.” I wonder if she has ever considered telling the story another way. What if her father sincerely loved another woman but stayed and sacrificed himself for his family?

Affairs have a lot to teach us about relationships. They open the door to a deeper examination of values, human nature, and the power of eros. They force us to grapple with some of the most unsettling questions: What draws people outside the lines they worked so hard to establish? Why does sexual betrayal hurt so much? Is an affair always selfish and weak, or can it in some cases be understandable, acceptable, even an act of boldness and courage? And whether we have known this drama or not, what can we draw from the excitement of infidelity to enliven our relationships? Must a secret love always be revealed? Does passion have a finite shelf life? And are there fulfillments that a marriage, even a good one, can never provide? How do we negotiate the elusive balance between our emotional needs and our erotic desires? Has monogamy outlived its usefulness? What is fidelity? Can we love more than one person at once?

For me, 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. Catastrophe has a way of propelling us into the essence of things.

Divorce. In all the heated debates about infidelity, online and off, that one word crops up over and over again. If you’re thinking of having an affair, get a divorce. If you’re unhappy enough to cheat, you’re unhappy enough to leave. And if your partner has an affair, call the lawyer immediately.

The risk is that in the throes of pain and humiliation, we too hastily conflate our reactions to the affair with our feelings about the whole relationship. History is rewritten, bridges are burned along with the wedding photos, and children divide their lives between two homes.

Ultimately, the problem with the judgmental, highly charged, and repressive conversation about infidelity is that it precludes any possibility for deeper understanding, and therefore for hope and healing—together or apart. Victimization makes marriages more fragile. Of course, when Julian cheats on Jessica while she is home changing her toddler’s diapers, it is helpful for her to get in touch with her anger, an appropriate response to this disfigurement of their relationship.

We have nothing to gain from breeding bitter, vengeful, and divisive sentiments. Exhibit A is the woman I met whose indignation was so intense that she told her five-year-old about her husband’s years of sexual misconduct “because my son should know why Mommy’s crying.”

When a couple comes to me in the aftermath of an affair, I often tell them this: Your first marriage is over. Would you like to create a second one together?

And many fingers point to women as being responsible for the increase, as they rapidly close the “infidelity gap” (research indicates a 40 percent jump since 1990, while men’s rates have held steady.) In fact, when the definition of infidelity includes not only “sexual intercourse” but also romantic involvement, kissing, and other sexual contact, female college students significantly outcheat their male counterparts.

The Internet has made sex “accessible, affordable, and anonymous,” as the late researcher Al Cooper pointed out. All of these apply equally to infidelity, and I’d add another a-word: ambiguous. When it’s no longer an exchange of kisses but an exchange of dick pics; when the hour in a motel room has become a late-night Snapchat; when the secretive lunch has been replaced with a secret Facebook account, how are we supposed to know what constitutes an affair? As a result of this burgeoning field of furtive activities, we need to carefully rethink how we conceptualize infidelity in the digital age.

When you catch your partner in bed with another, or find the email trail of a multiyear parallel life, again, it’s pretty obvious.

inheritances. At the core of betrayal today is a violation of trust: We expect our partner to act according to our shared set of assumptions, and we base our own behavior on that. It’s not necessarily a particular sexual or emotional behavior that comprises the betrayal; rather, it is the fact that the behavior is not within the couple’s agreement. Sounds fair enough. But the problem is that for most of us, these agreements are not something we spend much time explicitly negotiating. In fact, to call them “agreements” at all is perhaps a stretch.

For modern love’s idealists, however, the very act of explicitly addressing monogamy seems to call into question the assumption of specialness that is at the heart of the romantic dream. Once we have found “the one,” we believe there should be no need for, no desire for, and no attraction to any other. Hence, our rental agreements are much more elaborate than our relational agreements. 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.

Secrecy is the number one organizing principle of an infidelity. An affair always lives in the shadow of the primary relationship, hoping never to be discovered. The secrecy is precisely what intensifies the erotic charge.

Affairs are a pathway to risk, danger, and the defiant energy of transgression. Unsure of the next date, we are ensured the excitement of anticipation. 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.

By talking about sexual alchemy, I want to clarify that affairs sometimes involve sex and sometimes not, but they are always erotic. As Marcel Proust understood, it’s our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.

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.

At times, we define infidelity; other times, it defines us. We may be tempted to see the roles in the adulterous triangle as quite set—the betrayed spouse, the cheater, the lover. 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.

Heather, a single professional New Yorker at the cusp of her fertility peak, is still hoping for happily ever after. A couple of years ago, she broke up with her fiancé, Fred. She had discovered a folder on his computer filled with messages to escorts with all sorts of kinky requests and scheduled rendezvous. She felt betrayed by this sexual sidebar, but she was even more upset that he had checked out on her. She craved a dynamic hot monogamy, but he took his testosterone elsewhere and brought home a phlegmatic passionless version of himself.

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.

Traditional wedlock had a clear mandate based on well-defined gender roles and division of labor. As long as each person did what she or he was supposed to do, it was a good match. “He works hard. He doesn’t drink. He provides for us.” “She’s a good cook. She’s given me many children. She keeps a tidy household.” It was a system in which gender inequality was etched in the law and encoded in the cultural DNA. When women married, they relinquished their individual rights and property, and indeed, they became property themselves.

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.

Contained within the small circle of the wedding band are vastly contradictory ideals. We want our chosen one to offer stability, safety, predictability, and dependability—all the anchoring experiences. And we want that very same person to supply awe, mystery, adventure, and risk. Give me comfort and give me edge. Give me familiarity and give me novelty. Give me continuity and give me surprise. Lovers today seek to bring under one roof desires that have forever had separate dwellings.

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.

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.

that the “cornerstone” paradigm has an expectation of difficulty built into it, while the “capstone” does not. Couples who marry young are expected to struggle and to come out stronger for it. Hence, the cornerstone model “doesn’t condone infidelity so much as it concedes its near-inevitability.” In contrast, he observes, “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.”

These days, most of us arrive at the altar after years of sexual nomadism. By the time we tie the knot, we’ve hooked up, dated, cohabited, and broken up. We used to get married and have sex for the first time. Now we get married and we stop having sex with others.

By turning our backs on other loves, we confirm the uniqueness of our “significant other.” “I have found The One. I can stop looking.” Miraculously, our desire for others is supposed to evaporate, vanquished by the power of this singular attraction. In a world where it is so easy to feel insignificant—to be laid off, disposable, deleted with a click, unfriended—being chosen has taken on an importance it never had before. 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.

“How can this hurt so badly when no one has died?”

If you really want to gut a relationship, to tear out the very heart of it, infidelity is a sure bet. It is betrayal on so many levels: deceit, abandonment, rejection, humiliation—all the things love promised to protect us from. When the one you relied upon is the one who has lied to your face, treated you as unworthy of basic respect, the world you thought you lived in is turned upside down.

“How long has this been going on?” Eight years. In Gillian’s case, the number works like dynamite. “That’s a third of our marriage!”

“I felt full of shame and very, very stupid. I was so gullible, so easy to lie to, that at one point he actually concluded that I probably knew because, hey, who could be so dumb? I have so much shock, rage, and jealousy inside. When the anger subsides, it’s all pure hurt. Disbelief followed by crushing belief. I really have no compass for this.”

Adultery has always hurt. But for modern love’s acolytes, it seems to hurt more than ever. In fact, the maelstrom of emotions that are unleashed in the wake of an affair is so overwhelming that many contemporary psychologists borrow from the field of trauma to explain the symptoms: obsessive rumination, hypervigilance, numbness and dissociation, inexplicable rages and uncontrollable panic. Treating infidelity has become a specialty among mental health professionals—myself included—in part because the experience is so cataclysmic that couples can’t manage the emotional fallout alone and need intervention if they hope to make it through.

As hard as it is to do in these moments, I often caution couples to separate their feelings about the affair from their decisions about the relationship. Too often their impulsive responses, while meant to be protective, can destroy years of positive marital capital in an instant.

It speaks to both the isolation of modern coupledom and the stigma of infidelity that the therapist is often the only person to know what is going on at this early stage—the stable base to support their collapse.

two people grappling with the fact that they have been living in different realities and only one of them knew it.

Whether we were totally blindsided or had been tracking the spores of evidence all along, nothing prepares us for the actual unveiling.

Today, courtesy of technological memory, Gillian is more likely to burrow into the excruciating details of her husband’s duplicity. She can study her own humiliation, memorizing pages of painful electronic evidence.

Anyone can be a hacker these days. For all the years that Ang was watching porn, Sydney thought, That’s his business. But when he lost all interest in sex with her, she decided that now it was her business. A girlfriend told her about some spyware she could use to track his online activities. “I would sit there at my desk, watching these videos, knowing that he was watching them at the same time, jerking off, for hours on end. It messed with my head. At first I started dressing and acting more like those porn girls, thinking I could win him back. In the end, I felt betrayed, not only by him but more by myself.”

“I keep reading the emails, trying to fit it all together. Hundreds of texts between them in a single day—from seven A.M. till midnight. The affair was present all the time, in the midst of our life. What was I doing when he wrote that? At nine-twelve P.M. on August 5, 2009, we were celebrating my fifty-first birthday. Did he run to the bathroom to text her just before he sang ‘Happy Birthday,’ or was it after?”

Psychologist Peter Fraenkel emphasizes how the betrayed partner is “rigidly stuck in the present, overwhelmed by the relentless progression of disturbing facts about the affair.”