The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity

by Esther Perel

We are willing to concede that the future is unpredictable, but we expect the past to be dependable. Betrayed by our beloved, we suffer the loss of a coherent narrative—the “internal structure that helps us predict and regulate future actions and feelings [creating] a stable sense of self,” as psychiatrist Anna Fels defines it.

In the obsessive drive to root out every facet of an affair lies the existential need to reweave the very tapestry of one’s life. We are meaning-making creatures and we rely on coherence. The interrogations, the flashbacks, the circular ruminations, and the hypervigilance are all manifestations of a scattered life narrative trying to piece itself back together.

Gillian’s dual screens are often X-rated. “Our sex versus their sex. My body; her body. Those hands I love caressing another, those lips kissing hers. Him inside of her, whispering with that irresistible voice, telling her how hot she is. Did they have favorite positions? Was it better than our sex? Did he alternate days between her and me?”

In my conversations with a group of Senegalese women, several of whom had been cheated on by their husbands, none talked about having lost their entire identity. They described sleepless nights, jealousy, endless crying, outbursts of anger. But in their view, husbands cheat because “that’s what men do,” not because their wives are mysteriously inadequate.

Historically, most people anchored their sense of self-worth in complying with the values and expectations of religion and family hierarchy. But in the absence of the old institutions, we are now each in charge of the making and maintaining of our own identity, and the burdens of selfhood have never been heavier. Hence, we are constantly negotiating our sense of self-worth. Sociologist Eva Illouz astutely points out that “the only place where you hope to stop that evaluation is in love. In love you become the winner of the contest, the first and only.” No wonder infidelity throws us into a pit of self-doubt and existential confusion.

“The world as I knew it was over,” Vijay wrote to me. A forty-seven-year-old Anglo-Indian deli manager, with two kids, he’d just discovered an email that his wife, Patti, had sent to her best friend, containing a series of texts between her and her lover. “I felt like I was falling through dark, gravity-less space. I desperately tried to find something to cling to. But almost immediately she was changed. Me too. She seemed cold, retreated. She cried, but it didn’t seem like she was crying for us.”

I have so much contempt for myself, for allowing him to treat me this way. I barely recognize myself anymore.”

Shame is a state of self-absorption, while guilt is an empathic, relational response, inspired by the hurt you have caused another. We know from trauma that healing begins when perpetrators acknowledge their wrongdoing. Often, when one partner insists that they don’t yet feel acknowledged, even as the one who hurt them insists they feel terrible, it is because the response is still more shame than guilt, and therefore self-focused. In the aftermath of betrayal, authentic guilt, leading to remorse, is an essential repair tool. A sincere apology signals a care for and commitment to the relationship, a sharing of the burden of suffering, and a restoration of the balance of power.

During the crisis phase, the responsibility for repair lies primarily with the one who had the affair. In addition to expressing contrition and being receptive to the pain of their partner, he or she can do several other important things.

For her part, Gillian needs to begin to curb her angry outbursts—not because they are unjustified, but because they will not give her what she is really seeking. 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.”

You are not a reject, although part of you has been rejected. You are not a victim, although part of you has been abused. You are also loved, valued, honored, and cherished by others and even by your unfaithful partner, although you may not feel that in this moment. Realizing that she had totally disconnected from her friends after she merged her entire life with the boyfriend who had now left her, one woman made a list of five people she needed to bring back into her life. She took a two-week road trip, rekindling the friendships and reclaiming the parts of herself that each of them valued, and in so doing, she separated the injury from her own essence.

Dress up, even if you don’t feel like it. Let your friends cook you a beautiful dinner. Take that painting class that you’ve been meaning to take for so long. Do things to take care of yourself, that make you feel good, to counter the humiliation and your urge to hide. Many people feel too much shame to do these things when they’ve been cast aside, but that’s exactly what I urge them to do.

A magnifier can be a circumstance. Pregnancy, economic dependency, unemployment, health challenges, immigration status, and countless other life conditions can add to the burden of betrayal. Our family history is a prime magnifier—affairs and other breaches of trust we grew up with or suffered in past relationships can leave us more susceptible. Infidelity always takes place within a web of connections, and the story started long before the acute injury. For some, it confirms a deep-seated fear: “It’s not that he doesn’t love me, it’s that I don’t feel lovable.” And for others, it shatters the image they had of their partner: “I picked you because I was so sure you were not that kind of person.”

Buffers include a strong network of friends and family who are patient and provide a safe space for the complexity of the situation. A well-developed sense of self or a spiritual or religious faith can also mitigate the impact. The quality of the relationship itself, prior to the crisis, always plays a major part. And if one feels that one has options—real estate, savings, job prospects, dating prospects—it not only tempers vulnerability but gives one room to maneuver, inside and out. Parsing the pain points of betrayal helps to identify opportunities for strengthening these protective buffers.

Looking back, he asks himself, “How could I not see?” But it is human nature to cling to our sense of reality, to resist its possible shattering even in the face of irrefutable evidence. I assure him that his “cluelessness” is not something to be ashamed of. This kind of avoidance is not an act of idiocy but an act of self-preservation. It is actually a sophisticated self-protective mechanism known as trauma denial—a type of self-delusion that we employ when too much is at stake and we have too much to lose. The mind needs coherence, so it disposes of inconsistencies that threaten the structure of our lives. This becomes more pronounced when we are betrayed by those we feel closest to and are dependent on—a testament to the lengths we will go to preserve our attachments, however fraught they may be.

Understanding that the issue was not his failure to see the signs, but rather his brother’s profound failure to honor his trust was pivotal for Kevin.

Certainty is searing, but gnawing suspicion is its own kind of agony. When we begin to suspect that our beloved is duplicitous, we become relentless scavengers, sniffing out desire’s carelessly strewn clothes and clues. Sophisticated surveillance experts, we track the minute changes in his face, the indifference in her voice, the unfamiliar smell of his shirt, her lackluster kiss. We tally up the slightest incongruities.

Sometimes the corrosive torment of doubting a partner’s fidelity is made worse by the cruel practice of gaslighting. For months Ruby was asking JP if something was up, and he kept telling her she was crazy, jealous, paranoid. She was almost at the point where she believed him, were it not for the day he left his phone at home. In hindsight, his vociferous denial should have been proof enough. Now she feels doubly betrayed. He made her doubt not just him but her own sanity.

For these people, the specific injuries are shame and isolation. The revelation of an affair can leave the unsuspecting partner in a difficult bind: At the moment they most need others for comfort and affirmation, they are least able to reach out. Unable to draw on the support of friends, they feel doubly alone.

In some cases, it’s the intentional duplicity that burns—the degree of planning it took to pull off such a calculated series of deceptions. The deliberateness implies that the unfaithful partner has weighed his or her desires against their consequences and decided to proceed anyway. Furthermore, the significant investment of time, energy, money, and ingenuity point to the conscious motivation to pursue the selfish motives at the expense of the partner or family.

“The discovery was painful in and of itself,” she tells me, “but when it became clear how much energy and planning it took, that really stung. No wonder he had so little time or energy for us.”

Most of us today take for granted that we will not be the first lover of our chosen partner, but we hope to be the last. We can accept that our beloved has had other relationships, even other marriages, but we like to think of them as transient and past.

Contraception notwithstanding, there are still plenty of cases where there is living proof of the illicit liaison, bringing an additional level of shame and a long-lasting reminder. Men raise children they did not conceive. “Most days, I don’t think about it. I’m just her dad. Every once in a while, though, I ache, knowing that this little girl I love more than anything in the world carries the DNA of the man I despise.”

For the financial provider, the idea that “I’ve been working all these years to support you and this family and now I will have to pay alimony while you go to live with this loser” can be unbearable.

Edith is well into her fifties when she discovers her husband’s decades-long prostitute habit. The lurid nature of it all bothers her, but what really kicks her in the gut is the cost. “I don’t want to sound mercenary,” she tells me, “but twenty years of paid sex—that’s the price of a mortgage!” As she sits at home in their small, rented one-bedroom poring over the credit card bills, those tens of thousands of dollars hurt much more than the sex they paid for.

Money. Babies. STDs. Premeditation. Carelessness. Shame. Self-doubt. Gossip and judgment. The particular person, gender, time, place, social context. If this brief compendium of love’s horror stories shows us anything, it is that while every act of betrayal shares common features, every experience of betrayal is unique. We do no one a service when we reduce affairs to sex and lies, leaving out the many other constitutive elements that create the nuances of the torment and inform the path to healing.

jealousy—“that sickening combination of possessiveness, suspicion, rage, and humiliation [that] can overtake your mind and threaten your very core as you contemplate your rival,”

FYI, what Stuart doesn’t realize is that we may try to hide our jealous feelings, but the one who inspires them always knows—and sometimes even enjoys stoking the embers into maddening flames.

soars. Every couple lives in the shadow of the third, whether they admit it or not, and in some sense, it is the lurking presence of potential others that consolidates their bond.

Jealousy is riddled with contradictions. As captured by the incisive pen of Roland Barthes, the jealous one “suffer[s] four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common.”

“Trauma,” “intrusive thoughts,” “flashbacks,” “obsessiveness,” “vigilance,” and “attachment injury” are the modern vocabulary for betrayed love. This PTSD framework legitimizes our romantic affliction, but it also denudes it of its romantic essence.

To acknowledge jealousy is to admit love, competition, and comparison—all of which expose vulnerability.

It is the type of jealousy that is intrinsic to love and therefore to infidelity. Contained within this simple word are a host of intense feelings and reactions, which can run the spectrum from mourning, self-doubt, and humiliation to possessiveness and rivalry, arousal and excitement, vindictiveness and vengeance, and all the way to violence.

infidelity is not just about broken contracts, it is about broken hearts.

Many couples I see are ashamed to admit the intense erotic charge that sometimes follows the discovery of an affair. “How can I lust for someone who betrayed my trust? I’m so mad at you, but I want you to hold me.” And yet, the need to connect physically with the one who just abandoned us is surprisingly common.

“Jealousy feeds on doubts, and as soon as doubt turns into certainty it becomes a frenzy or ceases to exist.”

What is the difference between envy and jealousy? 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.

How naked we feel when we imagine our partner talking about us with the lover—exposing our private world, our secrets, our weaknesses. We obsess: “What did he say about me?” “Did she make herself out to be a victim of an unhappy marriage?” “Did he slander me, in order to come out looking good?” We can’t control the partner who leaves us, and even less so, the stories they choose to tell about us.

“The images and sensations played over and over like a crypt of dreams. At first they commandeered my thoughts every instant. With time, this stretched to every thirty seconds. Eventually I could make it through a full minute, then hours, then days. Do you know what it’s like not to have freedom of thought?”

“I was, in both senses of the word, occupied … on one side there was the suffering; on the other, my thoughts, incapable of focusing on anything else than the fact and the analysis of this suffering.”

Besides these activated biological circuits, Morgan was also caught in the psychological circuitry of early childhood losses. She was reliving multiple abandonments, some of which occurred even before she could remember, yet her body “kept the score,” as psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk puts it. Injured love sits on top of other injured loves. Like a ricochet effect across time, one breach in the present can trigger the resonance of all the breaches of the past.

Seeing Nigel coveted by another woman yanked her out of her marital torpor and reinstated him once again as an object of sexual desire and herself as a woman in pursuit. There is nothing like the eroticized gaze of the third to challenge our domesticated perceptions of each other.

My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart, concealing it, will break. —Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew

The dagger of romantic betrayal is sharp at both ends. We can use it to slash ourselves, to pinpoint our shortcomings, to underscore our self-loathing. Or we can use it to hurt back, to have the slayer experience the same excruciating pain they inflicted on us.

Often our reactions are unpredictable, even to ourselves. Ming is a mild-mannered woman, a consummate caretaker who never raises her voice. She has perfected the art of self-reproach. She can’t remember a time in her life when she didn’t think that if something was wrong, it was because of her. “My childhood can be summed up in three words,” she recalls. “It’s my fault.” But the roar that came out of her when she discovered her husband’s online prowls surprised her almost more than it did him. She had not exploded like that in years. “Every time he tried to defend himself, I just told him to shut the fuck up. It was like an alter ego came out to defend me. I’ve been letting him act like a jerk for a long time, blaming me for everything, and my response was always to try harder. He actually tried to put his affair on me. He told me that all his friends feel sorry for him because he only has sex twice a week. I tore him apart.”

“She kept on lying and I kept on sniping. We had bad therapy, bad advice from friends. The worst part was that I always felt like she didn’t love me as much as I loved her, but she kept telling me I was just being insecure. Now I know I wasn’t insecure, I was right. Or at least I was right to be insecure.”

In the wake of a betrayal, we often feel deeply unworthy, our feared inadequacies finally confirmed. That old familiar voice may rise from the muddle to remind us that, actually, it’s probably our own fault. A part of us suspects we got what we deserved.

Compounding his lack of confidence is Dylan’s realization that most people around him knew what was going on for almost a year. The discovery that one is “the last to know” delivers a humiliating blow and makes one feel contemptible—as if to say, “no one values or respects you enough to tell you.” Not only has he been betrayed by his girlfriend and his best buddy; he’s lost social status in the eyes of his friends. He imagines them gossiping behind his back, pitying him at best, laughing at him at worst.

Revenge often looks petty, but I have come to respect the depth of hurt it conceals. Unable to reclaim the feelings we’ve lavished, we grab the engagement ring instead. And if that’s not enough, we can always change the wills. 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. But in the end, it’s a zero-sum game. The urge to settle the score corresponds to the intensity of the shame that eats us up. And the deepest shame is that we were stupid enough to trust all along.

We often hear that revenge is sweet, but research and life prove otherwise. Behavioral scientists have observed that instead of quenching hostility, delivering justice, or bringing closure, revenge can in fact keep the unpleasantness of an offense alive. The exultation of self-righteousness is a shallow pleasure that traps us in an obsession with the past. In fact, when we don’t have the opportunity to exact a penalty, we move on to other things faster.