The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity

by Esther Perel

Anger is an analgesic that temporarily numbs the pain and an amphetamine that provides a surge of energy and confidence. More biology than psychology, anger temporarily eases loss, self-doubt, and powerlessness. While it can at times be a positive motivator, more often, as psychologist Steven Stosny cautions, “Bouts of anger and resentment always drop you down lower than the point at which they picked you up.”

In moments when one is flooded with emotion, it’s important to know how to self-regulate. Breathing exercises, soothing hot showers, bracing cold lakes, walks in nature, singing and dancing to music, and active sports can all be helpful. Stillness and movement can both be sources of relief.

His quandary echoes the legacies of masculinity. What kind of man lets a woman call the shots? It’s no accident that the cuckolded heroes of the great dramas and operas tend to kill their beloved rather than give her the freedom not to choose them. Death—of her, of him, or of them both—is the only honorable way out. “The heart that bleeds wants blood to wash away the shame,” croons Canio in Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci.

The twists and tangles of lying are endless. Many unfaithful spouses tell me that their love affairs represent the first time they’ve stopped lying to themselves. Paradoxically, while engaged in a relationship built on deceit, they often feel that for the first time they are touching truth, connecting with something more essential, authentic, and sincere than their so-called real life.

“Why would I tell my wife?” Yuri asks. “Since I met Anat, we don’t fight about sex anymore. I don’t beg her and I don’t bug her, and my family is doing well.”

This policy does not apply just to affairs. In fact, the turning point for me was a session in which a woman told me that for the past twenty years she couldn’t wait for sex with her husband to be over. She didn’t like his smell and faked her orgasms. Knowing that this wouldn’t change and not considering it a marital dealbreaker, she didn’t see the point of telling him. I was willing to proceed with therapy cognizant of her pretense. So I had to ask myself, How is this secret fundamentally different from others?

“Yes, I may feel attractions, but because I love you and I respect you, and I don’t want to hurt you again, I will choose not to act on it.”

“You can’t ‘prevent’ someone from betraying you again. They either choose to be faithful or they don’t. If they want to be unfaithful, all the monitoring in the world won’t stop them.”

The “symptom” theory goes as follows: An affair simply alerts us to a preexisting condition, either a troubled relationship or a troubled person. And in many cases, this holds true. Plenty of relationships culminate in an affair to compensate for a lack, to fill a void, or to set up an exit. Insecure attachment, conflict avoidance, prolonged lack of sex, loneliness, or just years of being stuck rehashing the same old arguments—many adulterers are motivated by marital dysfunction. And plenty has been written about trouble leading to trouble. However, therapists are confronted on a daily basis with situations that defy these well-documented reasons. How are we to interpret these?

The idea that infidelity can happen in the absence of serious marital problems is hard to accept. Our culture does not believe in no-fault affairs. So when we can’t blame the relationship, we tend to blame the individual instead.

Jeff’s wife, Sheryl, just discovered a slew of evidence that he has been cruising BDSM* sites and meeting strangers for sex. After many sessions with a therapist, Jeff is now convinced he is a “sex addict” who self-medicates his depression in the dungeon. His wife agrees, and indeed, it may be true. But medicalizing his behavior should not be used as a deflection from honestly exploring the uneasy territory of his kinky predilections. It’s easier to label than to delve.

But too often, when we jump to diagnosis too quickly, we short-circuit the meaning-making process.

I had always been told that sexual problems are the consequence of relationship problems, and that if you fix the relationship, the sex will follow. While that was indeed the case for lots of couples, I was seeing countless others who kept telling me, “We love each other very much. We have a great relationship. Except for the fact that we have no sex.” Clearly, their sexual impasse was not merely a symptom of a romance gone awry. We had to look in less obvious places for the roots of their erotic demise—which meant talking directly about sex, something couples therapists often prefer to avoid.

Why do happy people cheat?

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. For these seekers, infidelity is less likely to be a symptom of a problem, and is more often described as an expansive experience that involves growth, exploration, and transformation.

“I’ve always been good. Good daughter, good wife, good mother. Dutiful. Straight As.” Priya comes from an Indian immigrant family of modest means. For her, “what do I want?” has never been separated from “what do they want from me?” She never partied, drank, or stayed out late, and she had her first joint at twenty-two. After medical school, she married the right guy and even welcomed her parents into their home before buying them a retirement condo. At forty-seven, she is left with the nagging question, “If I’m not perfect, will they still love me?” In the back of her mind there is a voice that wonders what life is like for those who are not so “good.” Are they more lonely? More free? Do they have more fun? Priya’s affair is neither a symptom nor a pathology; it’s a crisis of identity, an internal rearrangement of her personality. In our sessions, we talk about duty and desire, about age and youth. Her daughters are becoming teenagers and enjoying a freedom she never knew. Priya is at once supportive and envious. As she nears the mid-century mark, she is having her own belated adolescent rebellion.

Affairs are, by definition, precarious, elusive, and ambiguous. The indeterminacy, the uncertainty, the not knowing when I’ll see you again—feelings we would never tolerate in our primary relationship—become kindling for anticipation in a hidden romance. Because we cannot have the lover, it ensures that we keep wanting, for we always want that which we cannot have. It is this just-out-of-reach quality that lends affairs their erotic mystique and ensures that the flame of desire keeps burning.

Interestingly, very few such affairs actually survive discovery. One would think that a relationship for which so much was risked would endure the transition into daylight. Under the spell of passion, lovers speak longingly of all the things they will be able to do when they are finally together. Yet when the prohibition is lifted, when the divorce comes through, when the sublime mixes with the ordinary and the affair enters the real world, what then? Some settle into happy legitimacy, but many more do not. In my experience, most affairs end, even if the marriage ends as well.

The affair lives in the shadow of the marriage, but the marriage also lives in the center of the affair. Without its delicious illegitimacy, can the relationship with the lover remain enticing? If Priya and her tattooed beau had their own bedroom, would they be as giddy as in the back of his truck?

From a psychological perspective, our relationship to the forbidden sheds a light on the darker and less straightforward aspects of our humanity. Transgression is at the heart of human nature. Moreover, as many of us remember from our childhood, there is a thrill in hiding, sneaking, being bad, being afraid of being discovered, and getting away with it. As adults, we can find this a powerful aphrodisiac. The risk of being caught doing something naughty or dirty, the breaking of taboos, the pushing of boundaries—all of these are titillating experiences.

Morin’s now-famous “erotic equation” states that “attraction plus obstacles equal excitement.” High states of arousal, he explains, flow from the tension between persistent problems and triumphant solutions. We are most intensely excited when we are a little off-balance, uncertain, “poised on the perilous edge between ecstasy and disaster.”

This insight into our human propensities helps to shed light on why people in happy, stable relationships are lured by the charge of transgression. For Priya, the question is bewitching: What if just this once I act as if the rules don’t apply to me?

The quest for the unexplored self is a powerful theme of the adulterous narrative. Priya’s parallel universe transported her to the teenager she never was. Others find themselves drawn by the memory of the person they once were. And then there are those whose reveries take them back to the missed opportunities, the ones that got away, and the person they could have been.

in modern life, “there is always a suspicion … that one is living a lie or a mistake; that something crucially important has been overlooked, missed, neglected, left untried, and unexplored; that a vital obligation to one’s own authentic self has not been met or that some chances of unknown happiness completely different from any happiness experienced before have not been taken up in time and are bound to be lost forever if they continue to be neglected.” He speaks directly to our nostalgia for unlived lives, unexplored identities, and roads not taken.

When we select a partner, we commit to a story. Yet we remain forever curious: What other stories could we have been part of? Affairs offer us a window into those other lives, a peek at the stranger within. Adultery is often the revenge of the deserted possibilities.

In the past decade, it seems to me that affairs with exes have proliferated, thanks to social media. These retrospective encounters occupy a place somewhere between the known and the unknown—bringing together the familiarity of someone you once knew with the freshness created by the passage of time. The flicker with an old flame offers a unique combination of built-in trust, risk-taking, and vulnerability. In addition, it is a magnet for our lingering nostalgia. The person I once was, but lost, is the person you once knew.

Their relationship had many facets—deep professional respect, creative partnership, intellectual camaraderie, erotic passion, and humor.

As I listen to her, it begins to fall into place why this revelation plunged her into such despair. Her husband did not just fall in love with another woman—he fell for the woman Julie could have been. Cynthia does not just represent some new part of Ayo that he is discovering. She also represents everything his wife gave up. It could have been Julie working at his side, sharing his passions, and celebrating their successes together. She chose differently, and there is no going back for her. Meanwhile, he has the option of doing a take two.

The one theme that I hear above all else from those who have bitten into the forbidden apple is this: It makes them feel alive.

“My husband hadn’t been able to get my juices flowing in more than a decade,” Alison exclaims. “I was thirty-five and convinced there was something medically wrong with me. In all other ways, we share so much. He’s my best friend, my copilot, and from the outside, we look perfect. Then Dino showed up, and with just a few words and suggestions, he did what all the lubricants and toys had not been able to do for me. It was an amazing feeling—as if he activated me.”

When I ask people what “being alive” means, they lay out a multifaceted experience. Power, validation, confidence, and freedom are the most common flavors. Add to these the elixir of love, and you have an intoxicating cocktail. There is the sexual awakening or reawakening, of course, but it doesn’t stop there. The awakened describe a sense of movement when they had felt constricted, an opening up of possibilities in a life that had narrowed down to a single predictable path, a surge of emotional intensity where everything seemed bland. I have come to think of encounters like these as existential affairs, because they cut deep to the essence of life itself.

When Danica’s husband, Stefan, followed the trail of texts and uncovered her eighteen-month affair with the man who made her feel alive, he felt kicked in the gut. “I can still feel your hands all over me,” she’d written. “Perhaps we can sneak out at lunch again? I dressed especially for you.” But he also recognized in those missives the vital and playful woman he’d once fallen in love with—a woman he’d barely seen in years.

She continues: “There are so many things going on at home. If it’s not the kids, it’s my parents. I often feel it’s all too much. I don’t even have time to take my coat off when I walk through the door. I go from one thing to the next, and by the end I am exhausted. Things changed for me that fall. I would go to the office and I’d feel worthy, in my element, even a little giddy.” Her encounter with Luiz infused her life with a renewed sense of joy and anticipation, both potent erotic ingredients that had long since disappeared from the marital home.

In the early stages of a relationship, this merger of contraries seems perfectly reasonable. Security and adventure rarely start out looking like an either-or proposition. The honeymoon phase is special in that it brings together the relief of reciprocated love with the excitement of a future still to be created. What we often don’t realize is that the exuberance of the beginning is fueled by its undercurrent of uncertainty. We set out to make love more secure and dependable, but in the process, inevitably we dial down its intensity. On the path of commitment, we happily trade a little passion for a bit more certainty, some excitement for some stability. What we don’t anticipate is that the hidden price we may pay is the erotic vitality of our relationships.

The permanence and stability that we seek in our intimate connections can stifle their sexual spark, leading to what Mitchell calls “expressions of exuberant defiance,” otherwise known as affairs. Adulterers find themselves longing to untangle themselves from the constraints of security and conventions—the very security they so arduously sought to establish in their primary relationship.

Danica is hardly the first woman who shuts down at home and wakes up outside. Hers is an archetypal tale of the muting of eros. I see women like her all the time—usually dragged into therapy by their frustrated husbands who are tired of being rejected, night after night. The typical complaint is: she is totally absorbed with the kids and has zero interest in sex. “No matter how many dishes I wash, I can’t get lucky.” But it’s those very same women, I’ve found, who “come alive” in a completely unexpected romance.

Many men struggle to understand how the woman who can’t be bothered in the marital bed is suddenly having a torrid affair in which she can’t get enough. For years, they’ve been thinking she’s just not interested in sex, period; now, with new evidence in hand, they reconsider—“she must not be interested in sex with me.” In some cases, a woman’s roaming desires may indeed be a reaction to an unimaginative husband, but not always. In fact, Stefan is a romantic who loves to set the stage for his wife’s pleasure, but her typical reaction is “let’s not make a production out of this. Shall we?” With Luiz, however, she reveled in the many-act play of languorous lovemaking—and made it last even longer in the multiple texts that followed.

The wife can’t wait for sex to be over. The lover wishes it would never end. It’s easy to think that it’s the men who make the difference. But the context matters more. And by context I mean the story she weaves for herself and the character she gets to play within it. Home, marriage, and motherhood have forever been...

Stefan, understandably, has not deciphered this puzzle of the feminine senses. Like many men, when his wife withdrew, he concluded that she didn’t like sex. This leads us to another common misunderstanding that Meana’s work has highlighted: We interpret the lack of sexual interest as proof that women’s sexual drive is inherently less strong. Perhaps it would be more accurate to think that it is a drive that needs to be stoked more intensely and more imaginatively—and first and foremost by her, not only by her partner.

In the transition to marriage, too many women experience their sexuality as shifting from desire to duty. When it becomes something she should do, it no longer is something she wants to do. By contrast, when a woman has an affair, she brings a self-determination to her pleasure. What is activated in the affair is her will—she pursues her own satisfaction.

I tell him, “With Luiz, she doesn’t have to think about the kids, the bills, the dinner—all things that make her feel erotically drab. Put him in your place, and he’d soon have the same fate.” “Erotic silence” is the term psychotherapist and author Dalma Heyn uses to describe this predicament—an “unexpected, in-articulable deadening of pleasure and vitality” that happens to some women after they tie the knot. “A woman’s sexuality depends on her authenticity and self-nurturance,” she writes. Yet marriage and motherhood demand a level of selflessness that is at odds with the inherent selfishness of desire. Being responsible for others makes it harder for women to focus on their own needs, to feel spontaneous, sexually expressive, and carefree. For many, finding at home the kind of self-absorption that is essential to erotic pleasure proves a challenge. The burdens of caretaking are indeed a powerful anti-aphrodisiac.

When a woman struggles to stay connected to herself, an affair is often a venue for self-reclamation. Like the heroes of ancient mythology, she leaves home to find herself. Her secret liaison becomes one thing in her life that is for her alone—a stamp of autonomy. When you have an affair, you know for a fact that you’re not doing it to take care of anyone else. Heyn’s subjects confirm the self-realization that is inherent in this kind of romance. “Whereas before their affairs these women experienced their bodies as fragmented, their voices muted, some vital organ or aspect of their personality missing, during the affair and after it they became changed. They let go of those muffled feelings and entered a clear reality, one filled with color and vibrancy, in which they felt alive and awake and strong and focused.”

They too begin to roam not just in search of more, or more exciting, sex but in search of connection, intensity, aliveness. Ironically, as the adulterous wheel turns, they will often end up meeting a woman who at home feels just like their wife and is seeking her own awakening elsewhere.

Their findings identify three core themes that “represent dragging forces on sexual desire.” First, the institutionalization of relationships—a passage from freedom and independence to commitment and responsibility. Second, the overfamiliarity that develops when intimacy and closeness replace individuality and mystery. And lastly, the desexualizing nature of certain roles—mother, wife, and house manager all promote the de-eroticization of the self.

For those who struggle to maintain this delicate balance between opposites, it is easy to see why infidelity offers an enticing proposition. The structure of the affair is anything but institutionalized, a sure pathway to freedom and independence. It is, as Sims and Meana put it, a zone of “liminality”—an abdication of rules and responsibilities, an active pursuit of pleasure, a transcendence of the limits of reality. There is certainly no risk of the overfamiliarity that comes from sharing a bathroom for decades. Mystery, novelty, and the unknown are built in. And the role of lover is quintessentially sexual, while the mother, the wife, and the housekeeper are left safely locked up at home.

I often say to my patients that if they could bring into their relationships even a tenth of the boldness, the playfulness, and the verve that they bring to their affairs, their home life would feel quite different. Our creative imagination seems to be richer when it comes to our transgressions than to our commitments.

For him, the deepest wound is not that she went elsewhere—it’s that she showed him what was possible and then seems unable or unwilling to share it with him. As long as he thought she simply didn’t have it in her anymore, he was resigned. Now he too is feeling entitled to more ardor, and the idea of going back to the tepidity is terrifying for him.

Sadly, bringing lust home proves more difficult than he imagined. When he writes to me, eighteen months later, he is still waiting to meet the flowering summer tree, and his hopes are fading.

In the twisting tale of adultery, however, things are not always what they seem. Plenty of women’s affairs are driven by physical desire. And plenty of men’s escapades are fueled by complex emotional needs—including many whose brand of infidelity tends toward casual or commercial conquests.

His last comment is not so strange to me—it’s an important clue to his impasse. It’s one thing to lose interest; there are plenty of people for whom voraciousness mellows into tenderness. But what he describes is more visceral—an aversive sexual response to his partner, almost as though it would mean crossing a forbidden line. This sense of taboo alerts me to the possible presence of what therapist Jack Morin calls a “love-lust split.”