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.

As a culture we’ve become sexually open to the point of overflowing, but when it comes to sexual fidelity, even the most liberal minds can remain intransigent.

The intricacies of love and desire don’t yield to simple categorizations of good and bad, victim and culprit. To be clear, not condemning does not mean condoning, and there is a world of difference between understanding and justifying. But when we reduce the conversation to simply passing judgment, we are left with no conversation at all.

I believe that some good may come out of the crisis of infidelity, I have often been asked, “So, would you recommend an affair to a struggling couple?” My response? A lot of people have positive, life-changing experiences that come along with terminal illness. But I would no more recommend having an affair than I would recommend getting cancer.

Catastrophe has a way of propelling us into the essence of things. I encourage you not to wait for a storm, but to address these ideas in a quieter climate.

Once divorce carried all the stigma. Now, choosing to stay when you can leave is the new shame.

The rush to divorce makes no allowance for error, for human fragility. It also makes no allowance for repair, resilience, and recovery.

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.

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. Some couples work out their commitments head-on, but most go by trial and error. Relationships are a patchwork of unspoken rules and roles that we begin stitching on the first date.

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.

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

the concealment that is frowned upon in one corner of our planet is reframed as “discretion” in others.

it’s our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.

Do we expect our partners’ erotic selves to belong entirely to us? I’m talking about thoughts, fantasies, dreams, and memories, and also turn-ons, attractions, and self-pleasure. These aspects of sexuality can be personal, and part of our sovereign selfhood—existing in our own secret garden. But some people view everything sexual as a domain that must be shared.

First we brought love to marriage. Then we brought sex to love. And then we linked marital happiness with sexual satisfaction. Sex for procreation gave way to sex for recreation.

The discovery of an affair can be all-consuming. So much so that we forget that it is only one chapter in the larger story of a couple.

Infidelity is a direct attack on one of our most important psychic structures: our memory of the past. It not only hijacks a couple’s hopes and plans but also draws a question mark over their history. If we can’t look back with any certainty and we can’t know what will happen tomorrow, where does that leave us? 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.” 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,”

Gillian may be socially more emancipated, but her identity and self-worth have been mortgaged to romantic love. And when love calls in its debts, it can be a ruthless creditor.

To acknowledge jealousy is to admit love, competition, and comparison—all of which expose vulnerability. And even more so when you expose yourself to the one who hurt you. The green-eyed monster taunts us at our most defenseless and puts us directly in touch with our insecurities, our fear of loss, and our lack of self-worth. This is not delusional or pathological jealousy (sometimes called the black-eyed monster), where unfounded suspicion is fed more by childhood trauma than by any current cause. 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.