More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
it’s our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.
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.
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.
Affairs are not what they used to be because marriage is not what it used to be.
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.
“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.”
Infidelity is a direct attack on one of our most important psychic structures: our memory of the past.
He sees how bad she feels, but it makes him feel bad about himself (shame), which prevents him from feeling bad for her (guilt).
In the wake of betrayal, we need to find ways to restore our own sense of self-worth—to separate our feelings about ourselves from the way the other person has made us feel.
Sissa describes jealousy as “an honest feeling” because it cannot disguise itself. “It courageously carries its suffering and it has the humble dignity of being able to recognize its vulnerability,”
envy relates to something you want but do not have, whereas jealousy relates to something you have but are afraid of losing.
I wish it were so simple—that we could use such categorical principles to neatly organize our messy human lives. But therapists don’t work with principles—they work with real people and real-life situations.
Respect is not necessarily about telling all, but about considering what it will be like for the other to receive the knowledge.
“I should be able to tell you anything, and I have a right to immediate and constant access to your thoughts and feelings.” This entitlement to know, and the assumption that knowing equals closeness, is a feature of modern love.
“What kind of sex did you have with him?” is often a stand-in for “Don’t you like the sex we have?” What you want to know is legitimate, but how you go about asking it makes all the difference to your peace of mind.
The quest for the unexplored self is a powerful theme of the adulterous narrative.
As children we have the opportunity to play at other roles; as adults we often find ourselves confined by the ones we’ve been assigned or the ones we have chosen.
At its best monogamy may be the wish to find someone to die with; at its worst it is a cure for the terrors of aliveness. They are easily confused. —Adam Phillips, Monogamy
“You fell hard for this guy, so it can’t have been all bad. Yes, you feel guilty, but nevertheless, you say he made you feel alive. Tell me more.”
“women choose good relationships over sexual pleasure.”
She knows what turns her on, but she also knows what is more important than being turned on.
Yet marriage and motherhood demand a level of selflessness that is at odds with the inherent selfishness of desire.
Reconciling the erotic and the domestic is not a problem to solve; it is a paradox to manage.
In London alone, there are 80,000 prostitutes. What are they but … human sacrifices offered up on the altar of monogamy? —Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism
The relationship may be very loving, affectionate, and tender, but it is devoid of desire.
Once we grace both men and women with a more nuanced understanding of their sexuality, we will have a better grasp of their infidelity.
This is where men and women differ. Men are much more likely to soothe their inner rumblings by turning to less emotionally complicated forms of sex, including solitary pleasures and paid ones.
As more than one man has said to me, you don’t pay the hooker to come—you pay her to leave.
when he’s caged by intimacy or unable to connect, is it sex he buys or is it kindness, warmth, friendship, escape, control, and validation all delivered in a sexual transaction?
Our culture tends to minimize the importance of sex for the well-being of a couple.
“Tell me how you were loved and I will know a lot about how you make love” is one of my guiding questions.
The worst moment was when someone got up and shared a memory of how he used to point to his wife and say, ‘Isn’t she gorgeous? Isn’t she wonderful?’ He used to say exactly the same thing to my mother.
Most of the clinical literature on affairs is dyadic, even though affairs are de facto triangular.
Yes, the lover gets the lust without the laundry, but she lives without legitimacy—a position that inevitably erodes self-esteem and confidence.
By remaining in a diffuse state, people avoid both loneliness and commitment.
This strange mix of comforting consistency and uncertainty is increasingly common to relationships in the age of Tinder, but it’s long been characteristic of extramarital liaisons.
He invites us to recognize that our values evolve as we mature and “move from an understanding of ethical and moral issues in black and white absolutist terms to comprehending the gray ambiguity of most matters.”
Every affair redefines a relationship, and every relationship will determine what the legacy of the affair will be.
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?
When a couple tries to safeguard their relationship through various forms of surveillance and self-policing, they risk setting themselves up for the exact opposite: the “enhanced eroticization of transgressions.”
Couples who feel free to talk honestly about their desires, even when they are not directed at each other, paradoxically become closer.
Each of these long-standing couples has chosen not to ignore the lure of the forbidden, but rather to subvert its power by inviting it in.
