Scheinkman suggests that rather than presume we are failing at marriage when we can’t make this “being all things” business work, we might consider the “segmented model” of marriage that exists in Europe and Latin America, where it’s understood that marriage will fulfill some needs but not others. Affairs and marriage are separate domains in some of these contexts, and affairs are more likely to be presumed “private” than “pathological.” Scheinkman critiques what she calls the “dogmatic no secrets policy” that tends to prevail in our fifty states of affairs and in the therapy sessions where we
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