Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

by Jordan B. Peterson

I have seen people who were in custody battles who would seriously have preferred cancer. It is no joke to have your arm caught in the dangerous machinery of the courts. You spend much of the time truly wishing you were dead. So that is your “affair,” for God’s sake. It is even more delusional than that, because, of course, if you are married to someone, you often see them at their worst, because you have to share the genuine difficulties of life with them. You save the easy parts for your adulterous partner: no responsibility, just expensive restaurants, exciting nights of rule breaking, careful preparation for romance, and the general absence of reality that accompanies the privilege of making one person pay for the real troubles of existence while the other benefits unrealistically from their absence. You do not have a life with someone when you have an affair with them. You have an endless array of desserts (at least in the beginning), and all you have to do is scoop the whipped cream off the top of each of them and devour it. That is it. You see each other under the best possible conditions, with nothing but sex in your minds and nothing else interfering with your lives. As soon as it transforms from that into a relationship that has any permanency, a huge part of the affair immediately turns right back into whatever it was that was bothering you about your marriage. An affair is not helpful, and people end up horribly hurt. Particularly children—and it is to them you...