The State of Affairs

The rush to divorce makes no allowance for error, for human fragility. It also makes no allowance for repair, resilience, and recovery. And it makes no allowance for people like Jessica and Julian, who want to learn and grow from what happened. They tell me, “We both want to make things work. We’ve had some of the most incredible conversations since this started. Really soul-baring and also constructive, like we haven’t talked in years.” But then they ask, “Did we really have to go through an affair just to be able to be truly honest with each other?” I hear this often and share their regret. But here’s one of the unspoken truths about relationships: for many couples, nothing less extreme is powerful enough to get the partners’ attention and to shake up a stale system. Ultimately, the problem with the judgmental, highly

For me, infidelity includes one or more of these three constitutive elements: secrecy, sexual alchemy, and emotional involvement.6 Before I go any further, I want to make clear that these are not three rigid criteria; rather, a three-sided prism through which to view your experience and assumptions. To broaden the definition, however, does not mean descending into moral relativism. Not all infidelities are created equal. In the end, these issues are personal and value-laden. My purpose is to give you a framework to make sense of your own circumstances and to communicate more deeply with those you love.

Any discussion about infidelity requires that we reckon with secrets. But it may also require that we ask ourselves, What about privacy? And where does privacy end and secrecy begin? Is snooping a legitimate preemptive tactic? Does intimacy require absolute transparency?

But some people view everything sexual as a domain that must be shared. Discovering that their partner masturbates or still has feelings for an ex is tantamount to betrayal. In this view, any independent expression of sexuality—real or imagined—is a breach. From another perspective, however, making space for some degree of erotic individuality can convey a respect for privacy and autonomy, and is a token of intimacy. In my decades of working with couples, I’ve observed that those who are most successful in keeping the erotic spark alive are those who are comfortable with the mystery in their midst. Even if they are monogamous in their actions, they recognize that they do not own each other’s sexuality. It is precisely the elusiveness of the other that keeps them coming back to discover more.

We’re on uncharted ground here. Emphasizing the “emotional” as infidelity never even occurred to earlier generations, whose concept of marriage was not organized around emotional exclusiveness. It is still foreign in many parts of the world. Is it a helpful concept for couples today? Marriages have always been strengthened when partners can vent to others or find multiple outlets for emotional connection. When we channel all our intimate needs into one person, we actually stand to make the relationship more vulnerable.

The modern world is in constant motion, spinning faster and faster. Families are often dispersed, siblings are scattered across continents, and we uproot ourselves for new jobs more easily than a plant is repotted. We have hundreds of virtual “friends” but no one we can ask to feed the cat. We are a lot more free than our grandparents were, but also more disconnected. In our desperate search for a safe harbor, where are we to dock? Marital intimacy has become the

The modern world is in constant motion, spinning faster and faster. Families are often dispersed, siblings are scattered across continents, and we uproot ourselves for new jobs more easily than a plant is repotted. We have hundreds of virtual “friends” but no one we can ask to feed the cat. We are a lot more free than our grandparents were, but also more disconnected. In our desperate search for a safe harbor, where are we to dock? Marital intimacy has become the sovereign antidote for lives of growing atomization.

Never before have our expectations of marriage taken on such epic proportions. 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. We should be best friends, trusted confidants, and passionate lovers to boot. The human imagination has conjured up a new Olympus: that love will remain unconditional, intimacy enthralling, and sex oh-so-exciting, for the long haul, with one person. And the long haul keeps getting longer. Contained within the small circle of the wedding band are vastly contradictory ideals. We want our chosen one to offer stability, safety, predictability, and dependability—all the anchoring experiences. And we want that very same person to supply awe, mystery, adventure, and risk. Give me comfort and give me edge. Give me familiarity and give me novelty. Give me continuity and give me surprise. Lovers today seek to bring under one roof desires that have forever had separate dwellings. In our secularized society, romantic love has become, as Jungian analyst Robert Johnson writes, “the single greatest energy system in the Western psyche. In our culture, it has supplanted religion as the arena in which men and women seek meaning, transcendence, wholeness, and ecstasy.” In our quest for the “soul mate,” we have conflated the spiritual and the relational, as if they are one and the same. The perfection we long to experience in earthly love used to be sought only in the sanctuary of the divine. When we imbue our partner with godly attributes and we expect him or her to uplift us from the mundane to the sublime, we create, as Johnson puts it, an “unholy muddle of two holy loves”4 that cannot help but disappoint.

Typically, the partner who has been betrayed feels compelled to ask questions, to obsess, to make sure that this terrible thing does not get swept under the rug. The wanderer is usually all too eager to put the unpleasant episode behind them. By reversing these positions, we change the dynamic. Surveillance rarely breeds trust. If Costa holds the memory of the affair, then he relieves Gillian from having to be the one to ensure that it isn’t forgotten. If he brings it up on his own and invites conversation about it, then he communicates that he is not trying to hide or minimize it. If he volunteers information, he frees her from the constant rehashing. One time, Amanda called him. He told Gillian right away, defusing a potential source of distrust. Another time, when they were at a restaurant, he sensed that Gillian was wondering if he had been there with Amanda. He didn’t wait for her to ask—he told her, unsolicited, and made sure she was comfortable staying there. All of this, abundantly displayed, helps to restore trust, as it makes her feel that they are on the same side.

Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl distills a profound truth: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”