Today I am a woman torn between the terror that everything might change and the equal terror that everything might carry on exactly the same for the rest of my days.
—Paulo Coelho, Adultery
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
“‘Let’s take the stairs,’ he said as we waited for the elevator outside the office. Then his hand brushed against mine. The slightest touch and I felt electricity. I felt alive.” Danica’s eyes light up at the memory. “And you know, it shocked me, because I didn’t even know I wanted to feel like that. Until that moment, I didn’t realize I’d been missing that feeling for a very long time.”
Danica’s account doesn’t shock me at all, nor does the fact that this conscientious wife and mother followed her younger Brazilian coworker Luiz not only up the stairs but into a full-blown affair. The one theme that I hear above all else from those who have bitten into the forbidden apple is this: It makes them feel alive.
Countless wanderers narrate their excursions in similar terms: reborn, rejuvenated, intensified, revitalized, renewed, vibrant, liberated. And many, like Danica, report that they didn’t even recognize the absence of these feelings until they were caught unawares. The sense of aliveness is rarely the explicit motive for an affair—in many instances they don’t quite know why it began—but it is often the unexpected meaning that is found there. In the decade I have been studying rebellious love, I have heard this sentiment expressed all over the world. Affairs are quintessential erotic plots in the ancient sense of eros as life energy.
“Everything with Cindy was intense,” Karim tells me, reflecting on their three-year affair. “The planning to see each other was intense. The sex. The fights were intense—and the making up. I guess she was both what I craved and what I feared at the same time. In contrast, my marriage is just normal. Not bad, but sort of blah.”
“I’d never even thought about falling in love with someone else,” Keith tells me. “Joe and I have been together since art school. But then I met Noah at an artists’ colony, and it was like waking up from a long winter hibernation. I didn’t even know how asleep I’d been. He pushed me and inspired me. I felt completely energized; I was getting my best work done with him.”
“My husband hadn’t been able to get my juices flowing in more than a decade,” Alison exclaims. “I was thirty-five and convinced there was something medically wrong with me. In all other ways, we share so much. He’s my best friend, my copilot, and from the outside, we look perfect. Then Dino showed up, and with just a few words and suggestions, he did what all the lubricants and toys had not been able to do for me. It was an amazing feeling—as if he activated me.”
When I ask people what “being alive” means, they lay out a multifaceted experience. Power, validation, confidence, and freedom are the most common flavors. Add to these the elixir of love, and you have an intoxicating cocktail. There is the sexual awakening or reawakening, of course, but it doesn’t stop there. The awakened describe a sense of movement when they had felt constricted, an opening up of possibilities in a life that had narrowed down to a single predictable path, a surge of emotional intensity where everything seemed bland. I have come to think of encounters like these as existential affairs, because they cut deep to the essence of life itself.
However we may judge their consequences, these liaisons are not frivolous. Their power is often as mystifying to the person involved in the secret as they are to the spouse who uncovers it. But having heard the same story so many times, I know that there is a method to the madness—an underlying riddle of human nature that leads people to unexpected trespasses. I often feel like part therapist, part philosopher—explaining to couples the existential paradoxes that make what seems inconceivable also quite logical.
In a surprising number of these cases, a direct line can be traced from an extramarital adventure back to our most basic human fear—the confrontation with mortality. I frequently witness affairs occurring on the heels of loss or tragedy. When the grim reaper knocks at the door—a parent passes, a friend goes too soon, a baby is lost—the jolt of love and sex delivers a vital affirmation of life.
Then there are other more symbolic losses. Bad news at the doctor can trample our sense of youth and robustness in an instant. I’ve seen quite a few men and women with a cancer diagnosis in hand who were escaping their death anxiety in the arms of a new love. Infertility puts us face-to-face with the inability to create life. Unyielding unemployment saps our confidence and makes us feel worthless. Depression robs us of hope and joy. Dangerous circumstances like wars or disaster zones incite us to take unusual emotional risks. In the face of the helplessness and vulnerability we feel at such moments, infidelity can be an act of defiance. Freud described eros as the life instinct, doing battle with thanatos, the death instinct.
Those same people may have previously felt tempted, but I wonder if it is the brusque confrontation with the brevity of life and its fragility that emboldens them to seize the day and act. Suddenly they are unwilling to settle for a life half-lived. “Is this all there is?” They hunger for more. Compromises that seemed reasonable yesterday become unbearable today. “Life is short, have an affair.” AshleyMadison.com’s infamous slogan may seem crude, but it is aptly targeted. Stories like this are so common that I now routinely ask my patients: “Have you suffered any losses, deaths, or tragedies in the past few years?”
Maybe it is death with a capital D, or maybe it is just the deadness that creeps up from dulling habit—whatever the case, I now see these affairs as a powerful antidote. “Love and Eros wake up the most tired person,”1 writes Italian sociologist Francesco Alberoni. The thirst for life triggered in such an encounter topples us with an irresistible force. It is often neither planned nor sought. The unexpected boost of erotic desire galvanizes us beyond the mundane, abruptly breaking the rhythm and the routine of the quotidian. Time slows down. The inexorable advance of age seems to lose its momentum. Familiar places take on fresh beauty. New places beckon to our reawakened curiosity. People report that every sense feels amplified—food tastes better, music never sounded so sweet, colors are more vivid.
When Danica’s husband, Stefan, followed the trail of texts and uncovered her eighteen-month affair with the man who made her feel alive, he felt kicked in the gut. “I can still feel your hands all over me,” she’d written. “Perhaps we can sneak out at lunch again? I dressed especially for you.” But he also recognized in those missives the vital and playful woman he’d once fallen in love with—a woman he’d barely seen in years.
After he got over the initial shock, Stefan was “oddly positive,” as he puts it, hopeful that there might be a silver lining. Danica had expressed deep regret and insisted the affair was over. Stefan came to see me and confided his wish that perhaps this crisis would rekindle their once passionate but now rather listless marriage. Perhaps he too would get to taste the woman who wrote those steamy messages to her office-mate.
After a couple of canceled appointments, I am finally meeting with Danica. An elegant, reserved woman in her early forties, she works as a consultant at the World Health Organization. I know from Stefan that she’s skeptical and more than a little annoyed that he has been nagging her for weeks to watch my talks on YouTube. Her demeanor tells me in no uncertain terms that there are so many more important things she could be doing right now than meeting with me. So let’s just say I don’t feel very welcome. She’s reluctant even to talk about what she calls her “mistake.” “Why does it matter? It’s over. I just want to move on.”
I sense that she expects me to judge her as she judges herself. But she feels bad enough as it is, there is nothing for me to add. Her shame and discomfort are palpable, and she has written off the entire experience as “wrong.”
In moments like this, I’m used to helping repentant adulterers express more authentic regret and remorse. With this woman, however, I find myself in the opposite situation. Her sweeping self-blame blocks all avenues for understanding and change, for her as well as for her marriage. We need to separate “wrong” from “hurtful,” so that she can acknowledge the positive aspects of her experience, all the while taking responsibility for the pain it caused. Otherwise, there is little chance that she can bring that newfound energy home. Stefan recognizes that woman and wants her back; Danica, however, is so shocked by her own actions that she insists the woman who came alive in Luiz’s arms “wasn’t me.”
“What happens inside an affair generally includes some enjoyable elements,” I tell Danica. “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.”
She begins hesitantly. “I wasn’t looking for a fling. I’ve been approached many times, and I’ve never even bothered. Luiz was different. He wasn’t just hitting on me. He’d say, ‘You have a beautiful energy, but it’s all blocked. There is a real woman somewhere deep inside, waiting to be released.’ He would compliment me in a way that felt much deeper than a compliment. And he was persistent.” Privately, I think that his words sound exactly like a come-on. But I know the effect that the simplest comment can have when it lands directly on a deep and unacknowledged yearning. Mere flattery turns into a dizzying tonic.
She continues: “There are so many things going on at home. If it’s not the kids, it’s my parents. I often feel it’s all too much. I don’t even have time to take my coat off when I walk through the door. I go from one thing to the next, and by the end I am exhausted. Things changed for me that fall. I would go to the office and I’d feel worthy, in my element, even a little giddy.” Her encounter with Luiz infused her life with a renewed sense of joy and anticipation, both potent erotic ingredients that had long since disappeared from the marital home.
Too bad, because the home in question was once a dream come true. It is a lovely chalet overlooking Lake Zurich, with a red-tiled roof and wide bay windows. She and Stefan, a successful lawyer, have lived there for the past decade and a half, and Danica lovingly oversaw every detail of its remodeling. A refugee from the Balkan conflict who fled Bosnia as a child, she had yearned for that stable haven all her life. She is quick to assure me that she doesn’t want to leave—this was not an exit affair. But she is struggling to understand how she ended up so divided. How did this idyllic place become so numbing that she sought escape? And she is even more bewildered by the fact that she hurt Stefan, “the first guy who ever made me feel safe.”
There is a painful irony to affairs in which people find themselves rebelling against the very things they value most deeply. And yet this is a common predicament that reflects an existential conflict within us. We seek stability and belonging, qualities that propel us toward committed relationships, but we also thrive on novelty and diversity. As psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell has insightfully pointed out, we crave security and we crave adventure, but these two fundamental needs spring from different motives and pull us in different directions throughout our lives—played out in the tensions between separateness and togetherness, individuality and intimacy, freedom and commitment.2
We straddle these opposing drives from the moment we come into this world—alternating between the safety of our mothers’ laps and the risks we take in the playground. We carry this dichotomy into adulthood. One hand clings to the known and the familiar; the other reaches out for mystery and excitement. We seek connection, predictability, and dependability to root us firmly in place. But we also have a need for change, for the unexpected, for transcendence. The Greeks understood this, which is why they worshiped both Apollo (representative of the rational and self-disciplined) and Dionysus (representative of the spontaneous, sensuous, and emotional).
Modern romance makes a new and tantalizing promise: that we can satisfy both needs in one relationship. Our chosen one can be at once the steady, reliable rock and the one who can lift us beyond the mundane.
In the early stages of a relationship, this merger of contraries seems perfectly reasonable. Security and adventure rarely start out looking like an either-or proposition. The honeymoon phase is special in that it brings together the relief of reciprocated love with the excitement of a future still to be created. What we often don’t realize is that the exuberance of the beginning is fueled by its undercurrent of uncertainty. We set out to make love more secure and dependable, but in the process, inevitably we dial down its intensity. On the path of commitment, we happily trade a little passion for a bit more certainty, some excitement for some stability. What we don’t anticipate is that the hidden price we may pay is the erotic vitality of our relationships.
The permanence and stability that we seek in our intimate connections can stifle their sexual spark, leading to what Mitchell calls “expressions of exuberant defiance,”3 otherwise known as affairs. Adulterers find themselves longing to untangle themselves from the constraints of security and conventions—the very security they so arduously sought to establish in their primary relationship.
This is not a predicament Danica ever thought she would find herself in. A man like Stefan, children, a solid job, and the reassurance that comes from making plans for next year were exactly what she had always wanted. But with children came a new dread—one that in her case was particularly acute. Her youngest boy had had heart surgery before his first birthday and required ongoing special care; her oldest boy decided it was time for him to get some attention at age twelve and has been particularly imaginative in instigating panic in his parents.
All the stresses notwithstanding, Danica and Stefan enjoyed a comfortable life. Stefan missed the fire in his wife’s eyes, but he kept thinking that he couldn’t ask for more, given how maxed out she was. He hurried home from work every day to be with her and the kids, and she was too absorbed in her responsibilities to even notice the growing numbness inside. “We don’t have a bad marriage,” she insists. “He never misses our weekly date nights. But how do you expect me to feel romantic when I’m worried about one kid’s health and the other one’s failing grades, and I know I’ve got to get up at six? To be honest, I’d rather just catch up on email before bed, so that’s one less thing I have to do in the morning.”
The historian and essayist Pamela Haag has written a whole book about marriages like Danica and Stefan’s, which she calls “melancholy marriages.” Analyzing the plight of these “semi-happy couples,” she explains:
A marriage adds things to your life, and it also takes things away. Constancy kills joy; joy kills security; security kills desire; desire kills stability; stability kills lust. Something gives; some part of you recedes. It’s something you can live without, or it’s not. And maybe it’s hard to know before the marriage which part of the self is expendable . . . and which is part of your spirit.4
For Danica, like many others, it was not until someone outside of her marriage reminded her of that part of her spirit that she realized it was not expendable after all. Luiz’s carefully worded flirtations tapped right into her unspoken melancholy and awoke a self that she no doubt feels is more authentic than the self-critical, frustrated, multitasking mom of today.
If we needed evidence of how challenging it is to consolidate our disharmonious drives, infidelity would be exhibit A. And perhaps, as Laura Kipnis suggests, it is not merely a by-product of the all-too-human desire for two things at once, but a kind of resolution. “The adulterous wish lodges itself in th[is] fundamental psychic split,” she writes, and affairs offer “the elegant solution of externalizing the conflict through the competing agents of your custom-designed triangle.”5
It is a given that many people go outside to find things they cannot find at home. But what about those who go looking elsewhere for things they don’t really want at home? For some, their snail mail address is not an appropriate venue for the kinds of messy emotions associated with romantic passion or unbridled sex. As Mitchell suggests, it is much more risky to unleash those forces with the person upon whom we depend for so much. In such cases, people’s extramarital adventures are not motivated by a disregard for what they have at home; quite the contrary, they value it so much that they don’t want to tamper with it. They are loath to disturb the stability of their domestic lives with the intemperate energy of eros. They may want to escape the cozy nest temporarily, but they sure don’t want to lose it. Infidelity beckons as a neatly segmented solution: the risk and the rush in the lover’s bower; the comfort and closeness in the marital abode.
At least in theory, an affair solves the dilemma of reconciling security and adventure by promising both. In outsourcing the need for passion and risk to a third party, the unfaithful gets to transcend the tedium of domesticity without giving it up entirely. After all, the adulterous bed is not necessarily the place we want to take up residence—we just want the freedom to visit it when we choose. So long as we are successful in keeping the secret, there is a feeling that we can have it all. As sociologists Lise VanderVoort and Steve Duck write, “The transformative allure of an affair is heightened by this contradiction—everything changes yet nothing need change. An affair offers the seductive promise that both/and is possible—the either/or of monogamy can be defied.”6
Danica is hardly the first woman who shuts down at home and wakes up outside. Hers is an archetypal tale of the muting of eros. I see women like her all the time—usually dragged into therapy by their frustrated husbands who are tired of being rejected, night after night. The typical complaint is: she is totally absorbed with the kids and has zero interest in sex. “No matter how many dishes I wash, I can’t get lucky.” But it’s those very same women, I’ve found, who “come alive” in a completely unexpected romance.
Many men struggle to understand how the woman who can’t be bothered in the marital bed is suddenly having a torrid affair in which she can’t get enough. For years, they’ve been thinking she’s just not interested in sex, period; now, with new evidence in hand, they reconsider—“she must not be interested in sex with me.” In some cases, a woman’s roaming desires may indeed be a reaction to an unimaginative husband, but not always. In fact, Stefan is a romantic who loves to set the stage for his wife’s pleasure, but her typical reaction is “let’s not make a production out of this. Shall we?” With Luiz, however, she reveled in the many-act play of languorous lovemaking—and made it last even longer in the multiple texts that followed.
The wife can’t wait for sex to be over. The lover wishes it would never end. It’s easy to think that it’s the men who make the difference. But the context matters more. And by context I mean the story she weaves for herself and the character she gets to play within it. Home, marriage, and motherhood have forever been the pursuit of many women, but also the place where women cease to feel like women.
The writings of prominent researcher Marta Meana are particularly illuminating about the enigma of female desire. She challenges the common assumption that women’s sexuality is primarily dependent on relational connectedness—love, commitment, and security. After all, if these assumptions were true, then sex should be thriving in marriages like Danica’s. Meana suggests that women are not just “touchy-feely” but also “saucy-sexy”—in fact, “women may be just as turned on as men by the novel, the illicit, the raw, the anonymous, but the arousal value of these may not be important enough to women to trade in things they value more (i.e., emotional connectedness).”7
As I have often said, our emotional needs and our erotic needs do not always neatly align. For some, the security they find in the relationship gives them the necessary trust to play, to take risks, and to safely lust. But for many others, the nesting qualities that nurture love are the same ones that slowly stifle desire. When forced to choose, what do women do? Meana posits that “women choose good relationships over sexual pleasure.”
In other words, since time immemorial, women have put their emotional needs ahead of their erotic needs. She knows what turns her on, but she also knows what is more important than being turned on. She knows what she likes, and she knows what she needs. The choice is already made for her.
Stefan, understandably, has not deciphered this puzzle of the feminine senses. Like many men, when his wife withdrew, he concluded that she didn’t like sex. This leads us to another common misunderstanding that Meana’s work has highlighted: We interpret the lack of sexual interest as proof that women’s sexual drive is inherently less strong. Perhaps it would be more accurate to think that it is a drive that needs to be stoked more intensely and more imaginatively—and first and foremost by her, not only by her partner.
In the transition to marriage, too many women experience their sexuality as shifting from desire to duty. When it becomes something she should do, it no longer is something she wants to do. By contrast, when a woman has an affair, she brings a self-determination to her pleasure. What is activated in the affair is her will—she pursues her own satisfaction.
Stefan feels bad that he didn’t notice the depth of Danica’s decline, and he even went so far as to seek out her lover in an attempt to figure out why. He asked, “How did you know she was dead inside? What did you see?” Luiz told him, “She reminded me of a tree in winter. Although it has no leaves, you can imagine its true natural state of glory in the summertime.” Upon hearing this poetic rendering of his wife’s predicament, Stefan felt sad and jealous. Why was Luiz able to make her bloom again while he was not?
I tell him, “With Luiz, she doesn’t have to think about the kids, the bills, the dinner—all things that make her feel erotically drab. Put him in your place, and he’d soon have the same fate.”
“Erotic silence” is the term psychotherapist and author Dalma Heyn uses to describe this predicament—an “unexpected, in-articulable deadening of pleasure and vitality”8 that happens to some women after they tie the knot. “A woman’s sexuality depends on her authenticity and self-nurturance,” she writes. Yet marriage and motherhood demand a level of selflessness that is at odds with the inherent selfishness of desire. Being responsible for others makes it harder for women to focus on their own needs, to feel spontaneous, sexually expressive, and carefree. For many, finding at home the kind of self-absorption that is essential to erotic pleasure proves a challenge. The burdens of caretaking are indeed a powerful anti-aphrodisiac.
When a woman struggles to stay connected to herself, an affair is often a venue for self-reclamation. Like the heroes of ancient mythology, she leaves home to find herself. Her secret liaison becomes one thing in her life that is for her alone—a stamp of autonomy. When you have an affair, you know for a fact that you’re not doing it to take care of anyone else. Heyn’s subjects confirm the self-realization that is inherent in this kind of romance. “Whereas before their affairs these women experienced their bodies as fragmented, their voices muted, some vital organ or aspect of their personality missing, during the affair and after it they became changed. They let go of those muffled feelings and entered a clear reality, one filled with color and vibrancy, in which they felt alive and awake and strong and focused.”9
In my experience, this theme of autonomy is more pronounced in female infidelity, but it is by no means exclusive to women, nor is it limited to heterosexual couples. Women are more likely to say, “I lost myself”; men complain that “I lost my woman.” They too begin to roam not just in search of more, or more exciting, sex but in search of connection, intensity, aliveness. Ironically, as the adulterous wheel turns, they will often end up meeting a woman who at home feels just like their wife and is seeking her own awakening elsewhere.
Meana’s research with fellow psychologist Karen E. Sims confirms the erotic fate of so many otherwise happily married women. Their findings identify three core themes that “represent dragging forces on sexual desire.” First, the institutionalization of relationships—a passage from freedom and independence to commitment and responsibility. Second, the overfamiliarity that develops when intimacy and closeness replace individuality and mystery. And lastly, the desexualizing nature of certain roles—mother, wife, and house manager all promote the de-eroticization of the self.10
These findings support my clinical observation that the challenge of sustaining desire lies in navigating these fundamental polarities within us. And again, they challenge conventional thinking about female desire, in particular the assumption that women rely exclusively on security in order to feel sexually open. “Rather than being anchored in the ‘safe side’ of the continuum,” they conclude, “female sexual desire requires a balance between opposing impulses . . . of comfort and freedom, of security and risk, of intimacy and individuality.”11
For those who struggle to maintain this delicate balance between opposites, it is easy to see why infidelity offers an enticing proposition. The structure of the affair is anything but institutionalized, a sure pathway to freedom and independence. It is, as Sims and Meana put it, a zone of “liminality”—an abdication of rules and responsibilities, an active pursuit of pleasure, a transcendence of the limits of reality. There is certainly no risk of the overfamiliarity that comes from sharing a bathroom for decades. Mystery, novelty, and the unknown are built in. And the role of lover is quintessentially sexual, while the mother, the wife, and the housekeeper are left safely locked up at home.
When I meet with Stefan and Danica together, he reiterates that he wants nothing more than for his wife to reclaim her erotic self with him. “I don’t like how she sacrifices herself constantly for the kids, leaving nothing for herself or for us. I want to support her in changing that.” He is full of ideas for how he can help her take more time and space for herself—to pick up all the things that used to make her feel happy. Volleyball. Yoga. Girl time. “But so far, it hasn’t happened,” he tells me.
Danica, I notice, is silent.
“That’s all great,” I tell him. “But there is only so much you can do.” If he keeps trying to solve the problem for her, every suggestion will add to the feeling of pressure and paradoxically reinforce her resistance. She needs to go after what she wants herself, not what he wants from her.
I often say to my patients that if they could bring into their relationships even a tenth of the boldness, the playfulness, and the verve that they bring to their affairs, their home life would feel quite different. Our creative imagination seems to be richer when it comes to our transgressions than to our commitments. Yet while I say this, I also think back to a poignant scene in the movie A Walk on the Moon. Pearl (Diane Lane) has been having an affair with a free-spirited blouse salesman. Alison, her teenage daughter, asks, “Do you love the blouseman more than all of us?” “No,” her mother replies. “But sometimes it’s easier to be different with a different person.”
If this marriage is to recover, not just emotionally but erotically, Danica needs to find a way to be different with the same person she has lived with for so long. And while there’s no doubt that’s a challenge, it’s not impossible. I have seen quite a few women, armed with fresh erotic entitlements and confidence, bring their newfound selves back to their partners, who may not even know what sparked the change, but certainly appreciated it. Close encounters with the third can bring to life (or bring back to life) a dormant sexuality. So while infidelity often delivers a devaluation of a couple’s sexual stock, at other times it can be an economy of addition.
Danica needs to embrace her inner contradiction and make peace with the woman who enthusiastically pursued her own pleasure even when it meant betraying her marriage. “If you disavow her, make the affair only ugly and shameful, you will cut off a lifeline to your aliveness,” I explain. But she still seems reluctant, and Stefan’s frustration is palpable.
For him, the deepest wound is not that she went elsewhere—it’s that she showed him what was possible and then seems unable or unwilling to share it with him. As long as he thought she simply didn’t have it in her anymore, he was resigned. Now he too is feeling entitled to more ardor, and the idea of going back to the tepidity is terrifying for him.
Sadly, bringing lust home proves more difficult than he imagined. When he writes to me, eighteen months later, he is still waiting to meet the flowering summer tree, and his hopes are fading.
Given our dialectical desires, is the inner conflict that leads to infidelity inevitable? Are we predisposed to cherish habit and safety at home and then escape it to find adventure elsewhere? Is it possible to stay alive with a life partner? Can we experience the otherness we crave in the midst of familiarity, and what does it take? Danica and Stefan’s story does not provide much encouragement, and you might be forgiven for feeling rather demoralized at this point. But it is illustrative of human realities that we cannot afford to avoid. Love and desire do not have to be mutually exclusive. Many couples find a way to integrate their contradictions without resorting to compartmentalization. But it starts with the understanding that we can never eliminate the dilemma. Reconciling the erotic and the domestic is not a problem to solve; it is a paradox to manage.