How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me?
—Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers
All suffering prepares one for vision.
—Martin Buber
Once the storm has passed and the crisis is over, what then? What can we learn from looking at the affair in retrospect? We know that a breach is a decisive moment in the history of a couple, with one of two expected outcomes: together or apart. But that doesn’t tell us much about the quality of the future togetherness or separation. Did the insight gleaned from the ordeal carry the couple through the slings and arrows of continued married life? Was there a brief second honeymoon before the relationship reverted to its pre-affair condition? Did he do it again? Did she ever stop? Once out of the therapist’s benevolent gaze, did they file for divorce?
Tracking the long-term legacy is key to developing a holistic understanding of infidelity. We look not just at the facts but at the stories we tell—to ourselves and others. Does time alter the narrative? Are we susceptible to revisionism? I reached out to people with these questions, one, three, five, or ten years after the fateful events. A handful doesn’t make for statistical evidence, but their personal testimonies inform both my thinking and clinical practice.
The stories I heard ran the gamut. Marriages fell apart, the affair an irreparable breach. For some, a cataclysmic ending; for others, kinder closure and grace. Marriages limped along, at times locking horns and other times locked in silence. Marriages came out stronger, the crisis of infidelity serving as a springboard to greater intimacy, commitment, and sexuality. And sometimes a new marriage emerged, with the former affair partners becoming the new spouses. In effect, infidelity can destroy a relationship, sustain it, force it to change, or create a new one. Every affair redefines a relationship, and every relationship will determine what the legacy of the affair will be.
Quite a number of affairs do finish off a marriage. Whether the breach itself was the fatal blow or it simply legitimized a long-desired exit, there is no question that infidelity is often a story that ends in divorce court.
I remember Kate and Rhys as a couple who were trying hard to rebuild. But after five years her pain is as raw as if it were yesterday. She left him, she tells me, because he was a repeat offender and “there was no way I could ever trust him again.” But Rhys’s infidelity accompanied Kate wherever she went, becoming a specter that haunted her future relationships. After driving away several boyfriends with her incessant jealousy, she married a man who had experienced the same pain when his previous wife left him for a mutual friend. “We met through SurvivingInfidelity.com. We understood each other’s hurt all too well and knew how to make each other feel safe,” she tells me.
In the case of Jaime and Flo, Jaime was the one who broke the commitment, but she too lives with the bitter taste of resentment. “I tried to do everything I could to win Flo back, to show her my love. But she was constantly pushing me away, intent on making me pay. She was more interested in punishing me than in reconnecting with me. Finally I gave up. And now she blames me for being a coward and for not trying. She gets to be twice the victim—of my affair and what she calls ‘my bullshit,’ even though she defeated every attempt to put things right. I accept that I broke her trust, but she destroyed whatever was left.”
When I am working with infidelity, my role is not to be a public defender of marriage or an advocate for divorce. But sometimes the inevitable outcome is so clear to me that I feel it would be kinder to cut to the chase. Although it was a decade ago, I’ve never forgotten my first session with Luke and Anais, because very soon I found myself telling them, “Your marriage is over.” Luke was shocked: he’d been determined to make it work, despite the fact that Anais had systematically rebuffed him in bed and then went on to have a two-year affair.
I can still see his face. He looked like a hit man with a loaded gun. I told him as much, and suggested that we might need to put the gun in a drawer for the duration of our sessions. When I reached out to him recently, I wanted to know how he saw my bold proclamation in hindsight. Luke remembered it all too well. When I brought up divorce so quickly, he says, he felt that I had given up on him and sided with his wife. “I felt she had conned me into seeing a therapist who wouldn’t even try to keep us together. When I told my cousin, she was so alarmed she said I should fire you. In that moment, I wanted to throw the coffee table at you and throw Anais out the window. But you saw right away what took me months to recognize—that we were dead upon arrival and I deserved better.”
I was glad to hear that he eventually understood that if any siding was taking place, it was with him. At the time I’d known from speaking with Anais alone that their sexual gridlock was unlikely ever to change. I knew he felt lonely, humiliated, and sometimes enraged by her withdrawal, but saw no way out. Infidelity had marked and marred his childhood, and now that he had a young daughter, keeping the family together was his number one priority. This was a man in the grip of triple betrayal—her rejection, her affair, and worst of all, her lack of contrition. Someone needed to open a door for him that he would not dare enter alone.
In retrospect, he tells me, “It was brutal, but you were right. I think you knew that in my case, the best thing was to rip off the Band-Aid. I was completely hung up on the fact that she wouldn’t express the kind of guilt I wanted her to feel.”
In some situations, partners will never get the remorse that they want. “You told me I needed to stop banging my head against the wall,” he remembers. “That was key. Letting me know there might not be any closure from her was helpful, if maddening at first.” In situations like this, it’s critical that one’s ability to move on is not contingent on the other person feeling the “appropriate” amount of guilt and regret. Luke understands that now. “All these years later, I know she could never come up with the right words, because it doesn’t work that way. It would never be ‘enough.’”
Luke also remembered that I assured him there’d be a future. “You said I’d be banging babes aplenty and that I’d feel that electricity because I’d be getting a ‘chargeback’ from someone who actually wanted me as much as I wanted them. You were right. I even found myself saying a silent and very sincere ‘thank you’ to Anais and her boyfriend. And you know what? I used to have this excruciating back pain. It stopped the day Anais moved out.”
I asked Luke if anything had changed in his world view as a result of his experience. “When Anais and I split, at first people saw it as a failure. They were wrong. I came to see that staying together at any cost was the wrong goal. Being happy is what counts. We were done, and now I get to live again.”
Anais may not have been the right romantic partner for Luke, but he makes a point of saying that she’s been “a great partner to raise a kid with.” They are friends. They go to their daughter’s soccer games together, and often he buys her lunch afterward.
“What about trust?” I ask him.
“I’m still hurt, deep inside,” he says, “but I have lived and loved again. People thought I would be fucked up forever and unable to truly trust. They are partially right, but it’s more that I trust differently. Before, I trusted too much and was naive. Now I realize that even the best people can’t always get it right and end up acting out. We are all human and anyone is capable of doing what Anais did, even me.”
“Have you forgiven her?” I ask him. “Yes,” he replies, “though at first it seemed impossible.” He recalls how I told him that one day he would understand that forgiving doesn’t mean giving the other a free pass. It’s a gift one gives oneself. Sure enough, as time passed, he got it. As Lewis B. Smedes writes, “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.”1
As Luke expressed all too clearly, our culture views divorce as a failure, and even more so when it is precipitated by an infidelity. Longevity is seen as the ultimate indicator of marital achievement, but plenty of people who stayed “till death do us part” have been miserable. A successful marriage doesn’t end only at the funeral parlor—especially in our era of increasing life expectancy. Sometimes a relationship has run its course, and in such cases, when I can, I try to help it end with dignity and integrity. I see no contradiction in asking a couple about the success of their breakup. Hence my check-in with Clive and Jade.
I first met them as newlyweds, twenty-two years ago, when I led a workshop for mixed-race couples. They were carefree, full of promise. Two decades, three kids, and one affair later, their marriage was on its last legs, and they came to me for help. Clive had recently come clean about his secret relationship with Kyra. He felt terribly guilty, but had resolved to move on and make a life with his new love. Jade was desperate, fighting to hold on to him. I remember her hanging on to every word, gesture, and smile from Clive, but all of it was in vain.
I felt it was my responsibility to decrypt the message that was right in front of us: “Jade, he’s not coming back. Your sadness makes him feel guilty, and that guilt instantly morphs into anger at you for making him feel bad that he’s making you feel bad. He may not be gone, but he’s not here, either.”
I told him, “You keep waiting till you can leave without guilt, and that’s never going to happen. It’s time to set her free.” He vacillated between being paralyzed and wanting to run as fast as he could, for fear that if he didn’t bolt, he’d get stuck again. Yet I thought they needed to take the time to say a proper goodbye. So I suggested a separation ceremony.
Just as we have marriage ceremonies to mark the beginning of a union, we also need rituals to mark the end. A marriage is the nexus of an entire life—history, memories, habits, experiences, children, friends, family, celebrations, losses, homes, trips, holidays, treasures, jokes, pictures. Why throw all of this out and treat the relationship, in the poetic words of Marguerite Yourcenar, like “an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish.”2
Rituals facilitate transitions. They also honor what was. Clive and Jade once exchanged vows; now they are tearing them up. But just because he fell in love with another woman doesn’t mean their entire past together was a fraud. Such a summation is cruel and shortsighted. The legacy of two decades of a shared life is larger than the legacy of the affair.
When a couple arrives at the finishing line, drained after two years of back and forth—his confusion, her false hopes, his guilt about leaving, her holding on—it’s easy to undervalue what they’re leaving behind. The purpose of the ceremony I suggested was to not let Clive’s affair eclipse all the positive aspects of their otherwise good marriage.
Sometimes departing spouses are reluctant to shift their focus to the good things in their relationship because they are afraid it will take the wind out of their sails. It’s as if they feel the need to trash what they had to justify leaving. What they don’t realize is that by doing so, they simultaneously degrade their own past and all the people they shared it with—leaving a trail of angry children, parents, friends, and exes.
We need a concept of a terminated marriage that doesn’t damn it—one that helps to create emotional coherence and narrative continuity. Ending a marriage goes beyond the signing of divorce papers. And divorce is not the end of a family; it’s a reorganization. This kind of ritual has caught the public imagination in recent years, dubbed “conscious uncoupling” by author Katherine Woodward Thomas.
I invite couples to write goodbye letters to each other. Letters that capture what they’ll miss, what they cherish, what they take responsibility for, and what they wish for each other. This allows them to honor the riches of their relationship, to mourn the pain of its loss, and to mark its legacy. Even if it is done with a cooled heart, it can nonetheless provide solace.
When Clive and Jade came in for the following session, they had their letters on their iPhones. One click and the reading began.
Entitled “What I’ll Miss,” Jade’s letter was a ten-page list, divided into categories, wistfully evoking the multilayered tapestry of their history. Their personal sayings—Hola, chickly . . . Dame un beso . . . the baaaaaby. The early days—love notes, mixtapes, salsa and more salsa, dog parks, parking meters, the opera. The food they loved. Their friends. The places that held meaning for them—from Martha’s Vineyard to Paris to the Cornelia Street Café to apartment 5C. Their “sexy spots.” Their “firsts” . . .
No one else will ever share the particular meanings these everyday things hold for them. She listed the connections she’d miss: “feeling protected, safe, beautiful, loved.” Her final category was simply “You”: “Your scent. Your smile. Your enthusiasm. Your ideas. Your hugs. Your big strong hands. Your balding head. Your dreams. You, next to me.”
When she finished reading, we were all in tears and there was no need to trample the tenderness with any extraneous verbiage. But it is important for the scribe to hear her own words read back to her, so I asked Clive to do so. Then he read his own pages.
Hers was a love letter; his, a diplomatic farewell, thanking her profusely for the life they had shared, expressing regret for having fallen short, and assuring her that he would always treasure their bond. He was kind and caring, but his tone was purely formal. His opening and closing sentences say as much: “Thank you for being an amazing person and a truly wonderful force in my life over the past twenty-two years” . . . “I want you to know that despite its outcome, I see the good in our marriage, and will always cherish it and hold it deeply within my heart.”
A year later, when I follow up with Jade, she emphasizes how the ritual of uncoupling helped her to see the writing on the wall. “At first I thought it was a little new agey, but I was also proud to be doing it and even shared it with some friends. We were doing something right despite all the wrong that had come before. I often wondered, how is he going to leave? Is he just one day going to wake up, say, ‘Okay, bye,’ and walk out the door? The separation ceremony put an end to my ruminations. I desperately needed a way to help me accept that he loved another woman and it was really over.”
Some affairs are temporary side stories; others are the beginnings of a new life. Clive’s was the latter, and no amount of waiting on Jade’s part would have changed that. The tone of his letter made that all too clear to her. “It wasn’t a ‘what I’ll miss’ letter,” she says. “It was a ‘we are over’ letter. He said some nice things, but this was definitely a man no longer in love. It struck me right then and there that while I was still suffering, still very much in love, he was gone. It hurt, more than you know, but it opened my eyes.”
Next I caught up with Clive, who remembered the ceremony as “emotional and effective.” Guilt was turned into gratitude, denial replaced by memory. Gradually he was able to simultaneously hold his attachment to Jade and his children and the calling of a new life with Kyra. “Until that moment, it hadn’t felt real. The symbolism gave it a seal of finality.”
This cathartic closure proved to be the right ritual for this couple. But sadly, many spew out a long list of curses rather than a list of sweet memories. Wherever I can, I try to help people create narratives that are empowering rather than victimizing. It doesn’t always involve forgiveness, it makes room for anger, but hopefully it is an anger that mobilizes rather than keeps them trapped in bitterness. We need to go on with life—hope again, love again, and trust again.
Of course, the legacy of the affair does not end with the removal of the wedding rings. It can be the beginning of a new life for the lovers who were once hidden. The affair has finally been legitimized and becomes the primary relationship. What at one point may have seemed an impossible union is normalized—sometimes after years of waiting for the kids to leave home, the spouse to find a new job, the mother-in-law to die, the mortgage to be paid off, the divorce to finally come through. For better or for worse, a relationship that begins as a secret will always be influenced by its origins. When I meet couples who embark on a new odyssey together, I want to know to what extent their past affects and shapes their future.
Undoubtedly, there is great relief when a love story can finally emerge from the shadows. But it comes with a fresh set of concerns. Sometimes the affair was better off in its clandestine form, because when it became a marriage, the fantasy was lost. I remember Nicole and Ron as passionate and determined to be together no matter what the cost. “But once he said, ‘I do,’ it was ‘I don’t,’” Nicole tells me three years later. She is vexed that after five long years of waiting in the wings, Ron is finally hers—and now he won’t touch her. Worse still, she suspects he’s having a new affair. This is his third marriage. He seems to have a knack for turning every wife into his mother, with sex as the inevitable casualty. He loves his mamas; he just can’t get it up for them. Desire is repeatedly reserved for the mistress. Nicole was that woman, but now she too has been relegated to the sexless status of wife.
For those affairs that do stay alive past the altar, there is the pressure to “make it seem worth the cost,” as Eric puts it. To be together, he and Vickie both had to dismantle domestic bastions. Between the two of them, they left behind four children, three grandchildren, two cities, two beach cottages, a grand piano, ancient oaks, a dog, two cats, and dozens of friends. When so much destruction had to take place for them to exist, it’s no wonder that the expectations are ratcheted up. When I got in touch with Eric recently, he confirmed that he is suffering stresses he never could have imagined while in the throes of fantasy. It’s been three years since his divorce from Gabrielle, and while their eldest child has grudgingly come around, the younger has taken her mother’s side. Does Eric have any regrets? I inquire.
“No,” he says, “I love Vickie. But I do miss the life I left behind. I feel a lot of guilt and sorrow and loneliness. I particularly miss seeing my kids every day. I wish I could speak more freely with Vickie about my past life. But it’s tricky. She immediately takes it as meaning I want to be back with Gabrielle.”
“Do you ever fantasize about going back?”
“Sometimes,” he admits.
Ironically, where the affair was once a secret in the marriage, nostalgia for the marriage becomes a secret in the now-legitimized affair. It’s often hard for new partners to accept that missing the past relationship does not necessarily equate to wanting to return to it. The sadness isn’t meant to be a threat. To break the pattern of internal lies, it’s essential to make space for each person to talk about the past—including the loss, the regret, and the guilt. Every relationship incorporates multiple histories.
While the affair existed in a secluded world, cocooned from the practicalities of life, the new marriage finds itself swamped in logistics and complexities. How to introduce the children? How to relate to the ex? The implant needs time to “take.”
In Brazil, I meet Paolo and Rafael. They met in college and fell in love, but in their Catholic community, love between men was an aberration. They parted ways, and both went on to do what was expected of them: wives, children, respectable lives. Two decades later, they met by chance in the Amsterdam airport. They claimed their baggage and reclaimed their hearts, beginning an affair that lasted two years before it was discovered, sending shock waves through their families and social circles. There were no bad guys to blame here—just the raw pain of taking apart two lives to build a new one. They’ve lost friends; some of their family members are refusing to speak to them; one divorce has been more amicable than the other. While being tarred as selfish, they risked everything for a truth that had been denied for too long. Time has vindicated their choice.
While some couples who come to me choose to part ways, many more enter therapy with the intention of staying together, and they do just that. But togetherness has many faces. One of my patients told me, “A few years ago when I had a car accident, I remember thinking how much support I got from friends and family. With a broken leg, the pain is visible and everybody sympathizes. But when a couple decides to stay together after an affair, people think everything is fine and you’re left living with an invisible pain.”
Other patients have told me quite a different story. “We almost sank, but we didn’t. Our relationship is more robust today. Too bad we had to go through all that to get here, but I wouldn’t go back.”
In my work I have identified three basic post-infidelity outcomes for couples who choose to stay together (with thanks to Helen Fisher for the typology): those who get stuck in the past (the sufferers); those who pull themselves up by the bootstraps and let it go (the builders); and those who rise above the ashes and create a better union (the explorers).
In some marriages, the affair is not a transitional crisis, but a black hole ensnaring both parties in an endless round of bitterness, revenge, and self-pity. Even five or ten years after the events, the affair is still the epicenter of their relationships. These couples endlessly gnaw at the same bone, circle and recircle the same grievances, reiterate the same mutual recriminations, and blame each other for their agony. In fact, it is quite likely that they would have ended up in the same conflicts had there been no infidelity at all. Why they stay in the marriage is often as puzzling as why they cannot get beyond their mutual antagonism. They are sharing a cell in marital prison.
The affair is tagged onto every disagreement between them. Such couples keep score with moral superiority; no amount of remorse is ever enough. Debbie, who stayed with Marc after a string of extramarital exploits, ostensibly to preserve the family, constantly makes him feel that he is lucky she didn’t kick him out, as if only he stands to lose everything they’ve built. Marc’s quota of wrongdoing was filled years ago, and now he is no longer permitted any deviation. His pleas to let bygones be bygones only stoke her sarcasm. When asked if she misses their intimacy, she offers a response meant to protect herself, but ultimately self-defeating. “I want to make love,” Debbie says, “but it’d be like saying everything is okay now.” They haven’t had sex since the affair three years ago. Sadly, Marc’s dalliances take up more space in their bed today than when they were happening.
Marc asks Debbie why she has to bring up the affairs every time she is unhappy about anything. Often, he says, she ruins what might otherwise be perfect moments between them—their daughter’s piano recital or a dinner with friends. “There are no perfect moments,” she sneers. “You took those away.” In these highly reactive couples, there is little room for neutrality, because the partners take the call for self-reflection as a personal attack.
Couples like these live in a permanent state of contraction. To the unfaithful, the betrayed spouse becomes the sum total of her vengeful fury. To the betrayed spouse, the unfaithful becomes the sum total of his transgressions, with few redeeming qualities. Marriages like these may survive, but the protagonists are emotionally dead. In any case, when past infidelity becomes the hallmark of a couple’s life, whatever was broken can’t be pieced back together. The relationship wears a permanent cast.
A second pattern is found in couples who remain together because they value commitment and the life they’ve created. They care about each other and want to preserve the family and the community. These couples can move past the infidelity, but they don’t necessarily transcend it. Their marriages revert to a more or less peaceful version of the status quo antebellum—the way things were, without their relationship undergoing any significant change.
An affair is revealed in a relationship, and an affair reveals a lot about a relationship. It sheds a stark light on its constructs—the cracks, the imbalances, the dry rot, the subsidence, but also the strong foundations, the solid walls, and the cozy corners. The builders focus on these structural strengths. They are not looking for massive renovations; they simply want to come back to the home they know and the pillow they can rest on. Along the way, they make amends, they renew their vows, and make sure to plug any leaks. Although a glimmer of passion can be intoxicating, they shudder at the prospect of losing everything. Ultimately, lying and deceiving are more agonizing than thrilling, and the end of the affair is simply a relief. When they look back, the whole episode is an anomaly best forgotten.
“Part of me was very disappointed in myself for not being able to leave my husband, and I wondered if I was letting go of the love of my life,” Joanna recalled after ending her passionate affair with Jaron. “But another part of me felt relief that I was going to stay and not destroy my family.”
She reflects that they almost divorced. She didn’t think he would be able to forgive her. And she needed him to forgive her so that she could forgive herself. When forgiveness did come for them, it did so “not with the fanfare of epiphany but with pain gathering up its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night,” to borrow the words of Khaled Hosseini.3
Lyle feels more regret. Recalling his brief infatuation with a colleague, he says, “I never wanted an outside love affair. I appreciated all the great things about my marriage—I love and respect my wife—and I didn’t want to leave my kids. I still harbor a lot of guilt. Eighteen months later I’d be in therapy with the next woman. But I’m also very sad because sex with my wife has been so lackluster throughout my marriage—she really has never been very interested in sex and has no idea how important this is to me. That part feels hopeless. Even so, I’d still rather look at porn and stay out of trouble than risk losing my family.”
For builders, sexual disappointment and what they regard as self-centered desires for more romantic “fulfillment” are not powerful enough incentives to turn them away from the more meaningful long-term rewards and vital obligations of family and community. Ultimately, these couples report favoring familiarity over the roller coaster of risky romantic love and sexual passion. Self-fulfillment without an ethical mooring feels hollow. They privilege deep, enduring love and loyalty. Doing what’s right restores a sense of wholeness that is worth far more to them than any extramarital enticements. To the builders, commitment stands for something greater than themselves.
I’ve been particularly interested in a third category of couples, those for whom the affair becomes a catalyst for transformation. These explorers come to see the infidelity as an event that, though insanely painful, contained the seeds of something positive.
When faced with the collapse of the world they know, these couples home in on each other with a level of intensity they haven’t experienced in years. It is not uncommon for them to experience a combustive rekindling of desire that is a potent mixture of anxiety and lust. Fear of loss is the spark plug that sets it off. They’re deeply engaged—in pain, but alive.
The explorers have taught me much about what lies at the core of resilient relationships. Madison and Dennis always struck me as being this kind of couple. The uncovering of his affair threw them into turmoil, but I remember noting during our sessions that they had an uncanny ability to express and accept a wide range of feelings without demanding premature “closure.” Their tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty opened up a space for exploration, in which they could more deeply reconnect.
In contrast with the sufferers, who conceive of their ordeal in moral absolutes, the viewpoint of the explorers is more fluid. They more readily distinguish wrong from hurtful, paving a smoother road for clemency.
Several years later, when I touch base with Dennis and Madison, they affirm that they managed to sustain their wild swings without either one marching off to a divorce lawyer. Their grief revealed new facets of themselves and each other. Their first marriage was over, and they could never get it back, but they chose to have a second one. In the process, they were able to turn the experience of infidelity into an enlarging emotional journey.
When they speak about the affair, it is clear that they identify it as one event—not the definitive event—in their long history together. One sign that they have successfully metabolized the events appears in their language: Shifting from “you” and “me” to “our,” Madison does not talk about “When you did this to me.” Rather, they both talk about “When we had our crisis,” recounting a shared experience. Now they are joint scriptwriters, sharing credit for what they produce. What started outside the relationship is now housed within. For Madison and Dennis, the affair has become a landmark integrated into the broader geography of their lives together. Above all, they know there are no clear-cut answers, so they’re able to discuss the betrayal with a fundamental acceptance of their human flaws.
Madison and Dennis’s relationship feels much richer and more interesting, but it also can feel less secure. They have added novelty to the enduring, mystery to the familiar, and risk to the predictable. “I’m not sure at all where this is going to take us, but dull it certainly is not,” Dennis says. If before they were facing dead ends, now they don’t know where they’ll end up. But that very fact is more exciting than frightening, and they are in it together. To repair is to re-pair.
Some relationships die, some survive and revive. What are the lessons of infidelity, for all of us who love? I hope these pages have served to illustrate that affairs are many things, but at best they can be transformative for a couple. I began this book with the analogy that while many people have positive, life-changing experiences as a result of terminal illness, I would no more recommend having an affair than I would recommend getting cancer. What many people want to know, then, is what they can learn from affairs without necessarily having to go through one. It comes down to two questions: 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?
The answer is counterintuitive. The impulse to protect your marriage is natural, but if you take the common “affair-proofing” approach, you risk heading back down the narrow road of stifling constraints. Outlawing friendships with the opposite sex, censoring emotionally intimate confidences in others, nixing water-cooler conversations, curtailing online activity, banning porn, checking up on each other, doing everything together, cutting off exes—all of these homeland security measures can backfire. Katherine Frank argues persuasively that the “marital safety narrative” creates its own demise. 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.”4 The more we try to suppress our primal longings, the more forcefully we may rebel.
The Irish poet-philosopher John O’Donohue reminds us, “It is always astonishing how love can strike. No context is love-proof, no convention or commitment impervious. Even a lifestyle which is perfectly insulated, where the personality is controlled, all the days ordered and all actions in sequence, can to its own dismay find that an unexpected spark has landed; it begins to smolder until it is finally unquenchable. The force of Eros always brings disturbance; in the concealed terrain of the human heart Eros remains a light sleeper.”5
Our romantic ideals are too entangled with the belief that a perfect marriage should deafen us against the rumblings of eros. We reject our unruly yearnings as immaturities we should have outgrown, and double down on our comfort and safety—which, as Stephen Mitchell points out, is no less of an illusion than our most passionate fantasies. We may long for constancy, labor for permanence, but it is never guaranteed.
Rather than insulate ourselves with the false notion that it could never happen to me, we must learn to live with the uncertainties, the allures, the attractions, the fantasies—both our own and our partners’. Couples who feel free to talk honestly about their desires, even when they are not directed at each other, paradoxically become closer.
The explorers model this. Their marriages may or may not be “open” in structure, but all of them are open in their communication. They are having conversations they never had before the breach: open-ended, vulnerable, emotionally risky conversations that elicit curiosity about someone who is at once familiar and also entirely new. When we validate each other’s freedom within the relationship, we may be less inclined to go looking for it elsewhere.
Moreover, when we acknowledge the existence of the third, we affirm the erotic separateness of our partner. We admit that as much as we may want it to, their sexuality does not revolve solely around us. They may choose to share it only with us, but its roots are far-reaching. We are the recipients, not the sole sources, of their unfurling desires. This recognition of the other as an independent agent is part of the shock of infidelity, but it is also what can reignite the erotic spark at home. While it may be a scary proposition, it is also exquisitely intimate.
What about trust? Trust is at the center of the marital plot, and affairs are a violation of that trust. Many of us feel that in order to trust, we need to know. We conflate trust with safety, as a rational risk assessment to ensure we won’t get hurt. We want a guarantee that our partner has our back and would never be so selfish as to put their needs ahead of our feelings. We demand certainty, or at least the illusion of it, before we are willing to make ourselves vulnerable to another.
But there’s another way of looking at trust: as a force that enables us to cope with uncertainty and vulnerability. To quote Rachel Botsman, “Trust is a confident relationship to the unknown.”6 If we accept that the certainty we long for is something we may never truly have, we can reframe the notion of trust. Yes, trust is built and strengthened by actions over time, but by the same token, trust is also a leap of faith—“a risk masquerading as a promise,”7 as Adam Phillips writes. An affair throws a couple into a new reality, and those who are willing to venture forward together discover that for them, trust no longer solely hinges on the predictable, but rather, trust is an active engagement with the unpredictable.
We also learn from affairs that for most, the forbidden will always hold an allure. The ongoing challenge for steady couples is to find ways to collaborate in transgression, rather than transgressing against each other or their bond. These illicit acts do not have to be dramatic, reckless, or risqué, but they must be authentic. I can offer suggestions and examples, but what works for one couple may fall flat for another. Only you know when you are finally breaking your own rules and stepping outside your comfort zone. Only you can sense what activates the erotic energy—the élan vital—in your relationship.
For Viola and Ross, it meant creating secret email accounts through which they could conduct private, X-rated conversations during meetings, playdates, and parent-teacher conferences. For Allan and Joy, it was occasionally leaving the kids with her mom and going out with no curfew. Dancing all night with a sense of unboundedness is the opposite of the regimentation of family life. Bianca and Mags can’t afford to go out, but they want to affirm that they’re not just parents. So once a week they put the babies to bed, light candles, dress up, and have a date at home. They call it “meeting at the bar.”
Alia took up singing again; Mahmoud, her husband of ten years, would come to watch her but make no contact—sitting in the back of the club like any other casual observer and seeing his wife through a stranger’s eyes. Rita and Ben go to carefully chosen sex parties, where they speak only French. Nate and Bobby love to occasionally sneak back home after they’ve dropped the twins at preschool and have an uninterrupted adult breakfast. Amber and Liam enjoy searching online together for someone attractive they can invite home to play.
Rikki and Wes have given each other license to flirt, all the way to the edge but never over the line. When guys hit on her, “It’s an ego boost,” Rikki says. But it works both ways. Seeing girls lusting after Wes makes it all the more affirming when he goes home with her. Renouncing others reaffirms their choice of each other. They play with their roving desires, yet channel the energy back into their marriage. Commitment and freedom feed off each other. From the commitment springs a sense of security and openness, and the ability to feel liberated and alive with each other deepens their sense of commitment.
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. Plainly, these tactics strengthen their connection, and when the connection is stronger, they are less likely to cheat. “It would be fun, but it’s not worth it” becomes a voice of the inner boundary. That still does not mean their relationships are “affair proof.” And it is precisely because they know this that they are continuously adding new pages to their love stories.
Our partners do not belong to us; they are only on loan, with an option to renew—or not. Knowing that we can lose them does not have to undermine commitment; rather, it mandates an active engagement that long-term couples often lose. The realization that our loved ones are forever elusive should jolt us out of complacency, in the most positive sense.
The current of aliveness, once awoken, is a force hard to resist. What must be resisted are the dwindling curiosity, the flaccid engagements, the grim resignation, the desiccating routines. Domestic deadness is often a crisis of imagination.
At their peak, affairs rarely lack imagination. Nor do they lack desire, abundance of attention, romance, and playfulness. Shared dreams, affection, passion, and endless curiosity—all these are natural ingredients found in the adulterous plot. They are also the ingredients of thriving relationships. It is no accident that many of the most erotic couples lift their marital strategies directly from the infidelity playbook.