It would take too long to explain the intimate alliance of contradictions in human nature which makes love itself wear at times the desperate shape of betrayal.
And perhaps there is no possible explanation.
—Joseph Conrad, Some Reminiscences
At this very moment, in all corners of the world, someone is either cheating or being cheated on, thinking about having an affair, offering advice to someone who is in the throes of one, or completing the triangle as a secret lover. No aspect of a couple’s life elicits more fear, gossip, or fascination than an affair. Adultery has existed since marriage was invented, and so too has the taboo against it. It has been legislated, debated, politicized, and demonized throughout history. Yet despite its widespread denunciation, infidelity has a tenacity that marriage can only envy. So much so that it is the only sin that gets two commandments in the Bible, one for doing it and one just for thinking about it.
In every society, on every continent, and in every era, regardless of the penalties and the deterrents, men and women have slipped the confines of matrimony. Almost everywhere people marry, monogamy is the official norm and infidelity the clandestine one. So what are we to make of this time-honored taboo—universally forbidden yet universally practiced?
For the past six years I have been having this conversation—not just within the cloistered walls of my therapy practice, but on airplanes, at dinner parties, at conferences, at the nail salon, with colleagues, with the cable guys, and of course, on social media. From Pittsburgh to Buenos Aires, Delhi to Paris, I have been conducting my own open-ended survey about affairs today.
Around the globe, the responses I get when I mention “infidelity” range from bitter condemnation to resigned acceptance to cautious compassion to outright enthusiasm. In Bulgaria, a group of women seem to view their husbands’ philandering as unfortunate but inevitable. In Paris, the topic brings an immediate frisson to a dinner conversation, and I note how many people have been on both sides of the story. In Mexico, women proudly see the rise of female affairs as a form of social rebellion against a chauvinistic culture that has forever made room for men to have “two homes,” la casa grande y la casa chica—one for the family and one for the mistress. Infidelity may be ubiquitous, but the way we make meaning of it—how we define it, suffer from it, and talk about it—is ultimately linked to the particular time and place where the drama unfolds.
Let me ask you: When you think of infidelity, what are the first words, associations, and images that come to mind? Do they change if I use the words “love affair” or “romance”? What about “tryst” or “fling” or “hookup” or “fuck buddy”? Do you find your reactions skewed toward disapproval or toward understanding? Where do your sympathies fall—with the jilted, with the unfaithful, with the lover, with the children? And have your responses changed because of events in your own life?
Convictions about extramarital affairs run deep in our cultural psyche. In the United States, where I live and work, the conversation tends to be visceral, loaded, and polarized.
“Infidelity? It’s a dealbreaker,” says one. “Once a cheater, always a cheater.”
“Come on,” counters another, “monogamy just isn’t natural.”
“That’s total bullshit!” retorts a third. “We’re not cats in heat, we’re humans. Grow up already.”
In the American marketplace, adultery is sold with a mixture of denunciation and titillation. Magazine covers peddle smut while preaching sanctimony. As a culture we’ve become sexually open to the point of overflowing, but when it comes to sexual fidelity, even the most liberal minds can remain intransigent. Curiously, our insistent disapproval keeps infidelity’s vigor in check without revealing how rife it really is. We can’t stop the fact that it happens, but we can all agree that it shouldn’t. Constituents clamor for public apologies as they pore over the tawdry details. From the upper echelons of the political and military elite to Angie down the block, infidelity bespeaks narcissism, duplicity, immorality, and perfidy. In this view, it can never be a simple transgression, a meaningless fling, or a genuine love.
Contemporary discourse about the topic can be summed up as follows: Infidelity must be a symptom of a relationship gone awry. If you have everything you need at home, there should be no reason to go elsewhere. Men cheat out of boredom and fear of intimacy; women cheat out of loneliness and hunger for intimacy. The faithful partner is the mature, committed, realistic one; the one who strays is selfish, immature, and lacks control. Affairs are always harmful and can never help a marriage or be accommodated. The only way to restore trust and intimacy is through truth-telling, repentance, and absolution. Last but not least, divorce affords more self-respect than forgiveness.
The moralizing tone of the current conversation tends to pin the “problem” on deficient couples or individuals, sidestepping the bigger questions that the scope of the phenomenon might invite. Infidelity says a lot about marriage—not just your marriage, but marriage as an institution. It also plunges us into today’s culture of entitlement, where we take our privileges for granted. Do we really think we can distill the proliferation of cheating to a few bad apples? Surely millions of renegade lovers can’t all be pathological.
There are few neutral terms to describe adultery. Moral opprobrium has long been the prime tool for containing our unruly impulses, so much so that we have no words to speak of them without it. The language that is available to us clasps to its bosom the taboo and the stigma that infidelity represents. While the poets speak of lovers and adventurers, most people’s preferred vocabulary includes cheaters, liars, traitors, sex addicts, philanderers, nymphos, womanizers, and sluts. The entire lexicon is organized around an axis of wrongdoing that not only reflects our judgment but fosters it. The term “adultery” itself is derived from the Latin word meaning corruption. Even as I strive to bring a more balanced perspective to this topic, I am aware of the compromised language I will often be using.
Among therapists, too, balanced, unbiased dialogue is rare. Affairs are overwhelmingly described in terms of the damage caused, with a focus on either prevention or recovery. Borrowing from the language of criminalization, clinicians often label the faithful spouse as the “injured party” and the unfaithful one as the “perpetrator.” Generally, there is much concern for the betrayed, and detailed repair advice for the unfaithful to help his or her partner overcome the trauma.
The revelation of an affair can be so wrecking; it’s no surprise that most people want to take sides. Whenever I tell someone I’m writing a book about infidelity, the immediate reaction is usually “Are you for or against?” as if there were only two options. My answer is “Yes.” Behind this cryptic response lies my sincere desire to initiate a more nuanced and less judgmental conversation about infidelity and its concomitant dilemmas. The intricacies of love and desire don’t yield to simple categorizations of good and bad, victim and culprit. To be clear, not condemning does not mean condoning, and there is a world of difference between understanding and justifying. But when we reduce the conversation to simply passing judgment, we are left with no conversation at all.
We are also left with no room for people like Benjamin, a mild-mannered gentleman in his early seventies, who approached me after a talk in Los Angeles to ask, “Is it still called cheating when your wife no longer knows your name?” “My wife has Alzheimer’s,” he explained. “She has been in a nursing home for the past three years, and I visit her twice a week. For the past fourteen months, I have been seeing another woman. Her husband is on the same floor. We have found great comfort in each other.” Benjamin may be one of the nicest “cheaters” I’ve ever met, but he is by no means alone. Plenty of people care deeply for the well-being of their partners even while lying to them, just as plenty of those who have been betrayed continue to love the ones who lied to them and want to find a way to stay together.
For all of these people, I am committed to finding a more compassionate and effective approach to infidelity. People often see an affair as a trauma from which there is no return, and indeed, some affairs will deliver the fatal blow to a relationship. But others may inspire change that was sorely needed. Betrayal cuts to the bone, but the wound can be healed. Affairs can even become generative for a couple.
Because I believe that some good may come out of the crisis of infidelity, I have often been asked, “So, would you recommend an affair to a struggling couple?” My response? A lot of people have positive, life-changing experiences that come along with terminal illness. But I would no more recommend having an affair than I would recommend getting cancer.
When I first became interested in the topic of infidelity, I used to ask audiences if anyone had ever experienced an affair. Not surprisingly, no hands went up. There are not many people who will publicly admit to fooling around or being fooled.
Bearing this in mind, I changed my question to “How many of you have been affected by infidelity in your lives?” Overwhelmingly, hands went up, and have done so in every audience to whom I have addressed this query. A woman saw a friend’s husband kissing a beautiful stranger on the train. Now the question of whether or not she should tell hangs heavy over her friendship. A teenage girl discovered that her father’s double life was as old as she was. A mother cannot fathom why her son has stayed with “that hussy,” as she refers to her daughter-in-law, no longer welcome at Sunday dinner. The echoes of secrets and lies resound across generations, leaving unrequited loves and shattered hearts in their wake. Infidelity is not merely a story of two or three; it binds entire networks.
The wanderers themselves may not readily raise their hands in public, but they tell me their tales in private. People take me aside at parties or visit my office to deposit their secrets and suspicions, transgressive desires and forbidden loves.
The majority of these stories are much more banal than those that make the headlines: no babies, no STDs, no stalking ex-lover extorting money. (I suppose those couples go to lawyers, not therapists.) Of course, I’ve come across my share of narcissists, sexual omnivores, and careless, selfish, or vengeful people. I have seen extreme acts of deceit, where unsuspecting partners have been blindsided by the discovery of second families, covert bank accounts, reckless promiscuity, and elaborate schemes of duplicity. I’ve sat across from men and women who brazenly lie to me for the entire duration of the therapy. But more often, what I see are scores of committed men and women with shared histories and values—values that often include monogamy—whose stories unfold along a more humble human trajectory. Loneliness, years of sexual deadness, resentment, regret, marital neglect, lost youth, craving attention, canceled flights, too much to drink—these are the nuts and bolts of everyday infidelity. Many of these people are deeply conflicted about their behavior, and they come to me seeking help.
The motives for straying vary widely, as do the reactions and possible outcomes. Some affairs are acts of resistance. Others happen when we offer no resistance at all. One person may cross the border for a simple fling, while another is looking to emigrate. Some infidelities are petty rebellions, sparked by a sense of ennui, a desire for novelty, or the need to know one still has pulling power. Others reveal a feeling never known before—an overwhelming sense of love that cannot be denied. Paradoxically, many people go outside their marriages in order to preserve them. When relationships become abusive, transgression can be a generative force. Straying can sound an alarm that signals an urgent need to pay attention, or it can be the death knell that follows a relationship’s last gasp. Affairs are an act of betrayal and they are also an expression of longing and loss.
Hence, I approach infidelity from multiple perspectives. I try to appreciate and empathize with the point of view of both parties—what it did to one and what it meant to the other. I also consider, and sometimes work with, other relational stakeholders—the lover, the children, the friends. An affair is one story that is experienced by two (or more) people in completely different ways. Hence, it becomes many stories, and we need a frame that can contain these highly differentiated and clashing accounts. Either-or discourses don’t invite understanding or reconciliation. To look at straying simply in terms of its ravages is not only reductionistic but also unhelpful. On the other hand, to dismiss the harm done and only glorify our human propensity for exploration is no less reductionistic and no more helpful. A both/and approach may be much more appropriate for the majority of cases. We need a bridging narrative to help real people navigate the multifaceted experience of infidelity—the motives, the meanings, and the consequences. There will always be some who insist that even trying to understand it is giving cheating more dignity than it deserves. But such is the work of this therapist.
On a typical day, my first patient is Rupert, a thirty-six-year-old man who followed his wife to New York from the UK. He knows she has been having an affair, but he has decided not to confront her. “I have a marriage to rebuild, and a family to save,” he says. “My focus is on us. I get that she fell for someone else, but what I keep wondering is, can she fall back in love with me?”
Next are Delia and Russell—college sweethearts who reconnected through LinkedIn long after they’d gone on to build their own respective families. As Delia says, “We couldn’t spend our entire lives wondering what could have been.” Now they’ve found the answer, but it comes with a moral dilemma. “We have both done enough therapy to figure that affairs are rarely sustainable,” Russell tells me. “But I think Delia and I are different. This isn’t a flash in the pan. This is a lifelong love story that was interrupted. Should I throw away the opportunity to be with the woman of my life, deny all my feelings, for the sake of preserving a marriage that was never that great?”
Farrah and Jude, a lesbian couple in their mid-thirties, have been together six years. Jude is trying to understand why Farrah had a secret affair after they’d agreed to open up their relationship. “We had an arrangement where it was okay to sleep with other women, so long as we told each other,” Jude recounts. “I thought being open would protect us—but she lied anyway. What more can I do?” Even an open relationship is no guarantee against deception.
During my lunch break, I read emails. One comes from Barbara, a sixty-eight-year-old woman from Minnesota, recently widowed. “In the midst of my grieving process, I discovered evidence of my husband’s long-standing affair. Now I’m dealing with questions I never expected—like, should I tell my daughter? And to make matters worse, my husband was highly respected in our community and I continue to be invited to tributes to him, which all my friends attend. I feel in such a bind—part of me wants to leave his legacy untarnished, and part of me aches to tell the truth.” In our exchanges, we discuss the power of one discovery to change the view of an entire life. How does one come to rebuild both a life and an identity after the dual loss of betrayal and widowhood?
Susie’s message is full of righteous anger, on her mother’s behalf. “She was a saint who stayed with my father until death despite his long-standing affair.” I wonder if she has ever considered telling the story another way. What if her father sincerely loved another woman but stayed and sacrificed himself for his family?
Adam, a young therapist, has sent me a message on Facebook after attending one of my training sessions. “I always thought that cheaters were lowlifes,” he writes. “They should at least have the decency to respect the people they married enough not to sneak behind their backs. And yet, sitting in that discussion, suddenly I had a rude awakening. The room we were in was safe and comfortable, yet I kept shifting in my chair as though hot coals were in the cushions waking me up to a truth. I had always overlooked the fact that my parents were both married when they met; in fact, my father was counseling my mother as she tried to leave an abusive husband. Their affair was how I came to be on this earth. Thirty-four years ago, adultery was the act that allowed my parents to find the person they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with.” Adam’s black-and-white thinking was rattled, both personally and professionally.
My last session of the day is with Lily, a thirty-seven-year-old ad rep who has been pushing back her ultimatums for almost a decade, waiting for her lover to divorce his wife. He has had two more children since their affair began, and Lily feels her fertility diminishing day by day. “I froze my eggs last month,” she confides in me, “but I don’t want to tell him that—I need all the leverage I can get.” She unpacks her ambivalence in session after session—one week convinced that he’s just stringing her along; and the next, grasping at every straw of hope that indeed she is the love of his life.
In the middle of a dinner, I receive an “emergency” text. Jackson is having a meltdown and needs to speak immediately. His wife just discovered that too many pills were missing from the Viagra bottle and kicked him out. “To be honest,” he says, “I felt terrible about lying to her, but I couldn’t bear seeing disgust on her face every time I tried to share my sexual needs with her.” Jackson’s fantasy life was colorful, but his wife found it a total turnoff, and told him so, repeatedly. After years of rejection, he took his fantasy palette elsewhere. “I should have been honest,” he says, “but too much was at stake. My sexual needs were important, but not important enough not to see my kids every day at breakfast.”
As I listen to all these people’s stories, I find myself shocked, judgmental, caring, protective, curious, turned on and turned off, and sometimes all in one hour. I have cried with them, felt hopeful and hopeless, and identified with everyone involved. Because I see, on a daily basis, the devastation this act can cause, I also see how inadequate much of the current conversation about the topic is.
Affairs have a lot to teach us about relationships. They open the door to a deeper examination of values, human nature, and the power of eros. They force us to grapple with some of the most unsettling questions: What draws people outside the lines they worked so hard to establish? Why does sexual betrayal hurt so much? Is an affair always selfish and weak, or can it in some cases be understandable, acceptable, even an act of boldness and courage? And whether we have known this drama or not, what can we draw from the excitement of infidelity to enliven our relationships?
Must a secret love always be revealed? Does passion have a finite shelf life? And are there fulfillments that a marriage, even a good one, can never provide? How do we negotiate the elusive balance between our emotional needs and our erotic desires? Has monogamy outlived its usefulness? What is fidelity? Can we love more than one person at once?
For me, these conversations are part and parcel of any adult, intimate relationship. For most couples, unfortunately, the crisis of an affair is the first time they talk about any of this. Catastrophe has a way of propelling us into the essence of things. I encourage you not to wait for a storm, but to address these ideas in a quieter climate. Talking about what draws us outside our fences, and about the fear of loss that accompanies it, in an atmosphere of trust can actually promote intimacy and commitment. Our desires, even our most illicit ones, are a feature of our humanity.
As tempting as it is to reduce affairs to sex and lies, I prefer to use infidelity as a portal into the complex landscape of relationships and the boundaries we draw to bind them. Infidelity brings us face-to-face with the volatile and opposing forces of passion: the lure, the lust, the urgency, the love and its impossibility, the relief, the entrapment, the guilt, the heartbreak, the sinfulness, the surveillance, the madness of suspicion, the murderous urge to get even, the tragic denouement. Be forewarned: Addressing these issues requires a willingness to descend into a labyrinth of irrational forces. Love is messy; infidelity more so. But it is also a window, like none other, into the crevices of the human heart.
Divorce. In all the heated debates about infidelity, online and off, that one word crops up over and over again. If you’re thinking of having an affair, get a divorce. If you’re unhappy enough to cheat, you’re unhappy enough to leave. And if your partner has an affair, call the lawyer immediately.
Jessica, a Brooklynite in her early thirties with a two-year-old son, contacted me a week after she learned that her husband of four years, Julian, had been having an affair with a coworker. “I found a secret Facebook account with messages to this woman.” A child of the digital age, she took her problem online. “Everything I read made me feel awful,” she explains. “It was like bad advice from a women’s magazine. Move on and don’t look back! He did it once, he’ll do it again! Kick him to the curb!
“None of the websites I looked at addressed the fact that I still had very strong feelings about this man,” she says. “We had a whole life planned together and he’s the father of my son. I’m attached to his family, and they’ve been a tremendous support for me in the past week. All of these articles and writers, not to mention my own parents, are telling me he is garbage and that my feelings for him are misguided. My dad even went so far as to suggest that I have Stockholm syndrome! I feel judged, like I’m one of ‘those women’ who just let their husbands get away with cheating.”
Jessica is a financially independent woman with options, unlike the many women who have no recourse in the face of their husbands’ patriarchal privileges. And precisely because she lives with a different bill of rights, our culture demands that she exercise them. As I listen to her, my mind flashes back to a workshop I had recently led with a group of women from a village in Morocco. When I explained to them that today in America, women like Jessica are encouraged to take a stand and leave, one young woman laughed. “Mais, madame, if we were to leave all the husbands who chase skirts, all of Morocco would be divorced!”
Once divorce carried all the stigma. Now, choosing to stay when you can leave is the new shame. Exhibit A is Hillary Clinton. Many women who otherwise admire her have never reconciled themselves with her decision to stay with her husband when she had the power to leave. “Where is her self-respect?”
Certainly there are times when divorce is unavoidable, wise, or simply the best outcome for all involved. But is it the only righteous choice? The risk is that in the throes of pain and humiliation, we too hastily conflate our reactions to the affair with our feelings about the whole relationship. History is rewritten, bridges are burned along with the wedding photos, and children divide their lives between two homes.
Jessica isn’t ready to kick her husband to the curb. “People make mistakes. I’m no saint myself; though I haven’t slept around, I don’t have the best coping skills either—I shut down and drink too much when things get bad or I’m stressed. If we didn’t allow for our partners to stumble, we would all be miserable and alone.” She’s ready to give Julian a second chance.
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 charged, and repressive conversation about infidelity is that it precludes any possibility for deeper understanding, and therefore for hope and healing—together or apart. Victimization makes marriages more fragile. Of course, when Julian cheats on Jessica while she is home changing her toddler’s diapers, it is helpful for her to get in touch with her anger, an appropriate response to this disfigurement of their relationship. But the more I speak to those affected by infidelity—the actor and the acted upon, the lovers, the children—the more strongly I feel the need for a view of life and love that steers away from blame. We have nothing to gain from breeding bitter, vengeful, and divisive sentiments. Exhibit A is the woman I met whose indignation was so intense that she told her five-year-old about her husband’s years of sexual misconduct “because my son should know why Mommy’s crying.”
Although infidelity has become one of the prime motives for divorce, a large number of couples will stay together despite an affair. But for how long and under what conditions? Will they have the opportunity to emerge stronger as a result? Or will they bury the affair under a mountain of shame and mistrust? How they metabolize the affair will shape the future of their relationship and their lives.
Today in the West most of us are going to have two or three significant long-term relationships or marriages. And some of us are going to do it with the same person. When a couple comes to me in the aftermath of an affair, I often tell them this: Your first marriage is over. Would you like to create a second one together?