Did you initiate? Did you try to resist? How did it feel? Were you looking for something? What did you find? One of the most uncomfortable truths about an affair is that what for Partner A may be an agonizing betrayal may be transformative for Partner B.
Extramarital adventures are painful and destabilizing, but they can also be liberating and empowering. Understanding both sides is crucial, whether a couple chooses to end the relationship or intends to stay together, to rebuild and revitalize.
Let me assure you that I do not approve of deception or take betrayal lightly. I sit with the devastation in my office every day. Not condemning does not mean condoning, and there is a world of difference between understanding and justifying.
My role as a therapist is to create a space where the diversity of experiences can be explored with compassion. People stray for a multitude of reasons, I have discovered, and every time I think I have heard them all, a new variation emerges.
I feel like a teenager with a boyfriend. As I listen to her, I start to suspect that her affair is about neither her husband nor their relationship.
Her story echoes a theme that has come up repeatedly in my work: affairs as a form of self-discovery, a quest for a new or lost identity. For these seekers, infidelity is less likely to be a symptom of a problem, and more likely an expansive experience that involves growth, exploration, and transformation.
Cheating is cheating, whatever fancy New Age labels you want to put on it. Intimate betrayal feels intensely personal—a direct attack in the most vulnerable place.
And yet I often find myself asking jilted lovers to consider a question that seems ludicrous to them: What if the affair had nothing to do with you? We are not looking for another lover so much as another version of ourselves. Perhaps this explains why so many people subscribe to the symptom theory. Blaming a failed marriage is easier than grappling with our existential conundrums, our longings, our ennui. The problem is that, unlike the drunk, whose search is futile, we can always find problems in a marriage.
They just may not be the right keys to unlock the meaning of the affair. If she and I had taken that route, we may have had an interesting chat, but not the one we needed to have.
Good daughter, good wife, good mother. She never partied, drank, or stayed out late, and she smoked her first joint at After college, she married the right guy, and helped to support her family, as so many children of immigrant parents do. More free? Do they have more fun? In our sessions, we talk about duty and desire, about age and youth. Her daughters are becoming teenagers and enjoying a freedom she never knew. Priya is at once supportive and envious.
As she nears the mid-century mark, she is having her own belated adolescent rebellion. These explanations may seem superficial—petty First World problems, or rationalizations for immature, selfish, hurtful behavior.
Priya has said as much herself. We both agree that her life is enviable. And yet, she is risking it all. S ecluded from the responsibilities of everyday life, the parallel universe of the affair is often idealized, infused with the promise of transcendence.
For some people, like Priya, it is a world of possibility—an alternate reality in which they can reimagine and reinvent themselves. Then again, it is experienced as limitless precisely because it is contained within the limits of its clandestine structure. It is a poetic interlude in a prosaic life. Forbidden-love stories are utopian by nature, especially in contrast with the mundane constraints of marriage and family.
A prime characteristic of this liminal universe—and the key to its irresistible power—is that it is unattainable. Affairs are by definition precarious, elusive, and ambiguous. Because we cannot have our lover, we keep wanting. It is this just-out-of-reach quality that lends affairs their erotic mystique and keeps the flame of desire burning.
Reinforcing this segregation of the affair from reality is the fact that many, like Priya, choose lovers who either could not or would not become a life partner. By falling for someone from a very different class, culture, or generation, we play with possibilities that we would not entertain as actualities. Few of these types of affairs withstand discovery. One would think that a relationship for which so much was risked would survive the transition into daylight.
Under the spell of passion, lovers speak longingly of all the things they will be able to do when they are finally together. Yet when the prohibition is lifted, when the divorce comes through, when the sublime mixes with the ordinary and the affair enters the real world, what then? Some settle into happy legitimacy, but many more do not. In my experience, most affairs end, even if the marriage ends as well. However authentic the feelings of love, the dalliance was only ever meant to be a beautiful fiction.
The affair lives in the shadow of the marriage, but the marriage also lives in the center of the affair. Without its delicious illegitimacy, can the relationship with the lover remain enticing? If Priya and her tattooed beau had their own bedroom, would they be as giddy as they are in the back of his truck? T he quest for the unexplored self is a powerful theme of the adulterous narrative, with many variations. Others find themselves drawn by the memory of the person they once were.
And then there are those whose reveries take them back to the missed opportunity, the one that got away, and the person they could have been. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote that in modern life,. Bauman speaks to our nostalgia for unlived lives, unexplored identities, and roads not taken.
When we select a partner, we commit to a story. Yet we remain forever curious: What other stories could we have been part of? Affairs offer us a view of those other lives, a peek at the stranger within.
Adultery is the revenge of the deserted possibilities. Dwayne had always cherished memories of his college sweetheart, Keisha. Over the years, he had often asked himself what would have happened had their timing been different. Enter Facebook. The digital universe offers unprecedented opportunities to reconnect with people who exited our lives long ago. Without defending adultery, she does think that sometimes adulterers get a bad press.
We need a conversation that embraces the complexity and that is more caring and compassionate for everybody involved. It involves lies, secrecy. But there are all kinds of things happening in the relationship, and betrayal sometimes comes in many forms. She gives the example of a woman who is put down and intimidated by her husband. If we just pretend that this betrayal tops all others … I think we do a disservice to honesty and to marriage.
The context must be taken into consideration, she said, citing the situation where someone is looking after a chronically ill partner. Perel thinks we have huge expectations of our relationships because we have elevated our partners to God-like positions. We look in our partners for transcendence, ecstasy, comfort, meaning, wholeness, and belonging.
Perel has been married to Jack Saul, a psychologist specialising in collective trauma, for 35 years and they have two sons. The third is about having new experiences together, taking risks, and maintaining a sense of curiosity and discovery over new things. Consider the following:.
Seek support. It can help to share your experience and feelings with trusted friends or loved ones who can support, encourage and walk along with you on your healing path. Avoid people who tend to be judgmental, critical or biased.
Some spiritual leaders have training and might be helpful. Consider seeing a well-trained, experienced marriage and family therapist alone or together. Recovering from an affair will be one of the most challenging chapters in your life. This challenge may come with ambivalence and uncertainty. However, as you rebuild trust, admit guilt, learn how to forgive and reconcile struggles, it can deepen and strengthen the love and affection we all desire.
If you are both committed to healing your relationship despite the pain, the reward can be a new type of marriage that will continue to grow and likely exceed your previous expectations. There is a problem with information submitted for this request.
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