Summary
For most of history, marriage was a strategic partnership between families, and love was optional. Romanticism turned it into a free choice based on love in the early 19th century — and as communities disappeared, we ended up asking one partner to be our entire emotional support system, which is a setup for disappointment.
Affairs cut so deep partly because we depend on our partner for so much emotionally now, but also because betrayal undermines our own memory and self-image — you have to go back and rewrite years of a story you thought you understood correctly.
Every relationship pulls between two needs: security and exploration, familiarity and novelty. It’s a seesaw that’s rarely perfectly balanced, and too far in either direction is where trouble starts.
What actually keeps desire alive is not taking your partner for granted. Desire runs on absence and longing — if a relationship isn’t leaving room for either, people go looking for it somewhere else.
Book Notes
Contemporary discourse says infidelity must be a symptom of a relationship gone awry. In reality, it's complicated.
Infidelity is not merely a story of two or three; it binds entire networks.
Even open relationships are no guarantee against deception.
Infidelity includes one or more of these three constitutive elements: secrecy, sexual alchemy, and emotional involvement.
Secrecy is precisely what intensifies the erotic charge of an affair.
Desire is rooted in absence and longing.
The elusiveness of the other that keeps keeping the erotic spark alive. Fire needs air.
Lovers today seek to bring under one roof desires that have forever had separate dwellings. When we channel all our intimate needs into one person, we actually stand to make the relationship more vulnerable.
For millennia, matrimony was less a union of two individuals than a strategic partnership between two families that ensured their economic survival and promoted social cohesion. Love might arise, but it certainly was not essential. In any event, it was too flimsy an emotion to support such a weighty institution.
Romanticism redefined marriage in the early nineteenth century. It evolved from an economic enterprise to a companionate one — a free-choice engagement between two individuals, based not on duty and obligation but on love and affection. But with the advent of urbanization and the loss of community, the expectations of marriage took epic proportions.
In a time when we depend on our partners emotionally for so much, never have affairs carried such a devastating charge.
Our sexuality is an expression of who we are, no longer merely something we do.
The constant awareness of ready alternatives invites unfavorable comparisons, weakens commitment, and prevents us from enjoying the present moment.
“Culturally, young adults have increasingly come to see marriage as a ‘capstone’ rather than a ‘cornerstone’ “that is, something they do after they have all their other ducks in a row, rather than a foundation for launching into adulthood and parenthood.”
Infidelity is a direct attack on one of our most important psychic structures: our memory of the past. As humans, we expect the past to be dependable. Betrayed by our beloved, we suffer the loss of a coherent narrative.
"Are there any secrets to long-lasting relationships? The threat of infidelity." Alain de Botton
A good relationship or good intimacy is not a guarantee against infidelity. There is none, ultimately.
Affairs are often a form of self-discovery, a quest for a new (or a lost) identity. The most intoxicating other that people discover in the affair is not a new partner; it’s a new self. Sex can be an expansive experience that involves growth, exploration, and transformation.
We all have multiple selves, but in our intimate relationships, over time, we tend to reduce our complexity to a shrunken version of ourselves.
“The tendency toward infidelity depends to a great extent on being able to justify it to ourselves” - Dan Ariely
Freedom and commitment: 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.
It’s easier to be different with a different person. But you can change a dynamic, given both partners change how they see each other.
Every relationship, from the most stringent to the most lenient, has boundaries, and boundaries invite trespassers. Breaking the rules is thrilling and erotic.
We are the most attracted to our partners when others desire them.
We are trying to define new boundaries for the modernity deal. Rather than insulate ourselves against infidelity, we must learn to live with the uncertainties, the allures, the attractions, the fantasies—both our own and our partners’. When we validate each other’s freedom within the relationship, we may be less inclined to go looking for it elsewhere.
