Affairs don’t typically spell the end of a marriage. Precise data are hard to come by, but research suggests that the majority of couples stay together after infidelity.
But what are the chances of being happy again, after an affair? Or for rebuilding trust? For that matter, what does it even mean to rebuild trust after infidelity?
The Erotic Equation
In 2006, couples therapist Esther Perel’s book Mating in Captivity caused a stir among sex and relationship therapists (and their clients) by suggesting that married sex was more difficult than most people realized. Drawing on the work of psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell,3 she saw a fundamental contradiction at the heart of erotic marriage.
Modern couples, she noted, were driven to satisfy two fundamentally opposite impulses—the yearning for safety and the longing for adventure. As she put it, “Reconciling the erotic and the domestic is not a problem to solve; it is a paradox to manage." Perhaps the reason conventional couples therapy is often helpless to revive sexless relationships is because the project to unite the erotic and the domestic was flawed from the start.
What saved Mating in Captivity from being a far gloomier book was the sheer force of Perel’s personality — exuberant, playful, with a European-born feel for the ironic. Hearing Perel speak was often so much fun that people tended to overlook the seriousness of her message.
The advice she gave to people in erotically frustrated marriages was challenging: Allow yourself to feel more deeply the otherness of your partner. You never really possess each other. You just think you do.
That’s a difficult thing to keep in mind, but for some people, it can be more erotic. As she says, how can you desire what you already possess? Give up the illusion of possessing the other person, and eros might have a better chance.
After the Affair
It's not surprising that Perel’s next book, The State of Affairs, would be about marital infidelity. Nothing makes you realize you don’t fully possess someone like finding out they’ve been sleeping with someone else. Infidelity surely ranks high on anyone’s list of the major causes of human misery. In the book, Perel herself makes an analogy to cancer.
In recent years, she tells us, her practice has been exclusively devoted to couples affected by infidelity. So I was eager to hear what she had to say about whether and how couples can find happiness after an affair, or whether and how couples might learn to trust again.
Since her previous book so often suggested acknowledging the “otherness” of your partner, I wondered what she might recommend to couples trying to heal from this ultimate act of otherness.
After an affair, according to Perel, couples that stay together fall into three categories: sufferers, builders, and explorers.