The Affair in Retrospect

The desire to find happy endings for sad human stories is probably lodged in most couples therapists' DNA. When the "sad story" is about infidelity that threatens a marriage, therapists generally aim for their favored resolution: saving the marriage. As a field, we've tended to think about this story in terms of a straightforward, three-part narrative:

 Part 1: A couple is shattered by the discovery of an affair and comes to see us.

 Part 2: We help them get through the immediate crisis, tend to the underlying wounds in the marriage, and then take a deeper look at childhood scars. We provide compassion and advice as needed, and encourage new trust, forgiveness, and intimacy in the relationship.

Part 3: As our preferred denouement, the couple leaves therapy weeks or months later, their marriage repaired, stronger, even transformed---or at least improved. We consider treatment a success; the couple has weathered the storm.

Of course, some couples refuse this neat storyline and, instead, use therapy as a gateway out of the marriage altogether. But, hopefully, they still live happily ever after.

I identified three basic patterns in the way couples reorganize themselves after an infidelity---they never really get past the affair, they pull themselves up by the bootstraps and let it go, or they leave it far behind.

In some marriages, the affair isn't a transitional crisis, but a black hole trapping both parties in an endless round of bitterness, revenge, and self-pity. These couples endlessly gnaw at the same bone, circle and recycle the same grievances, reiterate the same mutual recriminations, and blame each other for their agony. Why they stay in the marriage is often as puzzling as why they can't get beyond their mutual antagonism.

A second pattern is found in couples who remain together because they honor values of lifelong commitment and continuity, family loyalty, and stability. They want to stay connected to their community of mutual friends and associates or have a strong religious affiliation. 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 way things were before the crisis, without undergoing any significant change in their relationship.

For some couples, however, the affair becomes a transformational experience and catalyst for renewal and change. This outcome illustrates that therapy has the potential to help couples reinvent their marriage by mining the resilience and resourcefulness each partner brings to the table.

All marriages are alike to the degree that confronting an affair forces the couple to re-evaluate their relationship, but dissimilar in how the couple lives with the legacy of that affair.

This article was written by Esther Perel.

Esther Perel is a Belgian psychotherapist who has explored the tension between the need for security and the need for freedom in human relationships. She has promoted the concept of Erotic Intelligence in her book Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence, which has been translated into 24 languages. Her latest book is: The State of Affairs, Rethinking Infidelity published in 2018.

Infidelity

Affairs always cause pain, but what I’m looking for is where exactly did the knife twist?

No story of betrayal is simple; it focuses on the story of Saskia and Amin.  They are a couple, married for 11 years with 3 young children. I met them one year after Saskia discovered Amin’s year-long affair with a co-worker.

When I sit with a couple, there are always two types of stories present in the room; the spoken and the unspoken. The first manifests in dialogue and what we can hear, see and feel. The second is what is unspoken — private personal dialogues, hidden assumptions and covert motivations.

For every deceived partner, there is a particular pain point that is unique to them.  In the session, Saskia seemed numb and frozen – tears streamed down her face without her even knowing it.  My challenge was to understand what was beyond the fortress of her silent pain.  At first glance, one would say, “of course she’s been hurt, he cheated”.  In one sense that’s true - an affair is a fundamental violation of trust.  But the story doesn’t end there.

Saskia had a traumatic history in a politically turbulent country. Where she came from, women were attacked, raped, abused, and labeled “meat” by men because they could be used and discarded so easily.

She chose her husband Amin because he didn’t fit the profile of what she knew men to be. He was a good guy, with good values. She believed that she of all women had found a man who wouldn’t hurt her and could redeem her of her dim view of men. Amin, unknowingly, had been scripted into the role of the “golden apple”.  But then Amin had an affair.

You will hear people say, “it’s not that you cheated, it’s that you lied”. For her, this complaint was expressed in sharp relief. By putting another woman ahead of her, Amin made her feel invisible. For Saskia, who viewed Amin as the one potential mate who would not violate this unwritten code, this was devastating. 

Likewise, Amin’s reasons for cheating were no less complicated than his wife’s feelings about betrayal. He talks openly of feeling lonely and abandoned by his wife. He says that a lack of communication and the years-long misunderstandings between them has pushed them apart, so he sought comfort elsewhere.

But he too has a piece of the iceberg that is not visible to me. Alongside his feelings of discontent, Amin had learned in his childhood to keep a part of himself secret. Amin, because of his upbringing, had mastered the art of the double life; compliant at home, and rebellious on the outside. This layer was helpful for me to place his actions in context — another piece of the story.

Having conversations they’ve never had before

Amin’s affair took place at the end of a long period of distancing for the couple, which accelerated after the births of their children. By the time Amin turned to another, the couple’s sex life was, in both of their recollections, “terrible”. More importantly, their communication had deteriorated. Their story was one of loneliness and their communication had become a race to the bottom.

Saskia and Amin had both been sexually unfulfilled for years. But post-affair, they were refreshingly honest about their sex life for the first time.

For many couples a betrayal is the first time they talk about core issues in a relationship, during what I call the meaning-making phase. After the crisis phase has died down, they begin to try to figure out what went wrong.

Once trust is broken, can it be healed?

For many couples, infidelity isn’t the ultimate deal breaker. And whether or not infidelity ends the relationship, it acts as powerful alarm system that often jolts a couple out of complacency and makes them realize what they stand to lose, or what they have already lost.

For Saskia and Amin, this session did not have a happy ending with the bow on top to match. However, they did begin to talk about topics and feelings that had laid dormant up to and in the wake of the affair. The road is not always a straight line.

This article was written by Esther Perel, author of The State of Affairs and Mating in Captivity.

Esther Perel (born 1958) is a Belgian psychotherapist notable for exploring the tension between the need for security (love, belonging and closeness) and the need for freedom (erotic desire, adventure and distance) in human relationships.