“I’ve always been good. Good daughter, good wife, good mother. Dutiful. Straight As.” Priya comes from an Indian immigrant family of modest means. For her, “what do I want?” has never been separated from “what do they want from me?” She never partied, drank, or stayed out late, and she had her first joint at twenty-two. After medical school, she married the right guy and even welcomed her parents into their home before buying them a retirement condo. At forty-seven, she is left with the nagging question, “If I’m not perfect, will they still love me?” In the back of her mind there is a voice that wonders what life is like for those who are not so “good.” Are they more lonely? More free? Do they have more fun?

Priya’s affair is neither a symptom nor a pathology; it’s a crisis of identity, an internal rearrangement of her personality. 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.

Infidelity promises “lives that could never be mine,” as journalist Anna Pulley writes in a beautiful essay about her affair with a married woman. “I was,” she writes, “a road she would never take. . . . Ours was a love that hinged on possibility—what we could offer each other was infinite potential. Reality never stood a chance against that kind of promise. . . . She represented a singular perfection, she had to because she contained none of the trappings of a real relationship. . . . She was perfect in part because she was an escape, she seemed always to offer more.”

I have met countless women (and men) like Priya. I acknowledge the power of their experience. I do not belittle it as petty, selfish, or immature. Yet at the same time, I challenge the arrogance of lovers who feel that the epiphany of their connection has rendered everything else in their life bland. Falling in love, as Francesco Alberoni writes, “rearranges all our priorities, throws the superfluous overboard, projects a glaring light onto what is superficial and instantly discards it.”4 As I warn Priya, when the poetic flight comes crashing down, she is likely to realize that her prosaic life matters to her a great deal.

While for some, breaking the rules is a long-deferred dream, for others, entitlement is a way of life. They simply assume they are above the rules. Their narcissism gives them license to breach all conventions. For them, infidelity is opportunism—they cheat with impunity, simply because they can. Their grandiosity is the master narrative.

All affairs are plots of entitlement, but I am particularly interested in the meaning of entitlement for those who have lived responsible, dutiful, committed lives. What does rebellion represent for these upstanding citizens? What are we to make of the self-contradictory nature of their trespasses, when the constraints they are defying are the very ones they themselves created?

This distinction between the person and the experience is crucial in helping people to extricate themselves from their affairs. The extramarital excursion will end, but their souvenirs will go on traveling with them. “I don’t expect you to believe me right now, but you can terminate your relationship and keep what it gave you,” I tell her. “You reconnected with an energy, a youthfulness. I know that it feels as if in leaving him, you are severing a lifeline to all of that, but I want you to know that over time you will find that some of this also lives inside of you.”

Julie, meanwhile, wants to make sense of the irresistible pull Cynthia exerts on Ayo and the intensity of her own response. “Why did this hit you differently than his previous flings?” I ask her. We are familiar with the story of the middle-aged man who takes up with a young beauty and the wife’s feelings of inadequacy by comparison. For Julie, however, young beauties had never been a problem. “Not feeling threatened by them, I decided to ignore them,” she says. But Cynthia was a kick in the gut. A professional, accomplished woman, she was the same age as Julie and had excelled in the field Julie had walked away from decades earlier to devote herself to motherhood.

As I listen to her, it begins to fall into place why this revelation plunged her into such despair. Her husband did not just fall in love with another woman—he fell for the woman Julie could have been. Cynthia does not just represent some new part of Ayo that he is discovering. She also represents everything his wife gave up. It could have been Julie working at his side, sharing his passions, and celebrating their successes together. She chose differently, and there is no going back for her. Meanwhile, he has the option of doing a take two.

[...] In the face of the helplessness and vulnerability we feel at such moments, infidelity can be an act of defiance. Freud described eros as the life instinct, doing battle with thanatos, the death instinct.

Those same people may have previously felt tempted, but I wonder if it is the brusque confrontation with the brevity of life and its fragility that emboldens them to seize the day and act. Suddenly they are unwilling to settle for a life half-lived. “Is this all there is?” They hunger for more. Compromises that seemed reasonable yesterday become unbearable today. “Life is short, have an affair.” AshleyMadison.com’s infamous slogan may seem crude, but it is aptly targeted. Stories like this are so common that I now routinely ask my patients: “Have you suffered any losses, deaths, or tragedies in the past few years?”

Maybe it is death with a capital D, or maybe it is just the deadness that creeps up from dulling habit—whatever the case, I now see these affairs as a powerful antidote. “Love and Eros wake up the most tired person,”1 writes Italian sociologist Francesco Alberoni. The thirst for life triggered in such an encounter topples us with an irresistible force. It is often neither planned nor sought. The unexpected boost of erotic desire galvanizes us beyond the mundane, abruptly breaking the rhythm and the routine of the quotidian. Time slows down. The inexorable advance of age seems to lose its momentum. Familiar places take on fresh beauty. New places beckon to our reawakened curiosity. People report that every sense feels amplified—food tastes better, music never sounded so sweet, colors are more vivid.

The historian and essayist Pamela Haag has written a whole book about marriages like Danica and Stefan’s, which she calls “melancholy marriages.” Analyzing the plight of these “semi-happy couples,” she explains:

A marriage adds things to your life, and it also takes things away. Constancy kills joy; joy kills security; security kills desire; desire kills stability; stability kills lust. Something gives; some part of you recedes. It’s something you can live without, or it’s not. And maybe it’s hard to know before the marriage which part of the self is expendable . . . and which is part of your spirit.

It is a given that many people go outside to find things they cannot find at home. But what about those who go looking elsewhere for things they don’t really want at home? For some, their snail mail address is not an appropriate venue for the kinds of messy emotions associated with romantic passion or unbridled sex. As Mitchell suggests, it is much more risky to unleash those forces with the person upon whom we depend for so much. In such cases, people’s extramarital adventures are not motivated by a disregard for what they have at home; quite the contrary, they value it so much that they don’t want to tamper with it. They are loath to disturb the stability of their domestic lives with the intemperate energy of eros. They may want to escape the cozy nest temporarily, but they sure don’t want to lose it. Infidelity beckons as a neatly segmented solution: the risk and the rush in the lover’s bower; the comfort and closeness in the marital abode.

At least in theory, an affair solves the dilemma of reconciling security and adventure by promising both. In outsourcing the need for passion and risk to a third party, the unfaithful gets to transcend the tedium of domesticity without giving it up entirely. After all, the adulterous bed is not necessarily the place we want to take up residence—we just want the freedom to visit it when we choose. So long as we are successful in keeping the secret, there is a feeling that we can have it all. As sociologists Lise VanderVoort and Steve Duck write, “The transformative allure of an affair is heightened by this contradiction—everything changes yet nothing need change. An affair offers the seductive promise that both/and is possible—the either/or of monogamy can be defied.”

In other words, since time immemorial, women have put their emotional needs ahead of their erotic needs. She knows what turns her on, but she also knows what is more important than being turned on. She knows what she likes, and she knows what she needs. The choice is already made for her.

Stefan, understandably, has not deciphered this puzzle of the feminine senses. Like many men, when his wife withdrew, he concluded that she didn’t like sex. This leads us to another common misunderstanding that Meana’s work has highlighted: We interpret the lack of sexual interest as proof that women’s sexual drive is inherently less strong. Perhaps it would be more accurate to think that it is a drive that needs to be stoked more intensely and more imaginatively—and first and foremost by her, not only by her partner.

In the transition to marriage, too many women experience their sexuality as shifting from desire to duty. When it becomes something she should do, it no longer is something she wants to do. By contrast, when a woman has an affair, she brings a self-determination to her pleasure. What is activated in the affair is her will—she pursues her own satisfaction.