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.”