The idea that infidelity can happen in the absence of serious marital problems is hard to accept. Our culture does not believe in no-fault affairs. So when we can’t blame the relationship, we tend to blame the individual instead. The clinical literature is rife with typologies for cheaters—as if character always trumps circumstance. Psychological jargon has replaced religious cant, and sin has been eclipsed by pathology. We are no longer sinners; we are sick. Ironically, it was much easier to cleanse ourselves of our sins than it is to get rid of a diagnosis.

Sometimes, when we seek the gaze of another, it isn’t our partner we are turning away from, but the person we have become. We are not looking for another lover so much as another version of ourselves. Mexican essayist Octavio Paz describes eroticism as a thirst for otherness.1 So often, the most intoxicating other that people discover in the affair is not a new partner; it’s a new self.

“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.