“Have you forgiven her?” I ask him. “Yes,” he replies, “though at first it seemed impossible.” He recalls how I told him that one day he would understand that forgiving doesn’t mean giving the other a free pass. It’s a gift one gives oneself. Sure enough, as time passed, he got it. As Lewis B. Smedes writes, “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.”1

Our romantic ideals are too entangled with the belief that a perfect marriage should deafen us against the rumblings of eros. We reject our unruly yearnings as immaturities we should have outgrown, and double down on our comfort and safety—which, as Stephen Mitchell points out, is no less of an illusion than our most passionate fantasies. We may long for constancy, labor for permanence, but it is never guaranteed.

Rather than insulate ourselves with the false notion that it could never happen to me, we must learn to live with the uncertainties, the allures, the attractions, the fantasies—both our own and our partners’. Couples who feel free to talk honestly about their desires, even when they are not directed at each other, paradoxically become closer.