project/secret-life
Esther Perel,
Vladimir Nabokov,
Leslie Jamison,
Sally Rooney,
Eric Bennett,
Mary Gaitskill,
Rachel Kushner,
Richard M. Rorty,
Annie Dillard,
Martin Amis
Unless you say otherwise, people assume the end of a marriage involves an affair. So I am saying otherwise. This one did not. Just the mistake of two people believing they could make a life together, when in fact they couldn’t. Which is its own betrayal.
My parents’ marriage left me more allergic to affairs than to endings. But I knew there were people who felt otherwise—who believed the worst thing was giving up too soon.
I was certainly capable of infidelity—had inherited some version of my father’s capacity, even as I judged him for it. In the past, I’d cheated on two boyfriends—could still remember waking up in the beds of other men, trapped inside my own body like a rumpled, foul-smelling outfit I could not remove.
For me, cheating had been a way to avoid the work of either fixing a relationship or ending it. This time, with C, I did not want to avoid that work. But I was scared of myself. I had no illusions about my own innocence. Whenever I heard myself saying, I’d never do that, I heard a false promise. We can’t imagine ourselves doing many things until we do them.
Secrecy is the number one organizing principle of an infidelity. An affair always lives in the shadow of the primary relationship, hoping never to be discovered. The secrecy is precisely what intensifies the erotic charge. “Sex and subterfuge make a delicious cocktail,”7 writes journalist Julia Keller. We all know from childhood the glee of hiding and keeping secrets. They make us feel powerful, less vulnerable, and more free. But this dark pleasure is frowned on in adulthood. “I’ve always been a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of person,” says Angela, a punctilious Irish American paralegal who realized, through her affair with a client, that she enjoys sneaking around. “Discovering that I could act in total breach of my own long-held values was both bewildering and exciting at the same time. Once I was speaking with my sister, who was rattling away about the wrongdoing of cheaters, all the while smiling inwardly at my own secret. Little did she know that she was looking into the face of the ‘villain.’”
Emotional involvement is the third element that may play a role in infidelity. Most affairs register an emotional component, to one degree or another. At the deep end of the spectrum we have the love affair, where the accompanying bouquet of passionate feelings is integral. “I thought I knew what love was, but I have never felt like this before” is a common refrain. People in this state talk to me about love, transcendence, awakening, destiny, divine intervention—something so pure that they could not pass it by, because “to deny those feelings would have been an act of self-betrayal.” For those involved in such an unparalleled love story, the term “affair” is inadequate, for it doesn’t begin to capture the emotional depth of the experience. “When you call it cheating, you reduce it to something vulgar,” Ludo says. “Because she had gone through something similar, Mandy was the first person with whom I’ve ever been able to open up about my father’s abuse. Yes, we had sex, but it was so much more than that.”
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.”