by
Esther Perel
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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.
“Erotic silence” is the term psychotherapist and author Dalma Heyn uses to describe this predicament—an “unexpected, in-articulable deadening of pleasure and vitality”8 that happens to some women after they tie the knot. “A woman’s sexuality depends on her authenticity and self-nurturance,” she writes. Yet marriage and motherhood demand a level of selflessness that is at odds with the inherent selfishness of desire. Being responsible for others makes it harder for women to focus on their own needs, to feel spontaneous, sexually expressive, and carefree. For many, finding at home the kind of self-absorption that is essential to erotic pleasure proves a challenge. The burdens of caretaking are indeed a powerful anti-aphrodisiac.
Sexuality is the sanctioned language through which men can access a range of forbidden emotions. Tenderness, softness, vulnerability, and nurturance have not traditionally been encouraged for men. The body is the place where they have sought to satisfy these needs disguised in a sexualized language. When we say about men that all they want is sex, maybe we shouldn’t take this literally. Sex is the entrance to their emotional antechamber.
Interestingly, the opposite may be true of women. Their sexual needs have not been culturally sanctioned, but their emotional needs are well acknowledged. Perhaps hidden in women’s pursuit of love lies a host of physical yearnings that can be justified only when wrapped in an emotional package. This turns the old adage that “men use love to get sex, while women use sex to get love” on its head.
“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.
wish i'd read this like 6 months ago lmao
I recall you within a chance patch of sunlight. You had sharp elbows and pale, dusty-looking eyes. When you spoke, you would carve the air with the riblike edge of your little hand and the glint of a bracelet on your thin wrist. Your hair would melt as it merged with the sunlit air that quivered around it. You smoked copiously and nervously. You exhaled through both nostrils, obliquely flicking off the ash. Your dove-gray manor was five versts from ours. Its interior was reverberant, sumptuous, and cool. A photograph of it had appeared in a glossy metropolitan magazine. Almost every morning, I would leap onto the leather wedge of my bicycle and rustle along the path, through the woods, then along the highway and through the village, then along another path toward you. You counted on your husband’s not coming in September. And we feared nothing, you and I—not your servants’ gossip, not my family’s suspicions. Each of us, in a different way, trusted fate.
ahhh
[just the style, a little bit, not the content, though this is more disaffected than i want stunt to be]
In your misty bedroom, the sunlight, having penetrated the lowered Venetian blinds, formed two golden ladders on the floor. You said something in your muted voice. Outside the window, the trees breathed and dripped with a contented rustle. And I, smiling at that rustle, lightly and unavidly embraced you.
When we had left the village, crossed the bridge, and were climbing the path toward your house, I took you under the elbow, and you flashed that special sidelong smile that told me you were happy. Suddenly I had the desire to tell you about Pal Palych’s little wrinkles, about the spangled St. Isaac’s, but, as soon as I began, I had a feeling the wrong words were coming out, bizarre words, and when you tenderly said, “Decadent,” I changed the subject. I knew what you needed: simple feelings, simple words. Your silence was effortless and windless, like the silence of clouds or plants. All silence is the recognition of a mystery. There was much about you that seemed mysterious.