The participants were young, 20 years old on average, but their reasons for straying are common themes that could apply across other ages, Selterman said. No longer feeling passionate love or even falling out of love. Perceiving the relationship to be boring, dull or stagnant. Feeling that your partner is not paying enough attention to you or not spending enough time with you.
Not feeling appreciated. You feel sleeping with others will improve your sense of self-worth, signal your independence or increase your social status and popularity.
You suspect or know your partner has betrayed you, so you want to get even. Men were more likely to list motivations having to do with sexual desire , while women pointed to neglect, the study found.
Yet when the prohibition is lifted, when the divorce comes through, when the sublime mixes with the ordinary and the affair enters the real world, what then?
Some settle into happy legitimacy, but many more do not. In my experience, most affairs end, even if the marriage ends as well. However authentic the feelings of love, the dalliance was only ever meant to be a beautiful fiction.
The affair lives in the shadow of the marriage, but the marriage also lives in the center of the affair. Without its delicious illegitimacy, can the relationship with the lover remain enticing? If Priya and her tattooed beau had their own bedroom, would they be as giddy as they are in the back of his truck? T he quest for the unexplored self is a powerful theme of the adulterous narrative, with many variations.
Others find themselves drawn by the memory of the person they once were. And then there are those whose reveries take them back to the missed opportunity, the one that got away, and the person they could have been. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote that in modern life,. Bauman speaks to our nostalgia for unlived lives, unexplored identities, and roads not taken. When we select a partner, we commit to a story. Yet we remain forever curious: What other stories could we have been part of?
Affairs offer us a view of those other lives, a peek at the stranger within. Adultery is the revenge of the deserted possibilities. Dwayne had always cherished memories of his college sweetheart, Keisha. Over the years, he had often asked himself what would have happened had their timing been different. Enter Facebook. The digital universe offers unprecedented opportunities to reconnect with people who exited our lives long ago.
Never before have we had so much access to our exes, and so much fodder for our curiosity. Lo and behold, they were both in the same city. She, still hot, was divorced. It seems to me that in the past decade, affairs with exes have proliferated, thanks to social media.
These retrospective encounters occur somewhere between the known and the unknown—bringing together the familiarity of someone you once knew with the freshness created by the passage of time. The flicker with an old flame offers a unique combination of built-in trust, risk taking, and vulnerability. In addition, it is a magnet for our lingering nostalgia.
The person I once was, but lost, is the person you once knew. P riya is mystified and mortified by how she is putting her marriage on the line. The constraints she is defying are also the commitments she cherishes. No conversation about relationships can avoid the thorny topic of rules and our all-too-human desire to break them. Our relationship to the forbidden sheds a light on the darker and less straightforward aspects of our humanity.
Bucking the rules is an assertion of freedom over convention, and of self over society. Acutely aware of the law of gravity, we dream of flying. Our conversations help Priya bring clarity to her confusing picture. If he knew, he would be crushed. He would never believe it. She may be right. Or perhaps it would. Some relationships collapse upon the discovery of a fleeting hookup. Others exhibit a surprisingly robust capacity to bounce back even after extensive treachery. Priya has tried to end her affair several times.
But the self-imposed cutoffs become new and electrifying rules to break. Three days later, the fake name is back in her phone. Yet her torment is mounting in proportion to the risks she is taking.
Danger follows her to every movie theater and secluded parking lot. It is not my place to tell Priya what she should do. Besides, she has already made it clear that for her, the right thing is to end the affair. This distinction between the person and the experience is crucial.
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 the otherness you crave also lives inside you.
I often say to my patients that if they could bring into their marriage even one-tenth of the boldness, the playfulness, and the verve that they bring to their affair, their home life would feel quite different.
Our creative imagination seems to be richer when it comes to our transgressions than to our commitments. I f Priya succeeds in ending the affair, and doing so with finality, a new dilemma will arise: Should she tell her husband, or should she keep her secret to herself? Could her marriage survive the pain of revelation? Could it continue with a lie undisclosed?
I have no tidy answer to offer. In many instances, however, I have helped couples work toward revelation, hopeful that it will open up new channels of communication for them. Catastrophe has a way of propelling us into the essence of things. In the wake of devastating betrayals, so many couples tell me that they are having some of the deepest, most honest conversations of their entire relationship.
Their history is laid bare—unfulfilled expectations, unspoken resentments, and unmet longings. Love is messy; infidelity, more so. But it is also a window, like none other, into the crevices of the human heart. The revelation of an affair forces couples to grapple with unsettling questions: What does fidelity mean to us and why is it important? Is it possible to love more than one person at once? Can we learn to trust each other again?
How do we negotiate the elusive balance between our emotional needs and our erotic desires? Does passion have a finite shelf life? And are there fulfillments that a marriage, even a happy one, can never provide? For me, these conversations should be part and parcel of any adult, intimate relationship from the beginning. Talking about what draws us outside our fences, in an atmosphere of trust, can actually foster intimacy and commitment. But for many couples, unfortunately, the crisis of an affair is the first time they talk about any of this.
Priya and Colin will have to negotiate these questions while also dealing with the ravages of betrayal, dishonesty, and broken trust. But the intensity of these feelings usually fades over time. Sure, stable, lasting love exists.
But those first-date butterflies will only take you so far. This can make it harder to leave a relationship that still provides a sense of family, friendship, stability, and safety. But staying in a relationship without romantic love may lead to a desire to experience love again and motivate infidelity. Simply having an opportunity to cheat can make infidelity more likely.
Other factors often but not always add to the motivation to cheat. You might not choose to cheat if only one or two factors were involved. But this combination of motivating factors — the distance in your relationship, your feelings about your appearance, the attention of your coworker — can make infidelity more likely.
People who have a hard time with commitment may be more likely to cheat in some cases. In this case, one partner might end up cheating as a way of avoiding commitment, even if they actually would prefer to stay in the relationship. Many people choose to stay in the relationship, often hoping things will improve, especially if the relationship is otherwise fulfilling. This can provide motivation to get those needs met elsewhere. Unmet emotional needs can also motivate infidelity. Emotional infidelity can be tricky to define, but it generally refers to a situation where someone invest a lot of emotional energy in someone besides their partner.
This can lead to an intimate connection that resembles a relationship. A simple desire to have sex can motivate some people to cheat. But someone who wants to have sex might also look for opportunities to do so without any other motivators.
Even people who have sexually fulfilling relationships might still want to have more sex with other people. This might result from a high level of sexual desire, not necessarily any sexual or intimate issues in the relationship. In the context of a relationship, the desire for variety often relates to sex. Attraction is another big part of variety.
Some people in monogamous relationships might have a hard time not acting on those feelings of attraction. Having sex with a new person can lead to positive feelings.
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