Why would someone who loves their partner risk everything for an affair? It’s the question at the centre of Esther Perel’s work on infidelity, and in this clip from her 2015 London Real interview, recorded just after her TED talk “Rethinking Infidelity”, she gives Brian Rose an answer that is far more complicated, and more human, than the usual story of villains and victims.
It’s ten minutes long and one of the most thought-provoking conversations on the channel.
▶ Watch the full episode: Esther Perel – Sex & Infidelity
Counterintuitive truths
Brian lists some of the surprising points from her talk: that affairs can be an antidote to deadness, that even happy people cheat, and that most couples who experience an affair stay together. Perel confirms it. Infidelity is a leading cause of divorce, she says, but there is far more infidelity than there is divorce. Most people stay, at least the first time.
Beyond the “symptom” model
The easy explanation, she says, is that people have affairs because their relationship is bad. That is sometimes true. But she regularly sees people who say they love their partner, the last thing they want is to hurt them, and yet they are having an affair. Sometimes, she says, the affair has nothing to do with the relationship at all.
Infidelity, she points out, has existed for as long as marriage. However marriage has changed, infidelity has outlasted every version of it.
The dutiful self and the selfish self
So what drives it? Perel describes people who built exactly the life they wanted, the family, the children, the secure job, the big home, and then one day find it feels meaningless, like shackles. They have always done what was expected of them, and now they want to do what they want.
She frames this as a conversation between the dutiful self and the selfish self. An affair, she says, is often more about what someone is doing for themselves than what they are doing to their partner, and yet, when it’s discovered, the effect on the partner is shattering.
A story from Morocco
She shares a conversation with young women in Morocco. When she mentioned that in the West a woman can now leave an unfaithful husband, one replied that if they divorced all the unfaithful men, all of Morocco would be divorced. For Perel, it showed how much expectations of marriage differ between cultures.
A history of control
Perel also notes that fidelity was historically imposed on women, to guarantee lineage and inheritance. Today it has become an expectation for both genders. “Instead of giving more freedom to women,” she says, “we’ve taken the freedoms of men away.”
Neither good nor bad
What did she want people to take from her talk? A conversation that embraces complexity. Discussions of infidelity, she says, tend to become all-or-nothing: good and bad, villain and victim, as if understanding meant condoning. That doesn’t help couples, families or children. The real question isn’t whether infidelity is good or bad, but what it teaches us about love, lust and commitment.
Her conclusion is blunt. There would be no taboo against infidelity, she says, if it weren’t a real threat, and the threat is human nature: “we are fickle, we are curious, and we are greedy.”
Who is Esther Perel?
Esther Perel is a Belgian psychotherapist, born in Antwerp in 1958, known for her work on relationships and sexuality. She is the author of Mating in Captivity and The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity, and hosts the podcast Where Should We Begin?
In her full 2015 London Real episode, she talks with Brian Rose about desire, security, affairs and modern love. You can also watch another clip from the same interview: Esther Perel – How To Have A Great Marriage.
See everything Esther Perel has done with London Real on her guest page: Esther Perel on London Real.
More on London Real
Transcript
Transcript: Esther Perel – Why People Are Unfaithful (Even When They’re Happy)
0:00 Brian Rose: …and more about desire: that affairs are sometimes an antidote for deadness, that even happy people cheat, and you said the majority of couples who experience affairs actually stay together.
0:13 Esther Perel: Yes.
0:14 Brian Rose: All very counterintuitive.
0:15 Esther Perel: Of course. On the one hand, we know infidelity is a leading cause of divorce, but there is much more infidelity than there are divorces, so most people stay together, at least the first time around. But this is the same logic as Mating in Captivity. I didn’t write that book for people who don’t get along and no longer have any sex together. It’s the same with affairs. It would be easy to say people have affairs because they don’t like their partner and have miserable relationships. If they do, these days they actually divorce. If they have affairs, it’s often because the relationship is good enough for many other things.
0:58 Esther Perel: The easy thing would be to say people have no sex because they don’t have good connections, and people have affairs because they have bad connections. That’s true. But I see people coming in and saying, “I love my partner. The last thing I want to do is hurt my partner. And I’m having an affair.” That’s a much more complicated question. Why would people risk losing everything for a glimmer of what?
1:26 Brian Rose: Does this link back to your first talk?
1:29 Esther Perel: Yes, it’s a continuation. Mating in Captivity was about the dilemmas of desire on the inside of relationships, and rethinking infidelity looks at what happens when desire breaks free and goes looking elsewhere. The logical thing is to say people do this because there are problems in the relationship. It’s the symptom model: an affair happens because there’s a flawed relationship. Rather than actually grappling with the much more complicated imponderables of existential ennui and the complexities of love and desire, by which affairs actually happen. Sometimes they have nothing to do with the relationship. The relationship is perfectly fine. That’s not what it’s about.
2:19 Esther Perel: And then you enter into the question of transgression. After all, infidelity has existed since marriage was invented. Marriage has changed continuously, and infidelity has a tenacity that only envy has. There’s a robustness to infidelity: no single model of marriage manages to outdo it. No matter how much marriage tries to adapt to the times, infidelity tops it. There’s always another way. So now we need to look at the power of transgression. What is it about us, from Adam and Eve on, that wants to break free of the very constraints which we sometimes created, which yesterday we thought were the ones we wanted?
3:03 Esther Perel: “I wanted nothing more than this family and these children and this secure job and this big home I have.” And then one day all of it feels so meaningless. It’s become the shackles, the thing I want to break. “I have always done what was expected of me, and now I want to do what I really want to do.” That narrative goes back to what I talked about when I spoke about what people regret when they die. You hear the conversation between the dutiful self and the selfish self, between thinking about others and thinking about me, the places where they go together and the places where they clash.
3:54 Esther Perel: So here is this thing called infidelity, which by definition is an act of entitlement and selfishness, but it has a lot more to do with what I do for me than what I’m actually doing to you. And yet when it is uncovered, what it does to you is so shattering, so gutting, so painful, more so than it ever was, because socially it breaks everything down.
4:20 Esther Perel: I was in Morocco last week, in Marrakesh, and I had a conversation with a group of young women and young men in their 20s from the villages, who were working in the city. At one point I said, in the West today the push is that if a woman can finally leave, she doesn’t have to stay and bear her misery. She should just get out. And one of the girls said to me, “Madam, if we had to divorce all the unfaithful men, all of Morocco would be divorced.” And I thought: here is the difference.
5:00 Esther Perel: I am fascinated by how one day we want certain things, and the next day those are the things we think are imprisoning us. How we can have multiple loves, different kinds of loves. How we became one person here, and then remember there are all these other parts of us, and they suddenly manifest elsewhere. How sexual revolutions don’t happen at home, and how the same person who is completely sexually shut down here is lustful and free and eager in this other place, and why they can’t bring it home. At some level, you could say infidelity is an imperfect compromise for imperfect lives.
5:55 Brian Rose: Is it something endemic to us as a society: setting up our own rules and then wanting to break them?
6:02 Esther Perel: It has always existed. We’ve always had rules, and we’ve always wanted to break rules. The rules change. And let’s be very clear: fidelity was an imposition on women, in order to know about patrimony and lineage. Now that you can’t prove it by the children, you prove it by exclusiveness. It’s changed from an imposition on women to a dual-gender conviction. Instead of giving more freedom to women, we’ve taken the freedoms of men away, if you want to put it like that.
6:39 Brian Rose: What was the reaction to your talk, and what were you trying to get people to take away?
6:45 Esther Perel: I wanted a conversation that would embrace complexity. I deal with subjects that are complicated, which people often want to simplify, to make reductionistic and simplistic, and which are often very polarised. So the conversation about infidelity becomes a conversation about villain and victim, good and bad, perpetrator and saint. I don’t think that’s the truth. In these polarised, extreme conversations, you take the extreme example and make it the norm, and you think that if you don’t condemn, it means you condone, and if you try to understand, it’s as if you’re justifying.
7:40 Esther Perel: These kinds of discourses exist in politics, in society, and in the conversation about infidelity, and they breed narrowness, judgementalism and discrimination. They don’t help couples and families and children, that’s for sure. I see these all-or-nothing conversations as an example of an authoritarian discourse, rigid and narrow, and I want to loosen this up, because it’s a lie. It’s a dishonest way of looking at dishonesty, and it doesn’t capture the nuances of the human heart, which is really what infidelity is about. The question is not whether it’s good or bad. The question is what we learn about love, lust and commitment by studying infidelity.
8:36 Esther Perel: It’s an amazing window, the same way sexuality is a window. If you look at sexuality from a societal point of view, the most progressive aspects of a society organise themselves around changes in sexuality: covering your head, abortion, nakedness, sexual education, same-sex marriage. And the most traditional, archaic side of a society also organises itself around it. If you want to control a population, control the women: what they can wear, how much skin they can show, what kind of interaction they can have with men, and who controls the education and information of the children. It’s so foundational, and it’s amazing how little we talk about it.
9:45 Esther Perel: And infidelity is right in there, because infidelity has been one of the ways we control sex. If there is a taboo against infidelity, it’s because somebody understood human nature. We are fickle, we are curious, and we are greedy. We are not generally meant to stay put in one place. There would be no taboo if there were no sizeable threat. And what’s more threatening than human nature?
