He pointed out that the divorce rate has gone down significantly for college-educated couples, but not for couples in which neither person has a college education. I heard from a lot of people who prudently dated their partners for several years before getting married, then waited still more years before having children, just in case.
Of course, we are also living in the midst of a sexual-harassment crisis. But a number of MeToo offenses seem to be perpetrated by older men, some of whom blame changing mores for their alleged transgressions.
Cheating, meanwhile, can feel deeply inequitable. A few people who responded to my Twitter inquiry suggested that maybe Millennials in general are still young and idealistic. My generation wants jobs with a purpose, and we want relationships that feel purposeful, too.
Or, as a Gen X friend of mine speculated, perhaps Millennials are terrified of breaking rules. In line with this moral-Millennial hypothesis, many young, married people told me it feels less honorable to leave your spouse for someone else. In this case, some Millennials are still traumatized by the recession and struggling to launch their careers.
Why screw it up? The peak in the divorce rate was in , right as the oldest Millennials were being born and younger Gen Xers were reaching their tender grade-school years.
Cheating was more likely to end a relationship when it arose from anger, lack of love, low commitment or neglect. And it was less likely to do so when the infidelity was circumstantial. Surprisingly, only one in five The same number of couples The remaining relationships broke up for noncheating reasons.
Rarely did infidelity lead to a real relationship. Only one out of 10 of the affairs Gary W. Lewandowski, Jr. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Go Paperless with Digital. Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter. Sign Up. Support science journalism.
Why him? Why her? Why now? Was this the first time? Did you initiate? Did you try to resist? How did it feel? Were you looking for something? What did you find? One of the most uncomfortable truths about an affair is that what for Partner A may be an agonizing betrayal may be transformative for Partner B.
Extramarital adventures are painful and destabilizing, but they can also be liberating and empowering. Understanding both sides is crucial, whether a couple chooses to end the relationship or intends to stay together, to rebuild and revitalize.
Let me assure you that I do not approve of deception or take betrayal lightly. I sit with the devastation in my office every day.
Not condemning does not mean condoning, and there is a world of difference between understanding and justifying. My role as a therapist is to create a space where the diversity of experiences can be explored with compassion. People stray for a multitude of reasons, I have discovered, and every time I think I have heard them all, a new variation emerges.
I feel like a teenager with a boyfriend. As I listen to her, I start to suspect that her affair is about neither her husband nor their relationship. Her story echoes a theme that has come up repeatedly in my work: affairs as a form of self-discovery, a quest for a new or lost identity.
For these seekers, infidelity is less likely to be a symptom of a problem, and more likely an expansive experience that involves growth, exploration, and transformation.
Cheating is cheating, whatever fancy New Age labels you want to put on it. Intimate betrayal feels intensely personal—a direct attack in the most vulnerable place. And yet I often find myself asking jilted lovers to consider a question that seems ludicrous to them: What if the affair had nothing to do with you? We are not looking for another lover so much as another version of ourselves.
Perhaps this explains why so many people subscribe to the symptom theory. Blaming a failed marriage is easier than grappling with our existential conundrums, our longings, our ennui.
The problem is that, unlike the drunk, whose search is futile, we can always find problems in a marriage. They just may not be the right keys to unlock the meaning of the affair. If she and I had taken that route, we may have had an interesting chat, but not the one we needed to have. Good daughter, good wife, good mother. She never partied, drank, or stayed out late, and she smoked her first joint at After college, she married the right guy, and helped to support her family, as so many children of immigrant parents do.
More free? Do they have more fun? In our sessions, we talk about duty and desire, about age and youth. Her daughters are becoming teenagers and enjoying a freedom she never knew. Priya is at once supportive and envious. As she nears the mid-century mark, she is having her own belated adolescent rebellion. These explanations may seem superficial—petty First World problems, or rationalizations for immature, selfish, hurtful behavior.
Priya has said as much herself. We both agree that her life is enviable. And yet, she is risking it all. S ecluded from the responsibilities of everyday life, the parallel universe of the affair is often idealized, infused with the promise of transcendence. For some people, like Priya, it is a world of possibility—an alternate reality in which they can reimagine and reinvent themselves. Then again, it is experienced as limitless precisely because it is contained within the limits of its clandestine structure.
It is a poetic interlude in a prosaic life. Forbidden-love stories are utopian by nature, especially in contrast with the mundane constraints of marriage and family. A prime characteristic of this liminal universe—and the key to its irresistible power—is that it is unattainable. Affairs are by definition precarious, elusive, and ambiguous. Because we cannot have our lover, we keep wanting. It is this just-out-of-reach quality that lends affairs their erotic mystique and keeps the flame of desire burning.
Reinforcing this segregation of the affair from reality is the fact that many, like Priya, choose lovers who either could not or would not become a life partner. By falling for someone from a very different class, culture, or generation, we play with possibilities that we would not entertain as actualities.
Few of these types of affairs withstand discovery. One would think that a relationship for which so much was risked would survive the transition into daylight. Under the spell of passion, lovers speak longingly of all the things they will be able to do when they are finally together.
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.
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