Why infidelity might just save your marriage
There are surprising ‘benefits’ to extra-marital affairs, therapist says
Esther Perel is explaining why, as a woman, putting sex on your “to-do” list isn’t just OK, but might save your marriage. “Honestly, it’s a wonderful idea,” the Belgian psychotherapist and bestselling author says. “People are always horrified when you tell them that you have to schedule sex, because they want it to be spontaneous and to fall from the heavens while you’re folding the laundry. But sex only happens if you make it happen.”
Because female sexual desire is “responsive” rather than “initiative,” the 59-year-old goes on, “putting it on a ‘to-do’ list is saying ‘This is important to me,’ in just the same way as a woman might with going to the gym. Nobody says, ‘You should just want to go and run,’ do they? So it’s not about seeing it as a chore, but making time for yourself and the experience. It’s about assigning value to it.”
The value of intimacy has been at the core of Perel’s work for more than 20 years. The daughter of two Polish-born Holocaust survivors believes her understanding of its importance has helped her own 35-year marriage, to psychologist husband Jack Saul, endure.
Her bestselling 2006 book, Mating in Captivity, which examined our conflicting need for both security and erotic novelty, was translated into 26 languages, and her TED talk, The Secret to Desire in a LongTerm Relationship, has been viewed more than 15 million times. But it’s the knowledge and research Perel has amassed on infidelity over the years that’s most compelling.
Despite it being banal, easy and something Perel estimates 80 per cent of us have been directly affected by, our morbid fascination with why, how and with whom we cheat never wanes.
Readers of Perel’s new book, The State of Affairs, will experience that same perfect split of horror and what I can only describe as erotic vertigo — because Perel is defiantly non-judgmental — showing us the appeal and the “benefits” of extra-marital affairs as well as the chaos they can cause, and unveiling some surprising statistics as she does so, the most significant being the 40-per-cent jump in female infidelity since 1990.
“Male figures have held steady,” Perel says. “But despite the freedom women now have — to choose who they marry, to have a relationship that is based on connection and pleasure, not just duty, to have an economic independence, no longer be beholden to having 10 children, and crucially to be able to divorce if they are unhappy — they are ‘transgressing’ more than ever.”
That sense of vibrancy is in direct contrast to the “numbness to their own pleasure and longings” women can feel beneath the weight of their responsibilities. “The caretaking and devotion that a woman has to her children, family, partner and home often means that, for years, she thinks: ‘I have no time to think about myself or even go to the hairdresser.’ ”
That children have been “so sentimentalized” in modern relationships is helping to kill the intimacy our parents and grandparents had, says Perel. “And I would go further and say: ‘Have sex for your kids.’ Because you’re not being selfish when you have sex with your husband or wife; you’re actually saving your family by maintaining that erotic intimacy. All that erotic energy is being redirected into people’s children now, so the children get to be playful and wear new clothes and try out new activities.”
When women experience what Perel describes as their “now me” moment and embark on an affair, “interestingly, they are not too tired or stressed, but have all the time in the world: they are powered by their own transgression.
Because we live in the age of happiness and entitlement? “Absolutely. And because whereas we used to choose between three people in the village, we now have this digital online forest with bountiful flora. And only when you find The One can you stop looking.”
Perel believes it’s this emphasis on “The One” that’s setting so many marriages up to fail. “Relationships are crumbling under the weight of people’s expectations. But people won’t give up that idea. He or she has to be your passionate lover, intellectual equal, best parent, best friend and be able to maintain a sense of mystery and awe and transcendence besides,” she explains. “The soulmate is what people used to seek out in religion, but romantic love is the new religion.”