Affairs Read online

  The world is bigger than we’d thought

  The world has, without our really noticing it, grown predictable and stale. Our expectations are fixed. Our knowledge seems established. But the lover is showing us that life is so much richer than we had dared to think. The vastness of the cosmos comes through in little details. They have a completely different idea of what a bathroom or a kitchen can be like. They read an alternative newspaper and have spent years in places we’d hardly thought of. With them, we go to shops we’d never have entered, watch films we’d never have seen, hear about books and ideas that would never normally come our way. They spread their jam in an original manner; they give certain words a new intonation; their shoes come from a manufacturer we had never heard of. Their original sides lend us an opportunity to try out a different vision of existence.

  The pleasures of secrecy

  Being known is, at one level, our greatest longing. But being badly known is a prison. The phrase ‘I know you’ can be both a gift and a threatening way of asserting unwanted authority. Our partner claims to know us deeply, but in the process, they have often missed so much. An affair is a rebellion against this assumed, unfair knowledge. ‘You don’t know me at all’ is the implicit message behind the raft of lies we are telling. They thought that they knew what was passing through our minds, but they have not the slightest clue about what is really happening in our lives right now. They may tell our friends what we are ‘like’, but they have no inkling of the itineraries we have devised to meet our lover in Rome, or what we have written to our passionate new companion in the app hidden on our phone. Our secret affair is a rebellion against the perils of being badly ‘known’.

  Revenge

  We might not dare to put it this way, but there is a degree of delightful revenge in all this. Our partner assumed that no one else would care about us; they arrogantly believed that no one would look our way. They took our presence for granted. They couldn’t bear to hear us to the end of our sentences. They disagreed with us relentlessly when they could so easily have given way. We are, through our lover, finding recompense for the many times when so much of what we cared for was trampled upon.

  The majority position on affairs is, of course, that they are abhorrent. But they wouldn’t be as widely practiced as they are were there not another side to the story that we don’t typically dare to mention. It’s by investigating the pleasures of affairs that we gain a sense of what can be so difficult about long-term love. Our affairs give us a measure of how much, how blindly and how badly we have hurt one another over the years.

  THE PAINS OF AFFAIRS

  We may think the problems of affairs are only too obvious, but they will probably surprise us all the same. It is worth attempting to look ahead at a few of them – not that they can (or even should) ever constitute a decisive argument against what we are planning:

  Everyone is in tears

  We begin with the hope that we can make ourselves happy, delight the lover and leave the long-term partner in pleasant ignorance. But as the story unfolds, the lover grows furious at our inability to commit, the partner is crushed by our betrayal and we are left in anxious, agonised tears at the chaos we have unleashed. There may be some children crying in the background as well, and if we are properly unlucky, moralistic neighbours or newspapers decrying our beastliness too. We cannot be blamed for our aspirations for contentment, but we can be roundly condemned for imagining that we could turn any of them into a sustainable reality.

  We are denied a belief in our innocence

  It seemed, at first, as if we had managed to escape the gravitational pull of our psychological weaknesses. We were no longer going to have to feel anxious, unconfident or ashamed. But soon enough we were reintroduced to our shadow sides, with an added disadvantage: We can no longer furiously blame the partner for preventing us from acceding to our better selves.

  Blame is general

  For a time, we had the satisfaction of knowing that the problem lay firmly with our partner; they were the ones holding us back, stifling our sex lives, hampering our ability to express ourselves professionally, dampening our mood and ruining our chances. But the affair has revealed a more awkward truth: that many of the greatest problems that hound us are endemic to us, or even to existence. We can see that we had previously experienced the pains of life in the company of our partner, not because of our partner.

  The lover is human

  We had to believe, in order to justify this adventure, that our lover did not partake of the ordinary mortal condition. We had to trust that they had not been touched by the stubborn errors and follies of regular humankind, that they would be free of the catalogue of sins we had noted over so many years in our partner’s behaviour. But as the affair unfolded, we were inducted into a basic and sobering realisation: that the sins were not limited to our unfortunate spouse; the apparent angel could also at points grow tetchy, unreasonable, censorious, sharp-tongued and uninterested. We feel ready to accept a bitter truth: that love involves a process of exaggerating the difference between one person and another.

  The dashed dreams of infidelity

  So long as an affair remained only an abstract possibility, it could also be a source of comfort at moments of particular tension. We could, we told ourselves, if it were all to get too much, always have an affair. We knew it would not be easy, but it was an escape – and at points even a threat. But by turning that fantasy into a relationship, we have one less daydream to play with.

  Guilt

  This, naturally, is the greatest horror. In our bid for happiness, we have made others suffer. We have brought pain in our wake. We have engulfed those we love in sorrow. In more believing times, we could have fallen on our knees before a statue of a deity and begged for forgiveness. Now we must ask more haltingly for forgiveness from real people around us who are hurt and furious. There is no more transcendent cleansing available. We look in vain at the vast evening sky for deliverance. We thought ourselves kind and reasonable, but we have learnt that we were demented fools all along. We whisper idle sorries into our tear-stained pillows.

  HOW TO REDUCE THE RISK OF AFFAIRS

  The traditional way to try to reduce the chances of someone having an affair is to focus on controlling their actions and outward movements: not letting them go to social events without us, calling them at random times or restricting their access to social media.

  But people don’t have affairs because they are able to meet attractive others; they have affairs because they feel emotionally disconnected from their partners. The best way to stop them from being tempted to sleep with someone else is not, therefore, to reduce their opportunities for contact; it is to leave them free to wander the world while ensuring that they feel heard by and reconciled with their partners. It is emotional closeness, not curfews, that guarantees the integrity of couples.

  At a practical level, the route to closeness requires us to ensure that the two main sources of distance – resentment and loneliness – are correctly identified and regularly purged. The more we can tell our partners what we are annoyed and disappointed about, what we long for and are made by anxious by, and the more we can feel heard for doing so, the less we will bear grudges, take our distance and seek revenge by stripping naked with someone else. Few things are more properly Romantic (in the true sense of the word, meaning ‘conducive to love’) than highly honest conversations in which we have an opportunity to lay bare the particular ways in which our partners have disappointed us. Nothing may so endear us to someone as a chance to tell them why they have let us down.

  To guide us in our restorative complaints, we might follow a range of questions and prompts:

  I sometimes feel frustrated with you when …

  It sounds like a nasty theme, but handled correctly, it is the gateway to great tenderness and closeness. It provides us with an opportunity to do something very rare: level criticism without anger. And it’s a chance to hear criticism as more than an attack, to int
erpret it for what it may truly be: a desire to learn how to live together with less occasion for anger.

  I’d love you to realise that you hurt me when …

  We’re carrying around wounds that we have, understandably and inevitably, found it hard to articulate. Perhaps the complaints sounded too petty or humiliating to mention at the time. The problem is that when they fester, the currents of affection start to get blocked, and soon we may find ourselves flinching when our partner tries to touch us. This prompt provides a safe moment in which to reveal a set of – typically entirely unintentional – hurts. Maybe last week there was something around work, or their mother, or the way they responded to a fairly innocent enquiry in the kitchen before a run. It’s vital that the partner doesn’t step in and deny that the hurt took place. There is no such thing as a hurt that is too small to matter when emotional closeness is at stake.

  One of the hardest things for you to understand about me is …

  We end up lonely because there is something important about who we are that the other appears not to grasp, and so – we can end up assuming – does not even want to take on board. But this lack of interest is rarely malevolent; it is usually more the case that there hasn’t been a proper occasion for exploration. The feeling that one person knows another is the constant enemy of long-term couples. Our partners may understand us well, but we still need, patiently and diplomatically, to keep explaining things that remain unclear between us. We are changing all the time, we’re no longer who we were last month and we can struggle to explain our own evolutions and needs even to ourselves. We must never be furious with our beloved for not grasping facets of our identity we haven’t yet properly managed to share with them.

  What I'd love you to appreciate about me is …

  We don’t want untrammelled praise, but merely the odd moment when we can tell that what we feel is worthy of appreciation – maybe a little more appreciation than we have until now spontaneously received. We might want to draw attention to our best intentions (even when they didn’t entirely work out), to the sweeter aspects of our character or to the good things about us which have quietly removed conflicts that would otherwise have emerged in the background. We’re reminding ourselves and the other that there are reasons for us to deserve love.

  Where I’m unfulfilled in my life …

  It need not always be the fault of a lover that we are dissatisfied and restless. The longing for an affair can arise from a sense that the world more generally has not heard us, that we have been abandoned with career anxieties or that we are lagging behind our peers in terms of achievement and assets. Day to day, we tend not to explain the origins of these distressed moods very well. Our partner is the witness to them but can’t easily recognise where the unhappiness is coming from. So they make the next most obvious move and start to assume that we are simply being mean or bad-tempered. This prompt is a chance to explain the background existential fear and professional ennui responsible for some of our most acute day-to-day irritations and withdrawn states; a chance to demonstrate that we are not bad but are merely longing for their reassurance and support to battle our impression of insignificance and failure.

  In order to be close to our partner and resist the lure of an affair, we also need to be able to speak with unusual candour about our sexual aspirations. Nothing more quickly reduces the need to act out a fantasy than the ability to speak about it and to be heard with sympathy, tolerance and curiosity. Here are some of the prompts that might induce the right sort of conversation about sex:

  • Something I'm really inhibited about sexually is …

  • I would love it if you could understand that sometimes I want …

  • What I wish I could change about me and sex is …

  • What I wish I could change about you and sex is …

  No prompts can guarantee that an affair will never happen, but these could at least help to diagnose and repair the feelings of resentful distance or erotic loneliness that are the hidden drivers of the desire to wander off with someone else. We should dare to spend less time banning our partners from having lunch with strangers or travelling alone, and more time ensuring that they feel understood for their flaws and confusions – and appreciated for their virtues.

  HOW CAN AN AFFAIR HELP A MARRIAGE?

  The idea that an affair could help a marriage sounds, naturally, rather paradoxical. Affairs are the enemies of marriages. They are what destroy established couples. There should be nothing positive whatsoever about one or both parties in a marriage heading off with a lover. And yet there are – perhaps strangely – a few ways in which an affair might contribute to the growth and stability of a union. In optimal situations, affairs deserve to be counted among the strange but genuine elements that can strengthen a marriage.

  Here are a few of the reasons:

  Liking ourselves more

  Given how often we behave badly in love from feeling small and undesirable, a new person's interest can awaken us to a new sense of our own potency and sheer likeability, which we can take back into and use to nourish our primary relationship. Our romantic success can make us feel more able to cope with the irritants of ordinary life, helping us to recover the thread of our own self-esteem.

  Guilt

  We know a lot about how guilt can torment us; we know less about how it may motivate us to be kinder. Feeling that we have deeply wronged our partner can spur us to energetic attempts to recompense them for our deceit and mendacity. Rich in betrayal, we no longer stay fixated on their irritating habits and hurtful acts; we forget that they were unkind to us about our income or neglectful of our needs around the house. What we’re chiefly aware of is that we told a panoply of appalling lies, lay with our lover in a bathtub while we texted our partner to say that a meeting had overrun, ignored the children on the weekends and wasted the household money on costly erotic gifts. And so we have, quite simply, no leg left to stand on. We may have to wait until we feel very bad indeed to start to do a bit of genuine good.

  Practicing connection

  We were driven into another’s arms because we had forgotten the art of connection. We no longer knew how to be tender, give compliments, act playfully or behave with sensitivity and consideration. Our lover revised the emotional curriculum with us. In our hideaway, it became natural to touch them sweetly, to refer to them with an affectionate diminutive and to pick up on their best qualities. The affair was not just a school for betrayal; it turned out to be a school for love in its totality; its lessons could be transferred and reintegrated into the very relationship whose insufficiencies inspired the affair in the first place. In the process, the affair may start to seem a little less necessary. We can come to see that a lot of what we were seeking within the affair could, if only we remembered to practice certain moves, be available in the marriage.

  Sex

  We were desperate to re-experience ourselves as potent and desirable. Our lover hasn’t only helped us connect with them sexually; they’ve guided us back to our libido more broadly. It may be them in particular we made love to, but it’s sex in general that they have given us an appetite for. We may not, at this point, always be thinking of our partner during sex. But we are, at least – much to their and our surprise – having sex with them once more.

  Life is not elsewhere

  Cheating lends us the gift of reducing the ill temper and angry wistfulness that can come from a sense that there must be beautiful, astonishing alternatives out there which our commitments have arbitrarily cut us off from. An affair puts our vagabond romantic imaginations usefully to the test; it challenges our unfair, sentimental suspicions that the pain and melancholy we sometimes feel is specifically the fault of our partner, rather than a general feature of existence. We may not always be happy with our long-term companion, but – the affair teaches us – nor would we invariably be happy with someone else either. That all relationships are complicated and, in certain ways, unsatisfying may be the wisest lesson that we can p
ull out of the burning, troubled embers of an affair.

  No one is perfect

  The affair teaches us that everyone is tricky from close up. Life with a new person would be equally, but just differently, complex. It’s a case of working out what variety of suffering we’re best suited to. We stand to remember that we surrendered our freedom for very sound reasons, because we realised that we had found someone who was – in the end – about as good as any decent human can ever be expected to be. We are often unhappy, of course, but that is a universal law, not a unique curse.

  We are not trapped

  Instead of feeling that we have no option but to remain in our oppressive relationship, the affair gives us the opportunity fully to explore the idea that we could truly be with someone else. If, thereafter, we decide to stay in the marriage, the decision becomes once again a positive choice, not a habit or an arbitrary necessity. The conclusion that we want to remain functions like a renewal of vows. The best way to exorcise the power that affairs can have over married people is not to claim that they are both deeply lovely and yet entirely forbidden. It may be to give married people a chance to explore them and to see the reality from up close. As wise parents know, banning anything rarely works; it merely inflames our curiosity and arouses our defiance. The best move may be to give a restless partner a chance to find out what an affair is really like, and then have the nerve and wisdom to bet that the knowledge will return them to us soon enough.