Why happy people cheat on their partners

IT’S hard to believe, but people in happy, loving relationships do cheat on their partners. All the time. And there’s a reason for it.

Nicole Kidman starring in To Die For, in which she plays a weather woman who cheats on her husband.

INFIDELITY is a matrix of entitlement, arrogance, risk and eroticism. It is a powerful taboo, despite how ubiquitous it has always been in society.

We have, as a species, have reached an unspoken agreement to speak about infidelity in terms of fault: we use words like ‘perpetrator’, ‘victim’ and ‘adultery’. We assume that affairs happen when marriages fracture and love fails — but what if that isn’t always the case?

Happy people cheat, too, and to listen to their motives is to inch closer to understanding how infidelity really works.

Esther Perel is one of the world’s pre-eminent psychotherapists and an expert on the topic of infidelity. She has spent the past three decades seeing patients as a therapist; the past eight of those exclusively seeing couples and individuals affected by affairs. Her new book, The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity, is a manifesto on the topic that, above all, preaches the need for nuance and kindness. Calling from New York, she talked about one of the most confronting themes of her investigation.

“One of the most important findings of my research has been that even happy people cheat. Not all affairs, as previously thought, are symptoms of a troubled relationship or a troubled person,” she said, in her curt Belgian accent.

“This, for the record, goes against the way even therapists like to frame relationships: as a symptom of disharmony. It is a controversial thought, that perfectly happy people might stray from their loving relationships.

“I’ve had people say to me, ‘I have an amazing partner … and I am having an affair.’ I say to them, what’s happening here is that you’re looking for a different version of yourself. Perhaps it’s about a sense of longing, a sense of loss —— whether that’s the loss of vitality or the loss of certain parts of yourself.

Having an affair, in some cases, can be a rejection of the narrowness of self. This existential longing is very different to the sorts of reasons we’re used to for people having an affair. In actual fact, contrary to what we have believed for so long, there is a range of motives for an affair, and that includes good people who break their own rules after years of monogamy and they don’t know why they do it, but they do. There is always, inevitably, the shadow of mortality somewhere in the background.”

Leslie Mann’s husband in ‘The other woman’ was supposedly happy in his marriage, yet had affairs with two other women. Picture: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.

In her book, Perel tells the story of a woman who is utterly bemused by her own indiscretions. She is happily married, lives an enviable life and adores her husband, but finds herself having an affair. It is more shocking to her than to anyone else, and she comes to Perel to work out her own actions. Perel, a compassionate but brutally astute therapist, guides her with questions and suggestions until she comes to realise that her infidelity was a form of rebellion against the life she had settled into. She had always been ‘good’: the good girl, the good daughter, the good wife. Cheating on her husband was her way, painful and selfish, to indulge a different version of herself.

On this, Perel writes: “When we select a partner, we commit to a story. Yet we remain forever curious: What other stories could we have been a part of? Affairs offer us a window into those other lives, a peek at the stranger within. Adultery is often the revenge of the deserted possibilities.” Every time she thinks she has heard all the reasons for having an affair, she is surprised by yet another variation.

But through all her sessions with clients, the theme of exploration reappears. Having an affair is, strangely enough, not always to do with the relationship from which a person is straying. It is not even to do with the person from whom the cheater is straying. It is a deeply personal, perversely entitled venture in self-discovery, a chance to spend time as a sinister alter-ego.

None of this is to condone or encourage infidelity; oh no. Working in this field, Perel is often asked whether she would recommend an affair to an ailing marriage. She said she would no sooner recommend an affair than endorse cancer. She has worked on the frontline of heartache and seen the pain these kinds of betrayals can cause, the fractures, the fissures, the damage they can do to people. She knows better than anyone how excruciating infidelity can be — for everyone involved.

Perel is far from an advocate for an affair and she would never prescribe a little jaunt of self-discovery at the expense of a relationship or a heart — but she is revolutionary in the compassion she expects and the way she encourages us to delve into the real reasons people cheat. If happy people can cheat, then it is perhaps more complicated than we have ever suspected.