It is common, when an affair is discovered, to become an inquisitorial prosecutor: to seize a phone and ask the ‘cheat’ in detail where they have been; to read through their emails and parse every receipt. But such assiduousness is a little late, a little misdirected and rather too self-serving. We should look further back than the moment when a lover came on the scene. The revolution didn’t begin with the sexual act or the dirty texts – the actual storming of our domestic citadel. It began on a sunny, innocent afternoon many years before, when there was still a lot of goodwill, when a hand was proffered and when the partner was perhaps fatefully careless about how they received it. That might be a rather more painful account of our relationship and its troubles than either of us is ready to contemplate for now, but it may also be a more accurate and ultimately more useful one.
HOW TO SPOT A COUPLE THAT MIGHT BE HEADED FOR AN AFFAIR
Having arguments does not, in itself, say very much about the likelihood of a relationship disintegrating. What matters is how arguments are interpreted, conducted and resolved. The fragile unions aren’t necessarily the ones in which people shout, insist that this is finally it, call the other a ninny and slam the door; they are the ones in which emotional disconnection and rupture are not correctly identified, examined and repaired.
A number of qualities are required to ensure that a couple knows how to argue well. There is, first and foremost, the need for each party to be able to pinpoint sources of discomfort in themselves early and accurately: to know how to recognise what they are unhappy about and what they need in order to flourish in the couple. This is not necessarily as obvious as we might imagine. It can take time and psychological insight to know that it was actually the missing phone call or the request to move the date of the holiday that is really the source of anger.
Then there is the equally vital quality of feeling that we have the right to speak, that we aren’t duty bound to be ‘good’ and not cause trouble, that it is acceptable to say when we are miserable and when something – however small it might appear – is troubling us, that it is better to spoil a few evenings than ruin a marriage.
It can help to have a sanguine assessment of how human relationships tend to go: to accept that a bit of disappointment and some friction belong to the necessary ingredients of good-enough love, and that it isn’t a disaster to be cross at points and seemingly convinced that this should be the end.
A subsidiary talent is the skill of knowing how to speak up. Diplomatic skills matter. It might not be exactly the moment the problem appears – we might need to wait until some of the surface tension has dissipated; perhaps the next morning can do just as well. We need to have a background confidence not to blurt out every objection in a panicked diatribe or shout a wounded feeling across the room when the other is themselves too upset to hear it. We need to know how to formulate our complaints into a convincing, perhaps even comedically framed point that has a chance of winning over its target.
It matters in all this that we both feel attached to the partner and, at the same time, have an active impression that we could walk away from them were matters ever truly to escalate. Feeling that we have options means that we do not, therefore, have to cling on. Feeling that we deserve good treatment ensures that our voice can be measured and that the status quo will remain manageable.
None of these factors tend to be present in those unfortunate couples who do not just argue but lack the gift of arguing well. A range of inner obstacles prevents them from dealing effectively with their emotional disconnection and anger:
Over-optimism about relationships
Fragile couples, paradoxically, tend to be very hopeful about love. They associate happiness with conflict-free unions. They do not expect, once they have found the person they unwisely see as ‘the one’, ever to need to squabble, storm out of a room or feel unhappy for the afternoon again. When trouble emerges, as it inevitably does, they do not greet it as a sign that love is progressing as it should, but rather as alarming evidence that their relationship may be illegitimate and fundamentally flawed. Their hopes tire them for the patient tasks of diplomatic negotiation and routine maintenance.
Out of touch with pain
Fragile couples tend not to be good detectives of their own sufferings. They may be both unhappy and yet unsure as to the actual causes of their dissatisfactions; they know that something is wrong in their union, but they can’t easily trace the catalysts. They can’t zero in on how it was the lack of trust in them around money that rankles, or that it has been their behaviour towards a demanding youngest child that has been hurting. They lash out in vague or inaccurate directions, their attacks either unfairly general or unconvincingly specific.
Shame
A shamed person has fundamental doubts about their right to exist. Somewhere in the past, they have been imbued with an impression that they do not matter very much, that their feelings should be ignored, that their happiness is not a priority, that their words do not count. Once they are in a couple, shamed people hurt like anyone else, but their capacity to turn their hurt into something another person can understand, and be touched by, is recklessly weak. Shamed people will sulk rather than speak, hide rather than divulge, feel secretly wretched rather than candidly complain. It is frequently very late – far too late – by the time shamed people finally let their lover know more about the nature of their desperation.
Excessive anxiety
Complaining well requires an impression that not everything depends on the complaint being heard perfectly. Were the lesson to go wrong, were the other to prove intransigent, one could survive and take one’s love elsewhere. Not everything is at stake in an argument. The other hasn’t ruined one’s life. One therefore doesn’t need to scream, hector, insist or nag. One can deliver a complaint with some of the nonchalance of a calm teacher who wants an audience to learn but can bear it if they don’t; one could always say what one has on one’s mind tomorrow, or the next day.
Excessive pride
It takes an inner dignity not to mind too much about having to level complaints about things that could sound laughably ‘small’ or that leave one open to being described as petty or needy. With too much pride and fear, it can become unbearable for a person to admit that they have been upset since lunch because their partner didn’t take their hand on a walk, or that they wish so much that their partner would be readier to hug them last thing at night. We have to feel quite grown up inside not to be offended by our own more child-like appetites for reassurance and comfort. It is an achievement to know how to be strong about one’s vulnerability. One may have said, rather too many times, from behind a slammed door, in a defensive tone, ‘No, nothing is wrong whatsoever. Go away,’ while secretly longing to be comforted and understood like a weepy, upset child.
Hopelessness about dialogue
Fragile couples often come together with few positive childhood memories of conversations working out; early role models may simply have screamed at and then despaired of one another. Fragile couples may never have witnessed disagreements eventually morphing into mutual understanding and sympathy. They would deeply love to be understood, but they can bring precious few resources to the task of making themselves so.
None of these factors mean there will have to be an affair, but they are generators of the states of emotional disconnection that contribute to an all-important affair-ready state. Outwardly, things may seemingly be well. A couple may have an interesting social life, some lovely children, a new apartment. But a more judicious analysis will reveal an unexpected degree of risk: An affair won’t – in the circumstances, whatever it may later seem – be just an idle self-indulgence or a momentary lack of self-control. It will be the result of identifiable long-term resentments that a couple, otherwise blessed and committed, lacked the inner resources and courage to investigate.
THE ROLE OF SEX IN AFFAIRS
When an affair is discovered, it is common to describe the person who strayed as despicably
sexually uncontained. They are lustful, wanton, dog-like. They have ceded control to their animal selves. But we can get a more nuanced view of the role of sex in affairs by asking a deliberately obtuse, philosophical-sounding question: Why is sex so nice?
One possible answer, which can sound a little odd, is: because we have advanced tendencies to hate ourselves and find ourselves unacceptable – feelings which sex with a new person has an exceptional capacity to reduce.
A long-term relationship can only too easily enforce a sense that we are neither very admirable nor very worthy. Management of family life, cleaning rotas, finances and relations with friends and in-laws can contribute to an impression that one is fundamentally troublesome and undeserving of sustained notice. The mood around us is fractious and ungrateful. ‘Not you again’ may be the implicit message one receives upon entering any room.
Physically, we have strict instructions to keep ourselves to ourselves. There is one person on the planet we are meant to be naked in front of, and this figure is unlikely to be particularly impressed or even vaguely cognisant of our appearance. With everyone else, we are cautious, swaddled beings. We would not dare to come within thirty centimetres of most of humanity.
And then, suddenly, in the context of an affair, everything changes. We can be enlaced and carefree. Our tongue, normally carefully shielded and used to form sounds and break down toast or the morning cereal, is given permission to enter another person’s mouth. We are no longer just the person who makes problems with the in-laws and doesn’t lift their weight around the house or with the finances; we are someone whose very essence has, via the flesh, been witnessed and endorsed.
What we may be doing is slipping off another’s top or inviting them to release our trousers, but what all this means is that another human has – exceptionally – chosen to find us worthy.
For so-called cheats (who will most likely have to pay a very heavy price indeed for going to bed with another person), sex can have remarkably little to do with ‘sex’. It is an activity continuous with a range of nonphysical needs for tenderness, acceptance, care and companionship. It is an attempt – negotiated through the body, but focused on the satisfactions of the psyche – to make up for a long-standing, painfully severed emotional connection with a primary partner.
THE ESSENCE OF WHAT WE
FEEL UPSET ABOUT
As betrayed parties, we fixate – understandably – on what happened physically. We replay again and again the thought of what our partner did with their new companion. It seems horrific that they should have let lust control them in this way.
But to try to understand the true source of our devastation, we might distinguish between two kinds of things they have done. We may not necessarily know many details, but the thoughts and images that flit through our minds can be broadly divided into two kinds as shown in the table overleaf:
A: Bodily things they did
B: Emotional things they did
They took their clothes off urgently
They looked into each other’s eyes and smiled
They had sex for two hours in a hotel
They made up nicknames for each other
They sucked each other’s fingers
They talked of their sorrows and cried with one another
They watched each other masturbate
They shared moments of giddy, child-like joy
Typically an affair is defined by the ingredients in column A. But the things that truly upset us may be the elements of emotional engagement, as we imagine them, in column B. It may not strictly speaking be the idea of our partner (for instance) taking their clothes off in front of another person that is at the heart of our pain; it’s the way we imagine them thinking and feeling; it’s the nicknames they might have made up for one another …
This tells us something important. The crucial, active element in an affair isn’t really the physical sex per se: it’s the connection, the intimacy, the sense of closeness, the warmth, the shared liking for which physical sex provides the occasion.
The thought opens us up to a more defined, perhaps more searing and yet, usefully, more accurate avenue of pain in relation to our partner. The problem is not that they have been horny – something for which we cannot really be held responsible and which we can therefore safely moralise about. It is that they have been lonely – something which it is a great deal harder to bear and think ourselves wholly innocent of.
THE PLEASURES OF AFFAIRS
Given the pain infidelity may cause, it can feel callous to explore the charms and attractions of affairs; it’s a move that our Romantic age can be extremely censorious about. But it is difficult to make any sense of our escapades unless we can first understand what may be so powerfully compelling about them. We cannot secure the understanding of relationships that we need so long as we remain willingly blind to the more thrilling facets of ‘straying’.
There are several important ways in which an affair can feel urgent and important, despite all the complications and dramas it may embroil us in:
Foregrounding neglected parts of who we are
A central peril of long-term relationships is their corruption of our sense of identity, their habit of caricaturing us in unhelpful directions. At home, over the years, we become simply ‘the bossy one’, ‘the intellectual one’, ‘the organiser’, ‘the lazy one’ or ‘the one who frets stupidly about money’. The description may not be wholly untrue, but it is – crucially – woefully limited.
However, with our lover, we have the chance to start the story of ourselves anew. Whatever we may feel about them, it is how they make us feel about ourselves that can be at the core of their appeal. In their company, we can present facets of who we are that have been sidelined in our main relationship. We can discover a more carefree side of ourselves, or emerge as the one who takes the lead in making decisions. We are not boxed in by assumptions that might have been mostly true a decade before. The lover declares us to be, much to our surprise, but also to our relief, remarkably funny, relaxed or serious – things we might have struggled to feel in the face of the prejudices of our partners, who tell us with authority what we are ‘really’ like.
In long-term love, we are the prisoners of history. Nothing has been forgotten: the weekend city break when we shouted, the Christmas when we forgot the present, the anxious period after the sacking when we ruined a whole summer. We don’t wish to lie about who we are; we want a chance to be properly forgiven, which may mean in practical terms that someone should simply not know the whole of our story.
Kindness
One of the great perils of an established relationship is that it cuts us off from our longing to be kind. We are so often left fighting for our basic rights within the couple that we have no opportunity to give expression to our appetite for generosity and sweetness. We have to persuade our partner to let us have an allotted amount of time to ourselves. We have to point out that we have already compromised on a given issue. We have to put our foot down about certain domestic chores. We have to remind our partner on many occasions to do something they had solemnly agreed to do but are reneging on. We have to take issue with a cutting comment levelled in our direction. For much of the time, it feels as if we might be fighting for our lives.
We can grow very resentful. Our capacity to be kind becomes hampered by our memory of the other’s unkindness to us. We would like to prepare them breakfast and surprise them with a present, but we can’t forget the way they mocked us at the party or were ungrateful about the help we gave their sibling.
Yet within an affair, we can throw off the watchful and suspicious stance we have adopted. The delight isn’t just that the lover is nice to us; it is that we can be so nice to them, the way we always longed to be and knew we were when we first began to dream of love in adolescence. They have not hurt us (yet), nor given us grounds for vigilance. In the hotel room, we can give untrammelled expression to a passionate wish to be helpful, to listen, to be generous, to do
little things to make them comfortable, to be attentive to their needs, to show them special signs of respect and to pay them compliments. We are reminded that being emotionally stingy was only ever a response to upset.
The simplicity of the task
We are normally trying to be so much: a coparent, a domestic manager, a sexual companion, a friend. Unsurprisingly, we fail at most of these tasks. But affairs are mercifully simple propositions. We are not trying to do laundry and fathom someone’s intimate history. We are not juggling a homework schedule and attempting a sexual scenario. We don’t have to manage their mother and their soul. We have a rare chance to do one thing well.
Our faith in human nature is renewed
We learn, in established love, to be cautious in our hopes for what another human can be like. We know that people don’t generally change very much. We grow to accept that most attempts to persuade our companions of anything will fail. We accept how much intransigence we will meet with. We understand that luck seldom comes our way.
But an affair is a rare break. Despite everything we have become, another member of our species has opted to give us a chance. They have looked at us with new eyes and, for once, not found us wanting. They have chosen to glance past our flaws and it is as if we are reborn through their original, creative gaze.
We regain a little faith in the whole human project. We receive an uplift which spreads across all areas of life. One very special person gives us energy to look anew at the whole species. For the first time in many years, we smile benignly and open-heartedly at existence.
An end to shame
We grow used to being burdened by a sense that a lot of what we are deep down is unacceptable. Sex becomes the fulcrum of the censorship. The other doesn’t want to know our more intimate fantasies. They roll their eyes when we describe a passing daydream we had about a colleague or someone on a train. We are acutely aware of how disgusting some of what we want can feel to them after an exhausting day with the children. But no such taboos are in place with a new love. They welcome our extreme sides as evidence of trust and intimacy. They, too, long to do things that respectable people might shudder at. Our union is a conspiracy against judgement. We do so-called disgusting things as a way of proving our degree of inner purity and commitment.
Affairs Page 2