In a Ted Talk called ‘Rethinking infidelity’, the psychotherapist Esther Perel had this to say about cheating:
‘All over the world, there is one word that people who have affairs always tell me… they feel alive… They are often people who have been faithful for decades, but one day they crossed a line they never thought they would cross, and at the risk of losing everything, but for a glimmer of what?’
Since affairs are so common, this 'glimmer of what?’ is worth exploring. What, really, are people after when they fall into an illicit relationship?
In that same talk Perel offers this:
‘At the heart of an affair you will often find a longing and a yearning for an emotional connection, for novelty, freedom, autonomy, sexual intensity, a wish to recapture lost parts of ourselves, or an attempt to bring back vitality in the face of loss and tragedy.’
That’s a hell of a sentence.
Between nine to five work rhythms, the pressures of childcare, housework, the necessity for utilitarian conversation, its easy to see why the vital spark sputters out in many longterm relationships. Keeping it alive appears to require an unusual mixture of strategy and romance. A counter-offensive of rose petals and wine.
How easy is it to assume you’ll be together forever? How easy to take the other for granted, to lose sight of that wild spark that drew you in the first place, before the milieu of dishes and bills began to cloud your vision. Eros has a quiver of arrows. Will he open fire on the house?
Statistics on the frequency of affairs shows a massive, contradictory range, depending on which institution is doing the research, from 20% to 75% of people admitting to having cheated on their partners at some stage.
The pressure on long-term relationships is immense.
‘We have a romantic ideal in which we turn to one person to fulfil an endless list of needs. To be my greatest lover. My best friend. The best parent. My trusted confident. My emotional companion. My intellectual equal.’ - Esther Perel
Add to that the desire for ‘wild otherness’, as David Abram calls it, that we used to find in encounters with in the green-gold light that suffuses the forest before sunset, or the convivial presence of a tiger moth resting on your shoulder as you watch the sun come up with a cup of tea. This deep feeling of being met, of being filled with an exotic wildness is yet another thing that one’s chosen partner is supposed to fulfil. Ridiculous. No wonder so many people divorce, or cheat, or both, repeatedly.
‘The very structure of an affair - the fact that you can never have your lover - keeps you wanting. That in itself is a desire machine.’ - Esther Perel (from that same Ted Talk linked above)
The Greeks called that ‘pothos’ - the unfulfilled longing with the beyond - that which is out of reach: a lover you cannot have except in stolen moments, or a place that might feel like home if you could only reach it.
The pair of lovers entangled in an affair probably don’t know other as well as they might think they do. There’s all kinds of projection going on, since the mystery of the other person is what allows desires to constellate. That other person becomes a vessel for your fantasies, a place for imagination to run wild in a way that it never can in the confines of ‘ordinary life’ as we’ve set it up, with an abundance of meaningless jobs that are somehow good for the economy. Wage slavery, most are caught in, and that grey repetition is the milieu surrounding married life.
Where a life of courageous sensuality would allow eros and imagination to bloom in many ways, our civilisation favours anaesthesia and literalism. It’s more efficient. Aphrodite has been exiled to a maximum security prison. Too much paperwork to allow parole, so she withers away on microwave meals, with only the bible to read for the last two thousand years.
But you can’t really lock away such an awesome force as Aphrodite. It’s like trying to build a wall around the sea, or keep away the scent of tulips with chicken wire. She is volcanic, like her Husband Hephestus, whom she is always cheating on.
Instead of literalising a fantasy by having an affair, how else might the tectonic forces moving between you and that other who is not your partner, find movement and expression?
I think there’s a clue in pothos - in tending that unfulfilled longing by way of imagination, like Dante, whose unfulfilled longing for Beatrice led him to write The Divine Comedy, a masterpiece that transformed all of literature.
‘Behold,’ Dante wrote, with Beatrice in mind, and the powers constellated by her. ‘a deity stronger than I; who coming, shall rule over me.’
Dante was only nine years old when he met Beatrice in old Florence, and would see her only once after that, nine years later, before her early death. I bring this up just to show what a profound effect that love from afar can have on a person’s life, in contrast to close up love with a long-term partner. Pothos. The unfulfilled longing for the beyond, for the wild otherness that is out of reach.
Its out-of-reach-ness is the gift. Longing itself a bridge to the heart of our desire.
Literalising the fantasy in an actual affair traps the creative energies that could otherwise lead elsewhere. Look what happened to Dante. Imagination is the key.
‘If they could bring (to their relationships) one tenth of the boldness, the imagination, and the verve they put into their affairs, they would probably never need to see me.’ - Esther Perel
How do you tend the dull flame of desire?
It seems to me that medieval courtly love was another way to channel the same emotional yearning you’re talking about here.