State of Affairs

BY ESTHER PEREL

In one line: A fresh perspective on marriage and relationships–lots of great questions and thoughts to ponder, along with ideas for creating some new sparks with your partner.

Chapter 3 – Affairs are not what they used to be

• It’s worth remembering that until recently, marital fidelity and monogamy had nothing to do with love. It was a mainstay of the patriarchy, imposed on women, to ensure patrimony and lineage—whose children are mine and who gets the cows when I die
• “I love you. Let’s get married.” For most of history, those two sentences were never joined. Romanticism changed that in late 18^th / early 19^th century amid social change of Industrial Revolution; it evolved from an economic enterprise to a companionate one—a free-choice engagement between two people based on love and affection; as we moved from villages to cities we became more free but more alone—individualism began its torrid and remorseless conquest of Western civilization—mate selection became infused w romantic aspirations meant to counter the increasing isolation of modern life; despite these changes, a few social realities carried forward
• Even today more than 50% of marriages globally are arranged
• Martial intimacy has become the sovereign antidote for lives of growing atomization
• Never before have expectations of marriage taken on such epic proportions—we want security, children, property, and respectability AND love, desire, interest, best friends, trusted confidants, and passionate lovers—anchoring of stability, safety, predictability, and dependability—and awe, mystery, adventure, and risk…give me comfort and give me edge. Give me continuity and give me surprise. Give me familiarity and give me novelty
• We expect one person to give us what once an entire village used to provide, and we live twice as long
• Marriages based on attraction and love are often more fragile than marriages based on material motives—they leave us more vulnerable to the vagaries of the human heart and shadow of betrayal
• Consumerism has infiltrated the institution of marriage—powerful voices from inside tell us that we are suckers if we settle for less than we think we need and deserve, or culture lures us with the promise of something better, younger, perkier…we don’t get divorced because we’re unhappy but because we could be happier
• The minute we get what we want, our expectations and desires tend to rise, and we end up not feeling any happier—our culture lures us with endless possibility and exerts a subtle tyranny; the constant awareness of alternatives invites unfavorable comparisons, weakens commitment, and prevents us from enjoying the present moment
• In a world where it is so easy to feel insignificant—to be laid off, disposable, deleted with a click, unfriended—being chosen has taken on an importance it never had before. Monogamy is the sacred cow of the romantic ideal, for it confirms our specialness
• Our society has created an uncanny paradox: as the need for faithfulness intensifies, so too does the pull toward unfaithfulness as a result of our individualism

Chapter 6 – Jealousy

• The Paradox of Jealousy — We need to love in order to be jealous, but if we love, we should not be jealous…and still, we are. We are not only forbidden to admit we are jealous, we are not allowed to feel jealous—it has become politically incorrect
• “the jealous one suffers four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common.” – Roland Barthes
• “He that is not jealous Is not in love.” – Old Latin Proverb
• To acknowledge jealousy is to admit love, competition and comparison—all of which expose vulnerability; the green eyed monster taunts at our most defenseless and puts us directly in touch with our insecurities, our fear of loss, and our lack of self-worth—contained within jealous are a host of intense feelings and reactions on the spectrum from mourning, self-doubt, and humiliation to possessiveness and rivalry, arousal and excitement, vindictiveness and vengeance, and all the way to violence
• We want to compel our partners to come back to us but we don’t want them to come back out of obligation; we want to feel chosen; and we know that love that is deprive of its freedom and willing surrender is not love
• “Jealousy is the shadow of love.” – Ayala Malach Pines – because it affirms to us that we value our partner and our relationships
• Jealousy is an honest feeling because it cannot disguise itself. It courageously carries its suffering and it has the humble dignity of being able to recognize its vulnerability
• Jack Morin’s Four Cornerstones of Eroticism – 1) Longing – the desire for what is not present (number one); 2) Violating Prohibitions, 3) Searching for power, and 4) Overcoming ambivalence
• Envy relates to something you want but don’t have vs. jealousy relates to something you have but are afraid of losing
• Since symptoms are involuntary, we can’t erase them, but if we prescribe them, we can take control…staging a ritual can give new meaning to an old suffering and the perpetrator can become the liberator
• In a world where so many long-term relationships suffer much more from monotony and habituation than from unsettling feelings like jealousy, this erotic wrath may serve a purpose, if we are willing to bear the attendant vulnerability

Chapter 8 – To Tell or Not to Tell

• When counseling patients about the wisdom of truth-telling, Lisa Spiegel uses a simple and effective formula: Ask yourself, is it honest, is it helpful, is it kind?

Chapter 9 – Even Happy People Cheat

• “Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.” – Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
• “Streetlight effect” – the drunken man who looks for his keys where the lights are vs. where he dropped them; humans have a tendency to look for things in the places where it is easiest to search for them rather than in the places where the truth is more likely to be found
• We all have multiple selves, but in our intimate relationships, over time, we tend to reduce our complexity to a shrunken version of ourselves. One of the essential components of recovery is finding ways to reintroduce the many pieces that were abandoned or exiled along the way (p167)

Chapter 10 – An Antidote to Deadness

• “At its best monogamy may be the wish to find someone to die with; at its worst it is a cure for the terrors of aliveness.” – Adam Phillips, Monogamy
• How people define “being alive” – power, validation, confidence, and freedom—the most common flavors
• Affairs often occur on the heels of loss or tragedy
• A common predicament that reflects an existential conflict within us; we seek stability and belonging, qualities that propel us toward committed relationships, but also thrive on novelty and diversity; we crave security and we crave adventure, but they spring from different motives and pull us in different directions throughout life—played out in the tensions between separateness and togetherness, individuality and intimacy, freedom and commitment
• We want predictability and dependability but we also have a need for change, unexpected, and transcendence—the Greeks understood this which is why the worshipped Apollo (rational and self-disciplined) + Dionysus (spontaneous, sensuous, and emotional); modern romance makes a new and tantalizing promise: that we can satisfy both needs in one relationship—steady and reliable + lift us beyond the mundane
• What we often don’t realize is that the exuberance of the beginning of a relationship is fueled by its uncertainty. We set out to make love more secure and dependable, but in the process, inevitably we dial down its intensity; on the path to commitment, we trade passion for more certainty, excitement for stability; what we miss is the hidden price we pay for the erotic vitality of our relationships; the permanence and stability we want can stifle our sexual spark
• “Melancholy marriages” – “semi-happy couples” (from Pamela Haag) – ‘a marriage adds things to your life, and it also takes things away. Constancy kills joy; joy kills security; security kills desire; desire kills stability; stability kills lust. Something gives; some part of you recedes. Its something you can live without, or I’s not.’ – we often don’t find out until after the marriage which is part of our spirit that we can’t live without and what we can forego
• Home, marriage, and motherhood have forever been the pursuit of many women, but also the place where women cease to feel like women
• In the transition to marriage, too many women experience their sexuality as shifting from desire to duty. When it becomes something she should do, it no longer is something she wants to do
• Three dragging forces on sexual desire: 1) institutionalization of relationships—passage from freedom and independence to commitment and responsibility; 2) overfamiliarity that develops when intimacy and closeness replace individuality and mystery; 3) Desexualization of certain roles—mother, wife, and house manager all promote the de-eroticization of the self

Chapter 11 – Is Sex Ever Just Sex?

• Many boys who were beaten by their fathers promise themselves they will never be like that and try very hard to repress all forms of aggression; the problem is in disavowing this emotion, they end up stifling their ability to be sexual with the ones they love; desire needs some aggression—not violence, but an assertive, striving energy—its what allows you to pursue, to want, to take, and even to sexualize your partner
• Men’s sexuality is dependent on their inner life; it’s more than just a biological urge; if a man has low self-esteem or feels depressed, anxious, insecure, ashamed, guilty, or alone, it will directly effect how he feels about himself sexually
• “Sexual honesty” isn’t just about divulging the details of your infidelities. It’s about communicating with your partner in an open and mature way—revealing core aspects of yourself through your sexuality; it might mean bringing out of the closet secrets that have been locked away for a lifetime

Chapter 12 – The Mother of All Betrayals?

• The victim of the affair is not always the victim of the marriage; for many sexual faithfulness is the easiest of faiths to sustain, while they break their vows daily in many other ways
• Fidelity, in a destructive relationship, is sometimes more akin to weakness than virtue—being stuck should not be confused with being faithful
• Why is one form of diverted attention an indisputable violation of trust (infidelity), while another gets couched in nicer words? People are often looking for depth, appreciation, lingering gazes—all forms of penetration that don’t involve sex; call it intimacy, human connection—its what makes us feel we matter
• We need to acknowledge that when one partner unilaterally decides there will be no (or very little) sex, that is not monogamy—it’s enforced celibacy
• Our culture tends to minimize the importance of sex for the well-being of a couple, often seen as optional
• 15-20% of all couples are in sexless marriages (0-10x/year); there are even more who have sexual frequency but lack any satisfaction
• Our traumas are a common cause underlying sexual shutdown—parental violence, early sexual abuse, racism, poverty, illness, loss, unemployment, etc.—these disempowerments leave people feeling that they live in a world where trust and pleasure are too dangerous—unearthing these issues can help remove sexual blocks
• “Tell me who you were loved and I will know a lot about how you make love”
• We need to learn how to turn our criticisms into requests and frustrations into feedback by being open and vulnerable with each other
• Stop taking sex so deadly serious—tap into your playfulness, building anticipation and mystery in and out of the bedroom
• Our inflated modern expectations of coupledom make it inevitable that a “large portion of married people will feel that marriage has let them down in one way or another,” when some parts work and others don’t, one response is often to segment off those parts that don’t work
• In our marriage-is-for-everything culture, divorce or sucking it up tend  to be framed as the only two legitimate ways to go—which makes it unsurprising that many opt for the unspoken but increasingly popularly third alternative of infidelity…”We’ll break the marriage rules that don’t work so well anymore before we’ll condone revising them.” – Pamela Haag
• Marriage is need of new potions…Maybe some couples would still be together had they had they been willing to address their different sexual needs and what these might mean for the structure of their marriage.
• Too many people pretend they are working on rekindling their desire. They like the idea, but they actually don’t want the reality. They want the family, the companionship, or the life they’ve built together; they don’t really want to get down and dirty with each other.

Chapter 14 – Monogamy and its Discontents – Rethinking Marriage

• Whether monogamy is natural or not, what matters is that presently many men and women seem to find monogamy, translated as mandatory sexual and emotional exclusiveness, quite difficult to maintain
• “In the realm of the erotic, negotiated freedom is not nearly as enticing as stolen pleasure.”
• Can love be plural? Is possessiveness intrinsic to love or is it merely a vestige of patriarchy? Can jealousy be transcended? Can commitment and freedom coexist?
• Stephen B Levine invites us to acknowledge that our values evolve as we mature and “move from an understanding of ethical and moral issues in black and white absolutist terms to comprehending the gray ambiguity of most matters.”
• In a culture that places such importance on monogamy and attaches such dire consequences to breaking it, one would it would be a prime topic of deliberation. But for many, even raising the question seems too risky.
• Contrary to the unified public stance, couples tend to hold very different implicit views of monogamy, and that “often a sudden collision between each partner’s implicit contract precipitates a marital crisis.” Hence, we would rather say what society sanctions and what our partner wants to hear, and keep our truths to ourselves
• Rather than penalize those who fail monogamy’s standardized test, we should recognize that test is disproportionately difficult
• In my study of desire, there is a question I have taken around the globe: “When you do you feel most drawn to your partner?”
• Jamie Heckert highlights the difference between boundaries and borders: “Whereas borders are constructed as unquestionably right…boundaries are what is right at the time, for particular people involved in a particular situation…Whereas borders claim the unquestionable and rigid authority of law, boundaries have a fluidity, and openness to change; more a riverbank, less a stone canal. Borders demand respect, boundaries invite it. Borders divide desirables from undesirables, boundaries respect the diversity of desires”
• “The myth of equality” – the common assumption in conventional relationships that each partner has the same needs and desires. Equality have become synonymous with symmetry, leading couples to override the differences that likely exist between their sexual needs and emotional sensitivities. Symmetry is not required, agreement is.” – Tristan Taormino

Chapter 15 – After the Storm

• “All suffering prepares one for vision.” – Marti Buber
• “How can I begin anything new with all of yesterday in me.” – Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers
• “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.” – Lewis B. Smedes
• When it comes to ending relationships: Rituals facilitate transitions. They honor what was. Just because it didn’t work doesn’t mean their entire past was a fraud. Such a summation is cruel and shortsighted. When ending a relationship and not being willing to focus on the good aspects, we simultaneously degrade the past and all the people we shared it with—leaving a trail of angry children, parents, friends, and exes.
• We need a concept of a terminate marriage that doesn’t damn it—one that helps to create emotional coherence and narrative continuity; our tendency is to spew out a long list of curses rather than a list of memories—lets create narratives that are empowering vs. victimizing if things don’t workout
• The impulse to protect your relationships is natural, but if you take the common approaches, you risk heading back down the narrow road of stifling constraints—Katherine Frank argues that when a couple tries to safeguard their relationship through forms of surveillance and self-policing, they risk setting themselves for the exact opposite: the “enhanced eroticization of transgressions.” The more we suppress our primal longings, the more we forcefully rebel
• Couples who feel free to talk honestly about their desires, even then they are not directed at each other, paradoxically become closer 
• When we validate each other’s freedom within the relationship, we may be less inclined to go looking for it elsewhere
• We conflate trust with safety, as a rational risk assessment to ensure we won’t get hurt. We want a guarantee that our partner has our back and would never be so selfish as to put their needs ahead of our feelings. We demand certainty, or at least the illusion of it, before we are willing to make ourselves vulnerable to another. But there’s another way of looking at trust: as a force that enables us to cope with uncertainty and vulnerability. Rachel Botsman said” Trust is a confident relationship to the unknown.” Trust is built and strengthened over time by actions, but its also a leap of faith—“a risk masquerading as a promise”
• Our partners do not belong to us; they are on loan, with an option to renew—or not. Knowing that we can lose them does not have to undermine commitment; rather, it mandates an active engagement that long-term couples often lose. The realization that our loves ones are forever elusive should jolt us out of complacency, in the most positive sense. What must be resisted are the dwindling curiosity, the flaccid engagements, the grim resignation, the desiccating routines. Domestic deadness is often a crisis of imagination. Shared dreams, affection, passion, and endless curiosity are the ingredients of thriving relationships.