![]() And we want that very same person to supply awe, mystery, adventure, and risk. We want our chosen one to offer stability, safety, predictability, and dependability. We should be best friends and trusted confidants, and passionate lovers to boot.Ĭontained within the small circle of the wedding band are vastly contradictory ideals. We still want everything the traditional family was meant to provide-security, respectability, property, and children-but now we also want our partner to love us, to desire us, to be interested in us. Never before have our expectations of marriage taken on such epic proportions. ![]() For her and Colin, however, as for most modern Western couples, marriage is no longer an economic enterprise but rather a companionate one-a free-choice engagement between two individuals, based not on duty and obligation but on love and affection. A child of immigrants, Priya surely has relatives whose marital options were limited at best. For much of history, and in many parts of the world today, marriage was a pragmatic alliance that ensured economic stability and social cohesion. They reveal our personal and cultural attitudes about love, lust, and commitment-attitudes that have changed dramatically over the past 100 years.Ī ffairs are not what they used to be because marriage is not what it used to be. Strange as it may seem, affairs have a lot to teach us about marriage-what we expect, what we think we want, and what we feel entitled to. In the focus on trauma and recovery, too little attention is given to the meanings and motives of affairs, to what we can learn from them. But if we are to shed new light on one of our oldest behaviors, we need to examine it from all sides. Contemporary culture, to its credit, is more compassionate toward the jilted. For centuries, when affairs were tacitly condoned for men, this pain was overlooked, since it was mostly experienced by women. The damage that infidelity causes the aggrieved partner is one side of the story. (I am using pseudonyms to protect the privacy of my clients and their families.) And thanks to modern technology, his pain would likely be magnified by an archive of electronic evidence of her duplicity. If Priya’s husband, Colin, were to stumble upon a text, a photo, or an email that revealed his wife’s dalliance, he would be devastated. Indeed, the maelstrom of emotions unleashed in the wake of an affair can be so overwhelming that many psychologists turn to the field of trauma to explain the symptoms: obsessive rumination, hypervigilance, numbness and dissociation, inexplicable rages, uncontrollable panic. It is a shock that makes us question our past, our future, and even our very identity. And agony it is-infidelity today isn’t just a violation of trust it’s a shattering of the grand ambition of romantic love. Generally, there is much concern for the agony suffered by the betrayed. In contemporary discourse in the United States, affairs are primarily described in terms of the damage caused. Infidelity may be ubiquitous, but the way we make meaning of it-how we define it, experience it, and talk about it-is ultimately linked to the particular time and place where the drama unfolds. In Mexico, women I spoke with proudly see the rise of female affairs as a form of social rebellion against a chauvinistic culture that has long made room for men to have “two homes,” la casa grande y la casa chica-one for the family, and one for the mistress. In Bulgaria, a group of women I met seem to view their husbands’ philandering as unfortunate but inevitable. In Paris, the topic brings an immediate frisson to a dinner conversation, and I note how many people have been on both sides of the story. Around the globe, the responses I get when I mention infidelity range from bitter condemnation to resigned acceptance to cautious compassion to outright enthusiasm. From Pittsburgh to Buenos Aires, Delhi to Paris, I have been conducting an open-ended survey about infidelity.Īdultery has existed since marriage was invented, yet this extremely common act remains poorly understood. And my conversations about affairs have not been confined within the cloistered walls of my therapy practice they’ve happened on airplanes, at dinner parties, at conferences, at the nail salon, with colleagues, with the cable guy, and of course, on social media. ![]() For years, I have worked as a therapist with hundreds of couples who have been shattered by infidelity. ![]() Few events in the life of a couple, except illness and death, carry such devastating force. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. ![]()
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