03/04/2023
Infidelity and the Future of Relationships - Esther Perel
"Why do happy people cheat? People have always had desires. What is different today in our consumer individualistic society is that we feel more entitled to pursue our desires. We feel more entitled to be happy. We want happiness in marriage and if we can’t find it solely through our marriage then we go and find it somewhere else. That right (meaning "I have a right to be happy”) used to be for the afterlife. If you suffered well on earth, you could be rewarded later on. Then we brought that right to be happy down to earth. First it became an option, and now it’s a mandate. An "I deserve this” and it would be a betrayal of myself if I didn’t pursue it.
Many infidelities (and of course we have to define what we mean by ‘infidelity') occur in relatively happy relationships. They value a lot of things in their relationship but there are certain things that are missing. In my office, a lot of the people I see have often been perfectly monogamous or sexually exclusive for decades, and one day they cross the line that they never thought they would cross, for a glimmer of what? Why would somebody risk losing everything, everything they have built for so many years?
For first time in history, we want one relationship to give us all the needs that have to do with anchoring and rooting, a sense of belonging, continuity, stability, predictability, security, and safety. And we want that same person to also provide us the sense of novelty, and surprise, and the unknown, and mystery, and awe, and transcendence. I want the same person to be both familiar and to be new, and to be comfortable, and to be edgy, to be predictable, and to be surprising. We are asking one person to give us what once the entire village used to provide. And our relationships often crumble under those expectations."
