Perel wouldn’t actually advise you to have an affair, but if you do, it might actually make your marriage stronger in the long run, she says in her new book.

Esther Perel on affairs: do you break up or can you make up?

Esther Perel is animated, leaning forward in her chair and throwing up her hands to reinforce a point about her specialist subject: infidelity.

The renowned sex and relationship therapist is adamant that many marriages can recover from the bombshell of betrayal, but she is indignant that there is a stigma today about a deceived spouse staying with an adulterous partner.



Tammy Wynette singing about standing by your man and the pain of D-I-V-O-R-C-E in the 1960s hit the cultural zeitgeist, but those sentiments are out of tune with current norms. These days, Break Free by Ariana Grande chimes better.

Perel, whose advice dispensed via TED talks, books and podcasts has been heard by millions worldwide, said: “It used to be divorce that carried all the stigma. Now it’s choosing to stay when you can leave that is the new shame.” She references the flack Hillary Clinton got for sticking with Bill when she could have walked away.

The 59-year-old psychotherapist has a vital, down-to-earth way of talking in an endearing Belgian accent that commands attention. She deals with the mess and pain of fractured relationships with searing honesty, astute observations and compassion. If your marriage were in trouble, you’d want her help, although her methods can seem unconventional.

Applause erupted when Perel spoke about this to an audience of 12,000 women at a conference earlier this month. “So many women wanted to feel good and dignified over making that choice to stay,” she declares, flashing plum colored nail varnish and delicate gold hand chains as she gesticulates.

“When you are shamed for staying, you are in a double bind – I have been betrayed by my partner and I have to lie about it to protect him so that other people won’t judge him to such an extent that I will lose them. So now I can’t talk to anybody. That’s the new shame”.

Perel’s thinking goes like this: in the past, women were economically and legally dependent on men and divorce was rare. Now, in countries where women have equal rights and financial independence, the culture demands that she exercise them and throw out the cheat. Meanwhile, men are seen as weak if they stay with an unfaithful wife.

“It’s worse for the men,” she says earnestly. “I think people should be able to determine for themselves the choices that they will make and the consequences thereof. To just push people to divorce and to think that divorce is always the better solution when it dissolves all the family bonds … Entire lives are intertwined with a marriage. It isn’t just the relationship between the spouses. It is social networks, it’s lives of children, it’s grandchildren, it’s economics.”

She once suggested a wife build an altar to her husband’s lover to remind her of how she had reinvigorated her marriage. Then there was the time – featured in an episode of her podcast - where she asked a husband to adopt his alter ego, Jean-Claude, and speak in American-accented French for the session.

Explaining her approach, she says: “In terms of how I intervene, I’m very much not a formula person. I’m quite creative, and responding in the moment.

“The intervention of the altar is not meant to be taken literally. I understood she was obsessed with that woman, and thought, I’m going to give you power over your obsession. If you look at it out of context, it will make me look like I am completely cuckoo. The moment she laughs, she gets it. That’s when I know it’s working. It’s called prescribing the ordeal, you prescribe the very thing that people are trying to eliminate because then it loses its power.”

The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Perel grew up in Antwerp, studied in Jerusalem, came to the US for graduate school and stayed. She started her therapy practice in New York 34 years ago, and has drawn on her wealth of experience to write two books and deliver lectures worldwide.

Mating in Captivity was published in 2006 ,and New York Times bestseller The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity has just come out in the US and the UK. Her TED talks have garnered nearly 20 million views and she has a chart-topping podcast series Where Should We Begin? featuring counseling sessions with real couples. A second season has just been released.

Perel, who is in San Francisco to give a talk when we chat on Skype, believes that a marriage can survive an affair – even be revitalised by it – although she would not recommend having one any more than having cancer.

“Many affairs are break-ups, but some affairs are make-ups. Sometimes the relationship that comes out is stronger, and more honest and deeper than the one that existed before because people finally step up,” she says, flicking back her asymmetrical caramel-streaked bob and fixing me with eyes lined with smoky black eyeliner.

Without defending adultery, she does think that sometimes adulterers get a bad press.

“This experience of infidelity is so ubiquitous, and so poorly understood that I don’t think it can be reduced to good and bad, victim and perpetrator. We need a conversation that embraces the complexity and that is more caring and compassionate for everybody involved. So yes, an affair always involves a breach of trust and it’s an act of betrayal. It involves lies, secrecy. But there are all kinds of things happening in the relationship, and betrayal sometimes comes in many forms.”

She gives the example of a woman who is put down and intimidated by her husband.

“She has an affair and the man is saying, ‘You cheated on me, you slut, you bitch’. I’m thinking, ‘Mister, you may think you have the moral high ground because your partner breached the contract but the contract has been breached many times. If we just pretend that this betrayal tops all others … I think we do a disservice to honesty and to marriage.”

The context must be taken into consideration, she said, citing the situation where someone is looking after a chronically ill partner. “You may not be faithful but you are loyal, and you don’t leave that person, but you find comfort and warmth and tenderness and support in your connection with another person and that allows you to continue to take care of your sick partner.”

Perel thinks we have huge expectations of our relationships because we have elevated our partners to God-like positions.

“In the secularization of the western world, we are turning to romantic love for a host of needs that we used to look for in religion. We look in our partners for transcendence, ecstasy, comfort, meaning, wholeness, and belonging.”

Many crumble under the pressure, and in the digital age, “it has never been easier to cheat, and it has never been more difficult to keep a secret.”

Research indicates a 40% jump in the number of women having affairs since 1990, according to Perel, as economic and social conditions have changed, while men’s rates have held steady.

Perel says you cannot affair-proof your marriage. Happy people still stray.

“I see people in satisfying, happy relationships. They say, ‘I love my partner, I’m having an affair’. It’s not that they want to leave the person they are with, it’s that they want to leave the person they have themselves become.”

Perel has been married to Jack Saul, a psychologist specialising in collective trauma, for 35 years and they have two sons. While avoiding intimate details, she does have some thoughts on how they’ve strengthened their relationship over the decades, referring to three elements laid out in the book The All-or-Nothing Marriage by Eli J Finkel.

“The first is that over the 35 years, we have recalibrated our expectations - what is realistic for us, what we can expect from each other at this stage of our lives versus that stage.”

The second is that they have a diverse social network that “nurtures each of us, together and separate.”

The third is about having new experiences together, taking risks, and maintaining a sense of curiosity and discovery over new things.

Warming to her theme, she adds: “Those are the main things, but it’s a lot of things. It’s knowing to take responsibility for your part in a relationship and owning it and being able to see yourself as a flawed individual but still hold yourself in high regard. It’s about being able to maintain an intimate connection that involves touch. You can live without sex, but not without touch.”

If all this fails and an affair blows up your relationship, Perel would seem a good person to go to for advice.

It’s impossible to quantify how many marriages she has helped save, although she has received thousands of thank you letters over the years.

But to be clear, she adds: “I absolutely don’t think I’m for everyone.”

Esther Perel’s The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity is out now through Harper Collins in the UK, and Hachette in Australia

The headline was changed on Tuesday 31 October 2017

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