We deplore those who cheat on their partners, but we’re cheating more than ever. Illustration by Luci Gutiérrez Audio: Listen to this story. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone.

Not long ago, scientists discovered that swans, the beloved symbols of romantic and sexual fidelity, have some chronic philanderers among their number. (How swans had kept this from us for so long is a mystery.) Other species regarded as paragons of sexual constancy—prairie voles and shingleback skinks—have also proved, on closer inspection, to be inconstant lovers. For the makers of anniversary greeting cards, and for anyone else seeking a precedent in nature for the great human experiment in monogamy, only a handful of mascots remain: black vultures, owl monkeys, California mice.

We know that humans are bad at being faithful, but exactly how bad is hard to tell. Estimates of the number of people who fool around on their partners range, unhelpfully, from less than twenty per cent to more than seventy per cent. Reliable data are scarce, partly because cheaters tend to be untrustworthy on the subject of their cheating, and partly because people disagree on what qualifies as a cheat. Few survey respondents are likely to follow President Carter’s example and include sins of the imagination in their personal inventories; most, it can be assumed, will reject President Clinton’s wishful insistence that oral sex doesn’t count. But, when it comes to interactive porn sessions, or sexting, or occasional snogs with attractive co-workers, one person’s grievous betrayal is another’s harmless hobby.

Notwithstanding the problems of definition and the vague statistics, the consensus among social scientists is that the incidence of infidelity has been rising in recent decades. This is mostly attributed to the fact that modern life has increased and democratized the opportunities for illicit sex. Women, whose adulterous options have historically been limited by domesticity and economic dependence, have entered the workforce and discovered new vistas of romantic temptation. (Men are still the more unfaithful sex, but their rates of infidelity appear to have remained steady over the past three decades, while, according to some estimates, female rates have risen by as much as forty per cent.) Senior citizens have had their sexual capacities indefinitely prolonged by Viagra and hip-replacement surgery. Even the timid and the socially maladroit have been given a leg up, courtesy of the online pander. Adultery may still be, as Anthony Burgess described it, the “most creative of sins,” but, thanks to Tinder et al., engineering a tryst requires significantly less ingenuity and craft now than at any other time in human history.

Surprisingly, perhaps, our increasingly licentious behavior has not been reflected in more tolerant public attitudes toward infidelity. While we’ve become considerably more relaxed about premarital sex, gay sex, and interracial sex, our disapproval of extramarital sex has been largely unaffected by our growing propensity to engage in it. We are eating forbidden apples more hungrily than ever, but we slap ourselves with every bite. According to a 2017 Gallup poll, Americans deplore adultery (which is still illegal in some two dozen states and still included among the crimes of “moral turpitude” that can justify denial of citizenship) at much higher rates than they do abortion, animal testing, or euthanasia.

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The fact that a prohibition is often violated is not an argument, per se, for giving up on the prohibition. Humans kill one another with some frequency, and we continue to believe that our laws against murder are a good idea. If we keep failing to meet our own standards, the solution, some would suggest, is simply to try harder. The couples therapist and relationship guru Esther Perel believes otherwise. In her new book, “The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity” (Harper), she argues that we would be better off coming to a more compassionate accommodation of our unruly desires. Decades of administering to adulterers and their anguished spouses have convinced her that we need “a more nuanced and less judgmental conversation about infidelity,” one that acknowledges that “the intricacies of love and desire don’t yield to simple categorizations of good and bad, victim and culprit.” Our judgmental attitude toward our transgressions does not make us any less likely to commit them, she argues—“infidelity has a tenacity that marriage can only envy”—and it keeps us from understanding why we transgress. The desire to stray is not evil but human.

Traditional couples therapy focusses on the defense and enforcement of the monogamous pact, and tends to side firmly and explicitly with the faithful spouse. He or she is often referred to as “the injured party,” while the straying partner is labelled “the perpetrator.” The standard assumption is that an affair is a symptom either of marital dysfunction or of some pathology on the part of the perpetrator. (Sex addiction and fear of intimacy are the most common diagnoses, although lately a genetic predisposition to infidelity has been gaining traction.)

This approach, Perel believes, does little justice to the “multifaceted experience of infidelity.” It demonizes adulterers, without pausing to explore their motives. It focusses on the traumatic effects of affairs, without acknowledging their “generative” possibilities. “To look at straying simply in terms of its ravages is not only reductionistic but also unhelpful,” she writes. Affairs can be devastatingly painful for the ones betrayed, but they can also be invigorating for marriages. If couples could be persuaded to take a more sympathetic, less catastrophic view of infidelity, they would, she proposes, have a better chance of weathering its occasional occurrence. When people ask her if she is against or in favor of affairs, her standard response is “yes.”

Perel, who is Belgian-born but practices in New York, is much sought after for her sophisticated, European-flavored insights into love and desire, and she has made a specialty of challenging the puritanical orthodoxies of the American therapy industry. “Mating in Captivity” (2006), the book that brought her to public notice, was a sprightly disquisition on the anaphrodisiac effects of married life, in which she argued that the excessive value placed on communication and transparency in modern relationships tends to foster conjugal coziness at the expense of erotic vitality. Her suggestion that couples seeking to sustain their élan vital would do well to cultivate a little distance and mystery was not original, or particularly radical, but it inspired wariness and even hostility among some of her colleagues, who felt that she approached the solemn project of saving American marriages with insufficient reverence.

The new book, which expands on (and occasionally repeats) the ideas explored in the last, has met with similar objections. Perel has been accused of trivializing the scourge of infidelity and of promoting ideas that are fundamentally hostile to the institution of marriage. It’s difficult, however, to find any real evidence for these charges. Perel is more sanguine than others about the capacity of a marriage to withstand adulterous lapses, but her belief in coupledom—her commitment to the idea of commitment—is never in doubt. Insofar as she stresses the importance of flexibility, patience, and even stoicism in long-term relationships, her book bears a distinctly traditional message.

Perel takes a very stern line on what she sees as the excessive sense of entitlement that contemporary couples bring to their relationships. Their outsized expectations of what marriage can and should provide—perpetual excitement, comfort, sexual bliss, intellectual stimulus, and so on—together with their callow, “consumerist” approach to romantic choices, leave them ill-equipped to cope with the inevitable frustrations and longueurs of the long haul. They are too quick to look elsewhere the moment that their “needs aren’t being met,” and too ready to despair the moment that the promise of sexual loyalty is broken. Those who show willingness to forgive infidelity risk being chastised by friends and relatives for their lack of gumption. Women, Perel notes, are under particular pressure these days to leave cheating spouses as a mark of their feminist “self-respect.”