A Rational Approach to Infidelity: Why Affairs Happen
Looking beyond moral judgment to understand attraction, desire, opportunity, and betrayal.
Touch. It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By touch we are betrayed and betray others … an accidental brushing of shoulders or touching of hands … hands laid on shoulders in a gesture of comfort that lies like a thief, that takes, not gives, that wants, not offers, that awakes, not pacifies. When one flesh is waiting, there is electricity in the merest contact. — Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
The Affair Was Not the Beginning
About eighteen months ago, my wife of forty years began having an affair. It took me roughly four months to uncover what was happening. Her behavior had changed, and after four decades together, even subtle changes were easy to detect. Long marriages develop their own rhythm. You may not immediately know what is wrong, but you know when the person beside you is no longer moving to the same beat.
For the sake of honesty, ours was not a perfect marriage. We had already lived without sex for approximately fifteen years, although we still functioned well together in most practical ways. We managed money, traveled, cared for family members, and maintained the outward structure of a stable marriage. We were partners, but no longer lovers.
This is the central argument of this essay: an affair is often treated as the moment a marriage breaks, when it may actually be the moment an already broken part of the marriage becomes impossible to ignore. That does not excuse deception. It simply moves the discussion from punishment toward causation.
Betrayal Is Traumatic Even Without Sex
The discovery of my wife’s affair was the greatest emotional shock I had experienced in forty years. It was more stressful than building my first software startup with my brother and more destabilizing than years of litigation with Kodak. Business crises threaten money and reputation. Infidelity attacks your understanding of the past.
People assume an affair should hurt less in a sexless marriage. My experience was the opposite. Betrayal is not painful merely because your spouse touched someone else. It is painful because your shared reality collapses. The person you believed you knew becomes unfamiliar, and the history of the marriage suddenly feels unreliable.
I lost fifteen pounds in two weeks and began smoking again after nearly twenty years. Sleep became difficult, food became irrelevant, and my mind replayed the same questions endlessly. My wife responded with denial and minimization, which made the injury worse. Betrayal creates one wound; refusing to acknowledge it creates another.
Medium Explains How People Cheat, but Rarely Why
After discovering the affair, I turned to Medium. Most articles fell into predictable categories: how to catch a cheater, confront one, recover psychologically, and either repair or end the marriage. The articles on rumination were useful. After betrayal, the mind constantly reconstructs timelines, conversations, absences, and missed clues. This feels productive because the brain is searching for certainty, but mostly it burns emotional energy without producing a satisfying explanation.
The reconciliation articles also helped at first. Like many betrayed spouses, my initial instinct was to restore the marriage. Eventually, however, I realized that restoring it meant returning to the same sexless arrangement that had existed before the affair.
Many writers also explain infidelity through psychological labels: narcissism, avoidant attachment, childhood trauma, or personality disorders. These may occasionally be accurate, but often they serve a simpler emotional purpose: allowing the betrayed spouse to believe one person is healthy and innocent while the other is defective. Relationships are rarely that simple. Responsibility for the affair belongs to the person who has it. Responsibility for the condition of the marriage is usually shared more broadly.
Infidelity Is Common Human Failure, Not Exotic Pathology
Occam’s Razor suggests that simpler explanations should be preferred over complicated ones. Most affairs are better explained by attraction, aversion, opportunity, resentment, and unmet needs than by psychiatric diagnoses reaching back into childhood.
Infidelity is not rare or historically unusual. If it were an aberrant behavior, humanity would not have spent thousands of years writing laws, commandments, novels, songs, and plays about it. The Bible effectively devotes two commandments to adultery: one against committing it and another for thinking about it.
This does not make infidelity harmless. It means moral condemnation alone explains very little. The useful question is not why a small number of defective people cheat. It is why ordinary people, many of whom are otherwise responsible and decent, decide that the risks of an affair are worth taking.
Denial Protects the Cheater
My wife’s first response was: “What specifically has led you to believe that I am having an affair?” This was less a request for truth than an attempt to discover how much evidence I had.
When denial becomes impossible, minimization follows. Men often say it was “just sex.” Women may insist the man is “just a friend.” The language differs, but the goal is the same: reduce the affair to something less serious than the betrayed spouse believes it to be.
My wife has continued to deny the sexual side of her affair despite evidence that they met in hotel rooms. This may protect her self-image, but it makes the experience more corrosive for me. The affair is painful; being asked to deny the obvious is worse.
People will go to great lengths to defend their idea of themselves. Few want to think of themselves as liars or adulterers, so they create narratives in which the affair was not really an affair, the deception was not truly deception, or destiny left them no choice.
When Desire Becomes Destiny
Another strategy is to elevate the affair into a cosmic romance. The other person becomes a soulmate, a twin flame, or someone connected across lifetimes. This transformation removes agency. The affair becomes something that happened to the participants rather than something they chose.
The simpler explanation is usually less flattering. Someone new made them feel attractive, alive, desired, adventurous, or understood. The affair supplied erotic energy that the marriage no longer provided.
People do not need supernatural explanations to make destructive choices. Attraction, opportunity, secrecy, and dissatisfaction are usually enough.
Blame Shifting Contains Some Truth
The next stage is blame shifting: the argument that the faithful spouse caused the affair by failing to meet the other person’s needs. In a sexless marriage, this argument is especially easy to construct.
But dissatisfaction does not compel anyone to cheat. A person can demand change, seek counseling, negotiate a different arrangement, or separate. An affair is one response among many, often chosen because it offers novelty without requiring the immediate sacrifice of the existing marriage.
One of the first signs of my wife’s affair was her habit of disconnecting our security cameras whenever I traveled. When I questioned her, she said the cameras made her feel watched. The explanation would have been more convincing had installing them not originally been her idea.
Years earlier, she had insisted on cameras because of a volatile neighbor with a serious criminal history. Once the cameras became inconvenient, they were redefined as an instrument of surveillance imposed by a controlling husband.
That is how blame shifting works. The facts are reorganized until the person who cheated becomes the injured party.
The Worst Period Came Months Later
The emotional shock of infidelity develops its own rhythm. For me, the worst point came approximately four months after discovery, when disbelief faded and the long-term consequences became clearer.
I responded to my wife’s affair by beginning a relationship with a woman I had known fifty years earlier while growing up in France. My wife was not pleased. Since she had not ended her own relationship, I concluded that whatever claim she had on my sexual exclusivity had expired.
We made no serious effort to resume intimacy. My sense was that she had fallen in love with the other man and might have regarded sex with her husband as a betrayal of him. To be honest, I made no effort either.
During an argument over money, I purchased a one-way ticket to France with no intention of returning. My wife said to me, “You don’t get off that easy.” By then, the roles had reversed completely in her mind. Although she had initiated the affair, my decision to pursue another relationship had made me the cheating spouse. She was the prosecutor and I was the defendant.
What the conversation should be
Separation does not necessarily mean divorce. It can mean acknowledging that the marriage has changed — perhaps by moving into separate bedrooms or separate parts of the house — while preserving companionship, family, financial security, and shared history. The honest conversation may not be, “We have an intimacy problem we need to work on,” but rather, “We are no longer erotically attracted to one another.” That is painful, but often clearer. Erotic attraction cannot always be negotiated back into existence.
The spousal conversation should be as follows. As a man — or as a woman — I still have erotic needs. I need to feel desired, touched, held, and sexually connected to another person. I am not a monk or a nun, nor did I enter marriage expecting to live under a vow of chastity. I have met someone with whom I share a powerful attraction, and I would like to pursue a sexual relationship with them. I know this may be painful to hear, but honesty is better than secrecy. Since we are no longer meeting those needs for one another, I hope we can acknowledge that reality and decide whether it can fit within the larger structure of our marriage.
The Real Question Is Why the Marriage Became Vulnerable
Most writing about affairs focuses on mechanics: secret messages, hotel rooms, hidden charges, surveillance, and confrontation. Those details are dramatic, but they explain little. The mechanics are simple. Two people become attracted, find an opportunity, and begin concealing the relationship.
The harder question is why the marriage became vulnerable.
I do not believe my wife is a narcissist. She is hardworking, generous, and capable of great care. Perhaps she has avoidant tendencies, but I am not qualified to diagnose her, especially while occupying the role of injured spouse.
The simpler truth is that our marriage had become erotically empty, and another man made her feel something that I no longer did. That is painful to admit, but more useful than a diagnosis designed to preserve my innocence.
Attraction and Aversion Govern Marriage
The two forces that govern intimate relationships are attraction and aversion. Attraction draws people together; aversion pushes them apart. Both are shaped by appearance, behavior, health, resentment, familiarity, power, and unresolved grievances.
Marriage encourages people to believe that desire is guaranteed by commitment. It is not. A marriage certificate can create legal and financial obligations, but it cannot make one person find another erotically compelling. Between 2000 and 2010, I gained substantial weight while running a programming consultancy. When I met my wife in 1984, I weighed about 170 pounds. By 2010, I was around 230.
My wife, a portrait artist and highly visual person, almost certainly became less attracted to me. At the same time, she stopped making much effort to remain attractive to me. We drifted into a sexless marriage as two people who had become physically indifferent to one another. Communication might have helped us confront the problem, but it could not manufacture desire. Attraction may sometimes be revived through health, effort, novelty, and change, but it cannot be negotiated into existence because fairness demands it.
Long Marriages Also Contain Shifting Power
When I met my wife, I was twenty-two and she was thirty-five. I was the young man; she was the glamorous older woman driving a Porsche 911. The age difference was exciting, and so was the sex.
Over time, the power dynamic shifted. By thirty-five, I had made millions in software while she was approaching fifty. She became concerned that younger women might pursue me, and several did. Around that period, she developed a serious cancer, and I spent two years caring for her. The illness brought us closer emotionally, but our sex life declined sharply.
By 2010, the marriage was sexless. By 2015, nearly every form of physical intimacy had disappeared. We had become roommates with shared assets, shared history, and a durable domestic partnership.
Divorce Is Not Automatically Wisdom
Medium is filled with writers and commenters who treat divorce as the universal response to infidelity. The betrayed spouse is told to hire a lawyer, divide the assets, block all contact, and begin a triumphant new life.
This may be appropriate in abusive or irreparably destructive marriages, but ending a forty-year partnership is not a symbolic gesture. Divorce is a legal and financial operation with no simple undo command.
Lawyers must be paid. Assets must be valued and sometimes sold. Real estate, retirement accounts, taxes, health insurance, and estate plans become complicated. Both spouses often emerge with less than half of what they once owned collectively.
There are also costs that do not fit neatly into a spreadsheet. My wife helps in the background with my aging parents. We monitor each other’s health and provide practical support that becomes increasingly valuable with age. Divorce may also destroy decades of social capital: friends, family ties, traditions, routines, and shared knowledge.
Divorce should be a final option, not an automatic proof of self-respect. A marriage may fail romantically while retaining practical and human value.
A Marriage Can Survive in a Different Form
People are often trapped by an idealized definition of marriage built around fidelity, intimacy, exclusivity, and lifelong erotic attachment. When monogamy fails, they assume the entire marriage must be dismantled.
I no longer believe that.
A marriage can fail in one dimension while functioning in others. The sexual relationship may be over while the friendship, financial partnership, family structure, caregiving arrangement, and shared history remain valuable.
After an affair, confidence in monogamy may approach zero. That does not mean trust in every other part of the relationship must also disappear. Sometimes the mature response is not to force reality back into the original ideal, but to construct a new arrangement around the people who actually exist.
This is especially important for older couples. Time changes the calculation. The relevant question is not only how many years remain, but how many active, healthy, independent years remain. Travel, sexuality, movement, food, wine, and physical freedom do not continue indefinitely.
Preserving the outer frame of a marriage may therefore be rational even when its romantic center has disappeared. That arrangement may offend traditional expectations, but it can still be humane.
The Problem No One Talks About
The problem no one talks about is not merely infidelity. It is the long period of deterioration that often precedes it and the unwillingness of couples to speak honestly about attraction.
We are comfortable discussing communication, respect, household labor, finances, and emotional support. We are much less comfortable admitting that physical attraction matters, that it can disappear, and that its disappearance can fundamentally alter a marriage.
An affair remains a choice. Deception remains a choice. The person who cheats is responsible for those choices. But responsibility should not prevent analysis. A bridge may collapse when the final truck crosses it, but understanding the collapse requires examining the years of corrosion beneath the surface.
My wife’s affair did not create the fifteen years of sexual silence that preceded it. It exposed what we had both refused to confront. The marriage retained its outer structure while losing its erotic center. Another man entered that empty space, and another woman later entered mine.
The useful question is not merely, “Who betrayed whom?”
It is, “What had this marriage become before the betrayal occurred?”
Until couples are willing to ask that question honestly, affairs will continue to be treated as mysterious explosions rather than the visible result of forces that have often been building for years.
Infidelity is not the problem, it is the secrecy that is.
