Infidelity: The Truth, the Lie, and the Choice to Live With It
“Do not accept anything as the truth if it lacks love. And do not accept anything as love which lacks truth.” -Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein)
At the Centre Pompidou in Paris last year, I saw a painting by Suzanne Valadon that has stayed with me. A naked woman lies across a couch, exposed but not entirely vulnerable. Across from her sits a fortune teller. The woman’s body is open to view, but her mind is elsewhere. Her gaze is fixed on the seer, as if the cards might tell her something that her own conscience cannot.
The woman on the couch is not merely naked. She is taken, attractive, and fully aware of the power of her own desirability. She is the feminine embodiment of desire, but also self-conscious of the burden that comes with it. She understands her value. She knows what it means to be looked at, wanted, imagined. But perhaps that knowledge is no longer enough. Perhaps she wants to know whether someone else will still see her this way.
Perhaps she has committed an act of infidelity. Perhaps she has only imagined one. Perhaps nothing has happened at all, except the first dangerous movement of desire. But whatever she has done, or thought of doing, she wants to know what it means. Not what it means morally. Not what it reveals about her relationship, her hunger, her loneliness, or her vanity. She wants to know what it means for the future.
Infidelity often works this way.
The person who cheats, or who is tempted to cheat, rarely begins by saying: I wanted to be desired. I wanted to feel alive. I wanted to escape the dullness of myself. I wanted proof that I still had power over another body. Those admissions are too close, too human, too humiliating. So the explanation is pushed outward. Fate. Destiny. A bad marriage. A cosmic accident. A soulmate. A twin-flame. A moment written in the stars. An obsession.
The farther away the explanation, the less guilty the self.
No one wants to confront the ordinary machinery of infidelity: sexuality, need, boredom, resentment, vanity, opportunity, the ego boost of being wanted by someone new. It is much easier to believe the answer lies somewhere else. In the cards, perhaps. In the mysterious hand of fate.
Hopefully.
Infidelity
Infidelity is a touchstone test for a marriage.
By infidelity, I do not mean a roll in the hay, a one-night stand with an ex-boyfriend, or a trip to a massage parlor. Those things are technically cheating, of course, and I do not say that to offend the Puritan Protestants who may be reading this. But they are not quite the same thing.
Most marriages can survive a roll in the hay — or two. I would even venture to say that such episodes happen more often than people admit, and by both sexes. Because they are rarely disclosed or repeated, their visible impact is often minimal. I also suspect they occur with roughly the same frequency across every religious and cultural setting, however loudly those settings may condemn them. Homo sapiens are wired for sex. They crave novelty. And when desire collides with social expectation, they are remarkably prone to lying.
Infidelity, in the deeper and more destructive sense, is repeat business. It is what happens when a partner becomes emotionally, intimately, and romantically involved with another person outside the primary relationship. It is not merely a sexual event. It is the creation of a parallel intimacy.
An affair is not justified by loneliness, frustration, resentment, boredom, or sexual neglect. Those may explain the conditions in which an affair becomes tempting, but they do not excuse the act itself. Affairs are acts of radical dishonesty, and they are almost guaranteed to disrupt a marriage at its deepest level. Attempts to deny the scope of the betrayal, minimize its significance, or soften its impact only make the wound worse.
The central injury is the loss of trust. The betrayed spouse is left wondering how long this has really been going on, whether it has happened before, and whether the moments they thought were intimate, ordinary, or real were in fact part of a larger deception.
There is also a strange sense of alienation. The person you have loved for years suddenly feels inhabited by someone else. The face is familiar. The history is familiar. But the person standing there feels like a stranger.
Whatever the gendered differences in how men and women process betrayal, the underlying fact remains the same: an affair detonates inside a marriage. It does not merely break a rule. It breaks the shared reality two people thought they were living in.
Radical Honesty
My initial response after discovering my wife’s affair was a desperate desire to repair the marriage at almost any cost. I suspect this is typical for both men and women. We had forty years invested in the relationship, deeply intertwined assets, a long shared history, and the practical reality of age. The whole situation seemed, in one sense, tragic; in another, almost absurd.
When I confronted my wife after returning from France, I proposed that we go to marriage counseling, put everything on the table, and try to rebuild not only trust, but also intimacy. She was not in the same place. She downplayed the nature of the relationship and was not especially receptive to counseling. We never resumed intimacy.
That was the emotional backdrop that led me back to Paris in May, and then eight more times over the following year.
I still believe that relationship repair is a noble idea, especially for younger couples. Perhaps the best writer and counselor I have encountered on this subject is Vanessa Cardenas, a frequent Medium contributor. Her philosophy is rooted in radical honesty: both the cheating spouse and the betrayed spouse must put everything on the table and then work, step by painful step, toward rebuilding a functional relationship.
This is a long process. It requires patience, humility, and emotional stamina. More importantly, it requires the will of both spouses. One person cannot repair a marriage alone. It also requires giving up affair partners.
My affair
Shortly after discovering my wife’s affair, I began an affair of my own.
At first, that was not the intention. I had reached out to a French woman I had known since childhood, someone I had grown up with in Paris nearly fifty years earlier, and who now lived in Strasbourg. She was divorced, the mother of three adult children, and I initially turned to her for consolation and advice. I was in shock, angry, humiliated, and trying to understand whether my marriage could still be repaired.
At first, she listened. More than that, she seemed to understand me almost before I had finished speaking. There is a kind of familiarity that comes from childhood that even a forty-year marriage cannot quite reproduce. It belongs to an earlier version of oneself, before adulthood hardened into roles, compromises, disappointments, and silences.
What began as comfort quickly became something else. We started speaking regularly by video. The old friendship warmed into intimacy, then attraction, then unmistakable romantic and sexual chemistry. By the time we met again in Paris in May 2025, the emotional ground had already shifted.
When I saw her step off the train onto the platform, I was hit by a thunderbolt. I was instantly overwhelmed by a feeling of attraction and return, as if something long dormant had suddenly found its way back to the surface. I have never felt that in my life with anyone.
We had lunch at the train station, walked back to my apartment, and made love. We are both in our sixtees. Over the next week, we moved through Paris together — museums, churches, restaurants, friends, cafés — as if we had stepped into a life that had been waiting for us somewhere outside time. For a few days, my wife’s affair no longer occupied the center of my mind. It became background noise, something from another life.
The chemistry between us felt almost like something out of the 1980 film Somewhere in Time, like the connection between Richard and Elise: deep, improbable, suspended across half a century, and only now finding an outlet through which it could express itself again. But the setting was not a Victorian hotel in Michigan. It was the rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis in Paris, in the springtime.
Our reunion at the Gare de l’Est felt very much like the scene on the stairs in the movie: sudden, improbable, and charged with the sense that two lives separated by decades had somehow found their way back to the same moment.
Radical Pretense
Once I began a relationship of my own, the dynamic with my wife shifted quickly.
It became clear soon enough that we were both involved in extramarital relationships. The conversation therefore moved away from the simple question of right and wrong, her alleged culpability, my French liaison, and into the more complicated question of comparison. Were the two affairs equivalent? Were they balanced? Was there some moral symmetry between them?
Apparently, even in infidelity, people want accounting.
That is one of the strange mechanics of infidelity. The rumination never really stops, on both sides. The blame keeps accumulating, even for the partner who started cheating. Every new act becomes further evidence in support of one’s own injured marital position. Each person becomes both defendant and prosecutor, constantly revising the case. It is the sort of situation where comedy really is tragedy plus time.
Very early on, my wife’s position was that we had to preserve appearances. We could have lovers, but to the outside world the marriage still needed to look functional. I went along with it for a bit.
Pretense may create the appearance of stability, but it does not heal anything. It merely pushes emotion under the rug, where it waits, gathers force, and eventually bubbles back to the surface. You cannot pretend your way back to a healthy relationship. Eventually resentment, jealousy, and the sense of injustice overwhelm the arrangement.
Acceptance
I came back from France again about two weeks ago after spending ten days with my girlfriend in Strasbourg. We have now been together for about a year. It has also been about thirteen months since I confronted my wife about her infidelity. The relationship with my girlfriend has begun to evolve as well, away from the first intensity of romantic infatuation and toward something more settled and domestic. We have known each other for fifty years as children, and in some ways she already feels like family.
Something happened on this last trip, though. I stopped ruminating.
I am not entirely sure why. Perhaps the last remnants of emotional injury finally exhausted themselves. Feeling hurt after betrayal is normal, but it becomes harder to sustain that injury logically when one is also having a relationship of one’s own. Granted, mine began afterward, and perhaps in direct response to hers. But even so, I began to understand that I could no longer justify carrying the grievance indefinitely.
My wife and I remain good friends and good business partners. And given our age, I finally came to the conclusion that we were both entitled to fall in love again. It was really a question of finding new roles, and formally separating our intimate life together. I live in the upstairs apartment now. And eventually I realized that neither of us has the right to deny the other that happiness, especially this late in life.
In the end, I arrived at a final marital strategy: radical acceptance. Yes, I am married. Yes, we had a good run. Yes, we built something of value together. But in the twilight of our lives, we fell in love with different people. I went back into my deep past to find mine. I also realized that repairing a marriage to its previous state is not always realistic, especially when the spouses have evolved into completely different people from the ones who first entered it.
If there is one French song that has perfectly captured my mood over this past year, it is Florent Pagny’s Et un jour une femme interpreted by Anne Sila. The song speaks to the power of a woman who reaches into a man’s heart and changes the course of his life. These lyrics express that feeling so beautifully with respect to my French girlfriend:
Then one day, a woman places her hand in yours
To speak to you of another, because she carries the whole world
And to the very depths of herself, she proves that she loves you
Through the love she pours out
The love she pours out
