Infidelity Is Not a Sexual Problem. It Is a Broken Promise.

When somebody tells you there has been an affair, notice which questions arrive first. How many times. How far did it actually go.

Both of those questions point at the same place. And that place is not the heart of it. It is only where it happened to land.

Why it looks sexual

An affair always turns up in the shape of a new meeting between a man and a woman. That is the first thing anyone sees — the other person, and the fact that it was sexual. So attention goes there and stays there.

The affair may feel sexual to the person involved, but sexual desire is not the engine. It is not a sexual problem. If the cause is defined as sexual dissatisfaction, attention stays on frequency, attraction, and the third person. The broken trust and the hostility toward the partner remain unexamined.

The definition is hostility

All infidelity is hostility. By hostility I mean hatred that has been there a long time and has gone hard — the kind that has made an enemy of the other person.

I want to be exact about the word definition. The word does not mean the strongest entry on a list of causes, and it does not mean hostility is often a factor. It means there is no room inside it for anything else to be the cause. Which is why it holds in reverse: where there is no hostility, an affair cannot be produced at all.

What drives the affair is the wish to return an injury through revenge and the aggressive force used to damage the bond. Sexual contact becomes the method because it breaks the specific promise on which the relationship rests. The sexual act carries the hostility; it does not create it. On where that second force comes from, see Nobody Calls the Lion Evil: Where Your Drive Comes From.

It is written down as a broken promise

In a book on the psychology of affairs, the phrase written there is broken promise. Two words, and the whole account is folded inside them.

Two people have trust between them and a promise between them. Nobody handed it down from outside; they gave it to each other. An affair breaks the thing they gave each other.

The core of it is the betrayal of trust. Not the tally. The count of how many times and how far it went is not the place the weight rests. The weight rests on one fact: what the two agreed to keep, one of them did not keep.

The hard stretch, and then the separate matter

A wife gives birth, and for a period afterwards the two of them cannot sleep together. It is a stretch in which men are quite likely to come apart. That much is circumstance, and I will not make it smaller than it is.

Going on from there to have an affair is a separate matter. Sleep deprivation, loneliness, and sexual frustration explain distress; they do not explain why the person chose to break the promise rather than speak, wait, seek help, or leave. Joining the hardship directly to the affair turns circumstance into an alibi.

Without the hostility, there was more than one road

Take the same man in the same stretch, without hostility or the wish for revenge sitting inside him. He gets through it and does not have an affair. He may throw himself into his work and come out the other side that way. Resolving it does not require another person. It never did.

Read that backwards and it turns cold. If it genuinely seemed there was no other road — that meeting someone was the only thing on offer — then something unresolved was in there doing the choosing. There was never only one road. Only one was visible.

“Men are all like that”

There is an old way of talking about this. A man having affairs used to be spoken of as a kind of ability. Men are all like that. It is nothing. That is how the sentence goes, and it goes down easily.

Psychologically it is not good. The saying makes a thing running on hostility sound like nothing at all.

Some of the men who end up in my consulting room over this do regret it. Even so, the logic they bring with them is close kin to that old sentence.

If a man has it in him, what is actually wrong with being with a lot of women. Those women knew perfectly well I was married and were glad to meet me anyway. Why does it have to be one wife — that is just how the culture happens to be set up. There are countries where a man may have more than one and nobody treats it as a problem. It is only a problem here because this is Korea.

Those arguments are rationalisation: explanations constructed after the act to make it appear reasonable. They discuss culture, opportunity, and the third person while avoiding the one relationship in which a promise was made and broken.

There is a third person missing from it

Count the people in that logic. There is him, and there is the person he met. Two. The one who is not in the room is the one the promise was made with.

Which is why the line about those women collapses. That the new person knew he was married has no bearing on anything, because the promise that broke was never made with her. She was not a party to it. The broken promise is somewhere else, and the sentence never goes near it.

The line about other countries has the same hole. Move countries and hostility is still hostility, revenge is still revenge.

Monogamy is only possible for a mature person

In a psychodynamic couple therapy book it is put this way. Monogamy is only possible for a mature person.

It is not a compliment being handed out. It says that keeping to one person is difficult enough that it takes somebody who has actually grown up to manage it. Which means something for the ones keeping to it: they are not doing it because it came easily. It was held.

Then the question has to change

If the definition is hostility, the questions you were asking were aimed at the wrong place — who was she, what did she have, how hard was that stretch.

The question is this: who is the hostility in me pointed at, and where did it come from.

A promise does not break in the sexual register. It breaks where the hostility has been sitting. That is the place to look, and it is not the place anybody looks first.

Related

• As Long as I Hate Them, I Don’t Have to Be Sad
• They Became the Person I Was Afraid Of
• Living With Someone Who Has No Boundaries

Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board

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