When you hear that there has been an affair, notice which questions come to mind first: How many times? How far did it actually go?
Both of those questions are about the sex. But the sex is not the heart of an affair. It is only the part that shows on the surface.
Why it looks sexual
An affair always shows up as a new relationship with someone outside the couple. That is the first thing anyone sees — the other person, and the fact that it was sexual. So attention goes there and stays there.
An affair can feel as if it is about sex, but sexual desire is not what drives it. It is not a sexual problem. This matters, because once the cause is taken to be sexual dissatisfaction, every conversation afterwards stays on sex: how often the couple had been having sex with each other, how attractive the other person was. What actually broke — the trust between the couple — goes unexamined. So does the hostility that drove the affair.
Every affair is an act of hostility, by definition
Every affair is an act of hostility. By hostility I mean a hatred that has built up over a long time and hardened, until the person it is aimed at is seen as an enemy. Who that person is comes up at the end of this article.
The claim that every affair is an act of hostility is meant as a definition, and that word matters. It does not mean hostility is the biggest item on a list of causes, and it does not mean hostility is often a factor. It means hostility is the only cause, with no room for any other. Put another way: where there is no hostility, there can be no affair.
Hostility drives an affair through two forces. One is revenge: the wish to hurt back after being hurt. The other is aggression: the urge to break something — here, the bond between the couple. Sex becomes the means because it is a way of breaking the very promise the relationship rests on. The sex is how the hostility is carried out; it is not where the hostility comes from.
A book on affairs calls it a broken promise
One book on the psychology of affairs sums up everything it has to say in two words: broken promise.
Two people in a relationship have trust between them, and a promise. They gave these to each other. An affair breaks what they gave each other.
The core of an affair is the betrayal of trust. Hostility is what drives an affair; what the affair actually breaks is trust. The weight does not lie in how many times it happened or how far it went. It lies in one fact: the two of them agreed to keep something, and one of them did not keep it. This is also why the partner who was betrayed is shaken less by the sex than by the betrayal. The person they trusted hid something important and broke a promise the two of them had made together. All at once, everything they believed to be true up to yesterday is thrown into doubt.
A hard time is one thing; an affair is another
Take a hard time that really does happen: after a wife gives birth, there is a period when the couple cannot have sex. It is a time when men are quite likely to struggle badly. That part is real, and I do not want to play it down.
But going from there to having an affair is a separate matter. Lack of sleep, loneliness and sexual frustration explain why a man in that situation is struggling. They do not explain why he chose to break the promise instead of talking about it, waiting, or getting help. Once “it was a hard time” and “so I had an affair” are joined into one sentence, the hard time becomes an excuse.
Without the hostility, there was more than one road
Now take a man in that same hard time who has no hostility or wish for revenge inside him. He can get through it without an affair — he might, for instance, throw himself into his work. He does not need someone new in order to cope, and he never did.
Turn this around, and it is uncomfortable to hear. If a man in that hard time felt there was no other road — that seeing someone else was the only option — then unresolved hostility was inside him, doing the choosing. There was never only one road; he could see only one.
“Men are all like that”
There is an old way of talking about this, in which a man’s affairs are treated as a sign that he has what it takes. People say things like “Men are all like that” and “It’s no big deal.” Talk like this goes down easily.
Psychologically, this way of talking is not healthy. It makes something driven by hostility sound like nothing at all.
Some of the men who come to my consulting room because of an affair do regret it. Even so, the reasoning they bring with them sounds a lot like that old way of talking. It goes something like this:
If a man has what it takes, what is actually wrong with being with a lot of women? Those women knew perfectly well I was married and were happy to see me anyway. Why only one wife? That is just how the culture happens to be set up. There are countries where a man may have more than one wife and nobody treats it as a problem. It is only a problem here because this is Korea.
These are rationalisations: explanations put together after the act to make it look reasonable. They talk about culture and about the other women, and they steer clear of the one relationship in which a promise was made and broken.
One person is missing from these arguments
Count who appears in that reasoning: the man himself, and the women he was seeing. The one who never appears is the person he made the promise with: his wife.
That is why “those women knew I was married” falls apart as an argument. It makes no difference that they knew, because the promise that broke was never made with them. They were not party to it. The broken promise is between him and his wife, and the argument never goes near it.
The argument about other countries goes wrong as well. It is about the rules of marriage, and it leaves out what drove the affair. Move to another country, and hostility is still hostility, revenge is still revenge.
Monogamy is only possible for a mature person
The men’s argument treats having one wife as nothing more than a cultural rule. A book on couples therapy sees it differently: Monogamy is only possible for a mature person.
The point is that staying with one person is hard — hard enough that only someone who has truly grown up can manage it. And that says something about the people who do stay with one person: they are not doing it because it comes easily.
Then the question has to change
If every affair is an act of hostility, then the questions people usually ask are aimed at the wrong place: How many times? How far did it go? What was the other person like? How hard were things back then?
The question that matters is one the person who had the affair has to ask: Who is the hostility in me aimed at, and where did it come from?
Sex is only the means by which the promise is broken. What breaks it is the hostility that was already there. That hostility is where to look, and it is not where 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