Esther Perel

And her story highlights for me that when we seek the gaze of another, it isn't always our partner that we are turning away from, but the person that we have ourselves become.

And it isn't so much that we're looking for another person as much as we are looking for another self.

Now, all over the world, there is one word that people who have affairs always tell me.

They feel alive.

And they often will tell me stories of recent losses, of a parent who died, and a friend that went too soon, and bad news at the doctor.

Death and mortality often live in the shadow of an affair because they raise these questions.

Is this it?

Is there more?

Am I going on for another 25 years like this?

Will I ever feel that thing again?

And it has led me to think that perhaps these questions are the ones that propel people to cross the line, and that some affairs are an attempt to beat back deadness and an antidote to death.

And contrary to what you may think, affairs are way less about sex and a lot more about desire.

Desire for attention, desire to feel special, desire to feel important,

And the very structure of an affair, the fact that you can never have your lover, keeps you wanting.

That in itself is a desire machine, because the incompleteness, the ambiguity, keeps you wanting that which you can't have.

Now, some of you probably think that affairs don't happen in open relationships, but they do.

First of all, the conversation about monogamy is not the same as the conversation about infidelity.

But the fact is that it seems that even when we have the freedom to have other sexual partners, we still seem to be lured by the power of the forbidden.

That if we do that which we are not supposed to do, then we feel like we're really doing what we want to.

And I've also told quite a few of my patients that if they could bring into their relationships one tenth of the boldness, the imagination, and the verve that they put into their affairs, they probably would never need to see me.