On Fidelity, Freedom, and the Other Self
By Joe Cozart
There is a temptation, whenever we encounter infidelity, to begin at the end of the story. Someone betrayed someone. An agreement was broken. There is an injured party and an offending party, evidence to be examined, explanations to be demanded, and eventually some judgment to be rendered. We are remarkably comfortable with this arrangement because judgment creates order. It divides an untidy human event into recognizable categories and allows everyone standing safely outside the wreckage to know where to stand.
I have become more interested in what happened before the wreckage. Not because betrayal requires an excuse. It does not. Understanding an act and absolving someone for committing it are entirely different intellectual exercises, although we frequently confuse them. Accountability answers the question of who was responsible. Understanding asks what happened inside a human being before responsibility became necessary. I find the second question considerably more difficult, and therefore considerably more interesting.
Esther Perel’s The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity approaches this uncomfortable territory without pretending that moral clarity and psychological curiosity are enemies. That alone makes the book unusual. We live in an age that increasingly requires immediate verdicts. Something happens, positions are taken, identities assigned, and curiosity begins to look suspiciously like sympathy. Perel refuses the bargain. Betrayal can be devastating and still be examined. A person can behave selfishly and still be complicated. An affair can be wrong and still contain information.
The proposition that stopped me was not really about adultery at all. Sometimes we do not go looking for another person. Sometimes we go looking for another version of ourselves. That changes the entire landscape.
The obvious interpretation of an affair is that one person has found something desirable in somebody else. Perhaps. But what if the more powerful attraction is what that other person allows someone to become? What if the lover is less destination than passport? Around one person I am responsible. Around another I am reckless. Here I am known completely. There I am mysterious again. Here everyone remembers my failures, my habits, my medications, my schedule, the story I have told six times and the joke everyone knows is coming. Somewhere else I arrive without biography.
There is extraordinary seduction in being temporarily released from one’s own history. We rarely discuss this because our language for relationships is overwhelmingly concerned with whom we love. We have much poorer language for who we become while loving them. Yet every relationship creates an environment in which certain versions of ourselves flourish and others gradually disappear. This is not necessarily anyone’s fault. Time itself does some of the work. Marriage does some. Children do some. Careers, mortgages, illness, responsibility and simple repetition do the rest.
Eventually a person can look around at a perfectly respectable life and discover that it fits beautifully while wondering whether the person wearing it still does. That is a dangerous question. It is also an exquisitely human one.
The affair, viewed through this lens, becomes not merely an escape from another person but an excursion away from an established self. The secret restaurant, the hotel room, the unexplained afternoon, the message deleted before coming home—all of it exists outside ordinary geography. The participants have temporarily created a country with almost no institutions. There are no utility bills there. No dentist appointments. No children asking where their shoes are. No twenty-year accumulation of disappointment. No one has to take the garbage out. Of course it feels different. Reality has been selectively excluded.
This is one reason affairs can produce such extraordinary emotional intensity. The comparison is structurally unfair. Domestic life must carry the entire weight of existence. The secret world carries almost none of it. One relationship must survive influenza, taxes, exhaustion, family obligations, aging parents and Tuesday afternoon. The other is allowed to exist largely as anticipation. Fantasy gets to compete against logistics. Fantasy usually wins. But eventually Tuesday comes for everyone.
What interests me more is why intelligent people fail to recognize the asymmetry while they are inside it. Perhaps because the affair is supplying something stronger than pleasure. It is supplying evidence. Evidence that I can still surprise someone. Evidence that somebody still sees me. Evidence that I have not become merely the sum of my obligations. Evidence that some road remains untaken. Evidence, finally, that I am still alive.
And here sex becomes almost secondary. Mortality has entered the room.
There comes a point in a human life when possibility changes character. At twenty-five, the unlived life stretches almost infinitely in front of us. We can become nearly anything because there appears to be time for nearly everything. At forty-five, fifty-five, sixty-five, arithmetic begins intruding upon imagination. Doors that once seemed merely unopened begin quietly becoming doors that will never open. The question is no longer simply, “What do I want?” It becomes, “What will I never experience if I do not experience it now?” That is an entirely different psychological force.
We tend to describe the resulting behavior as a midlife crisis, a phrase sufficiently comic that we do not have to examine what it contains. But beneath the sports car, the younger lover, the sudden wardrobe and the inexplicable determination to learn Italian is something much less amusing: an encounter with finitude. Time has become visible. The person is not necessarily running away from a spouse. He may be running toward the disappearing horizon.
This is where fidelity becomes much more interesting than sexual exclusivity. Fidelity, at its deepest level, may involve remaining faithful not only to another person but to a life one has chosen while continuing to acknowledge all the lives one did not choose. Every serious commitment contains renunciation. To choose one city is not to live in a thousand others. To pursue one profession is to abandon dozens of alternative selves. To build a life with one person is to relinquish an unknowable number of possible lives with others.
We seldom describe commitment this way because it sounds insufficiently romantic. Yet perhaps commitment becomes more meaningful when we do. There is little nobility in remaining faithful because temptation never occurred. The interesting fidelity is the one that understands perfectly well that other countries exist and chooses home anyway.
But home must remain a place where a person is permitted to change. That may be the more difficult lesson.
We often promise to love someone forever and then unconsciously require that they remain recognizable enough for us to accomplish it. We fall in love with a person and slowly construct an identity around them: dependable, adventurous, quiet, ambitious, sexual, practical, intellectual, maternal, paternal, strong. Then years pass. Human beings continue becoming. The contract remains. The signatories change.
Perhaps one of the great challenges of long relationships is learning to meet the stranger periodically emerging inside the person we believe we already know. “I know you” may be among the most comforting sentences in love. It may also be among the most dangerous. Because nobody is ever completely known. There remains another room. The great mistake may be believing intimacy requires eliminating it. Perhaps desire requires leaving the door slightly open.
And perhaps fidelity, properly understood, is not the elimination of every other possible life. It is the extraordinary decision to keep discovering possibility inside the life already chosen. That seems to me a much larger subject than infidelity. It is the tension running beneath nearly every human commitment: our simultaneous desire for belonging and sovereignty, permanence and possibility, recognition and reinvention.
We want someone who knows exactly who we are. And somewhere inside us remains the person who desperately hopes we have not yet become entirely knowable. That person does not necessarily need another lover. Sometimes that person simply needs another frontier.
The wiser question may therefore come long before anyone leaves. Not “Who else do you want?” but “Who have you not been allowed to become?”
A relationship capable of surviving the answer may discover something far more valuable than security. It may discover that home and freedom were never required to be opposite countries.
——— GMJoe™ ———
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Books by Joe Cozart are available at: amazon.com/author/joecozart