In dating, if you say no, your lover goes on to the next person. In marriage, if you say no, the person stays.

What is the relationship between love and desire? How do they relate, and how do they conflict? ... Therein lies the mystery of eroticism.

In dating, if you say no, your lover goes on to the next person. In marriage, if you say no, the person stays.

The vast majority of unfaithful people are experiencing a conflict between their values and their behavior, and that is the mess of infidelity. It's not an either-or. The idea that you would ask, "How can you say you love your husband and you want to stay married, and you also are having an affair?" Because we are not the same woman, or the same man. Because sexual revolutions don't take place at home. Because for most of us, freedom wasn't something that we experienced in our family, but usually outside of our family.

To look at infidelity from the point of view of sex is a complete narrowing of the phenomenon. There's a reason that the commandment is repeated twice in the Bible - once for doing it and once for thinking about it. We have always created structures and broken structures. It is essential to the human spirit.

Affairs can be powerful detonators. They can invigorate a marriage that's flat, jolt people out of years of complacency. Fear of loss rekindles desire, makes people have conversations they haven't had in years, takes them out of their contrived illusion of safety.

One of the big misconceptions is that affairs or trysts are flings about sex. And sometimes they are, but much more often they are about desire. And that is very different. The desire to feel special, to feel seen, to feel appreciated, to be laughed at or with. The desire to be desired. That does not manifest in a sexual act per se. Affairs make you feel alive. Alchemy means it's not about the actual sex, but the sexuality, the energy, the aura. It's the imagination and anticipation of it as much or instead of the actual experience of it.