Since I’ve long been interested in extramarital love affairs, thanks to my own experiences, I’ve noticed a persistent explanation for why they happen: It usually boils down to this unproven banality…You had an affair because you don’t believe you deserve love. This sweeping idea is so vague it can be sloppily applied to many people, yet it’s automatically credited as a universal cause. I think this is ridiculous, not to mention lazy. Yet I haven’t ever seen it questioned, never mind criticized! Like many old ideas, it’s still here because it always was.

I recently read a column by a well-known therapist, advising a young woman about a passionate affair she’d had with a married man. Eventually he broke off the affair to focus on his marriage. The writer was devastated and asked how she could recover from her acute sadness and self-doubt. The therapist’s understanding of this situation was classic and predictable: the woman was enacting the Freudian idea of “repetition compulsion,” says the columnist. That is, the young woman probably had emotionally unavailable parents and so she is only attracted to unavailable men. (Her unconscious finds them like a “finely tuned radar system.” What a well-oiled mechanism the unconscious is!) So the appeal of the man in question was just “a projection of something she wanted to work out.” It had nothing to do with his attributes, or the dynamics of their relationship. His attraction was simply that she would “never really feel safe with him.” That’s right, the theory here is that being “unsafe” was what she really wanted, and worked hard to get.

Once you accept that as the reason she had an affair, the flip side is that she fell in love with this married man because she was “afraid of meeting someone available to her”. End of story. Of course the column concludes on a note of optimism, since therapy is fundamentally optimistic: once she understands her own unconscious, she will be closer to finding “the love she deserves.” 

The problem with this grand interpretation and solution is that there’s not a shred of evidence to back it up; it’s an interpretation, much like Freud’s Oedipal complex, which could be true, might be true for some, but is not necessarily true for anyone when you make it automatic and universal. What this widely (and wildly) popular idea leaves out is…just about everything. Where does this particular person stand in the dating and marriage market? What does she want that she was not getting in a lover (other than their “unavailability”), and how many men have fit her needs at any particular time? The reasons people fall in love, I would guess, are extremely complex, based on one’s history and experience, yes, but also the culture one lives in, what one reads or sees, who one happens to meet. It’s unlikely to be a simplistic idea that can be reduced to one sentence. 

As for the “emotional unavailability” theory, most dating relationships break up, usually initiated by only one of the partners, causing the exact same feelings the young woman had: acute sadness, rejection, feeling unlovable. Sadly, those who were “emotionally available” can become “emotionally unavailable” at any time. In fact, the therapeutic idea seems to imply that the only “emotionally available” partners are those who marry you — which is also absurd, given the high rate of divorce. 

I must say that in the same column, the advice therapist does a great job of explaining the likely reasons why the married man in question did not leave his wife for the heartbroken young woman. That doesn’t mean he didn’t love her or want to be with her, she says reasonably, but he was bound by his devotion to his kids, and to his wife, who gives him “stability, security, a shared history, commitment to their children”. There’s also the pain and consequences of divorce, financial as well as emotional. In other words, he had good reasons not to leave for another woman he doesn’t really know in “real life”, including her annoying habits and bad moods. All this makes sense.

It’s odd that the therapist does such a trenchant analysis of the married partner in the affair, while resting on psychological platitudes to explain the woman’s role. When the columnist describes the man’s decision, she backs it up by the facts of a married person’s life after divorce, what there is to lose and how difficult that decision can be – not fuzzy generalities about the “unconscious” of a woman who is a complete stranger to her. 

If I sound annoyed by this, it’s because I am – decades ago, when I was having an affair with a man who had a partner, I was also devastated that he would not leave…and I heard “You’re afraid of intimacy so you choose an unavailable man to love” over and over from therapists, as well as the man in question, as brilliant a person as I’ve ever met. Since he was partnered up, the implication of his helpful analysis was that he himself was not “afraid of intimacy,” as I supposedly was. I never believed this nonsense, and still don’t.

I wish I could write to that anonymous young woman and tell her, from my perch of old age and many years of experience, that she should love whoever she loves, that she and her putative unconscious longing to be rejected are not to blame, and if it doesn’t go as she wishes, chances are she’ll get over it someday and go on to other adventures, just as I did. How’s that for an optimistic ending? Just a different kind.

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