‘Why Can’t I Stop Cheating?’

Esther Perel is a psychotherapist, a best-selling author, and the host of the podcast Where Should We Begin? She’s also a leading expert on contemporary relationships. This column is adapted from the podcast — which is now part of the Vox Media Podcast Network — and you can listen and follow for free on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.

This week’s “Esther Calling” caller is worried that she’s stuck in a pattern: She cheats to escape. At 46, she’s been married four times, and each marriage ended in divorce. Today, she’s in a relationship with the man with whom she had the affair that ended her fourth marriage, and now that he is ending his own marriage, things are getting serious. “I’m afraid that I will get hurt, she says. “Despite my longing for a life partner, I question my ability to maintain a healthy and stable relationship.” Over the course of their call together, Esther Perel helps the caller unpack how her desire to escape a difficult childhood — her mother was often ill; her father was absent; resources were scarce — is what drives this flight response in her relationships as an adult. So how does she break the cycle? Well, it won’t be easy.

Esther Perel: So, you find Mr. Right, but you become Mrs. Not Right.

Caller: Yeah, looks like it.

Esther: What comes first? Extricating yourself through the affairs? Or deciding that you want to end and then finding the best bet to do so?

Caller: First, I decide that it’s gonna end. And I think that for me, I was catching myself on the thought that if I actually can look at another man, it means that, yeah, my feelings are over.

Esther: Oh, really? Do the lovers become your next husbands?

Caller: Uh, no —

Esther: The lovers are just exit strategies?

Caller: Yes, so it was always very short-term.

Esther: Except for this last one?

Caller: Yes, this last one is very special.

Esther: But you are basically saying: As we now have a clear slate to really be with each other, I am so afraid that I’m gonna mess it up. That I would rather he not be available.

Caller: Yes, me choosing this relationship that I have now, I was very conscious when I was going for it. Basically, I opened the computer and I didn’t know that such websites existed for married people. And I just Googled “website for married people for sex” or something. Suddenly, it appeared, and I was shocked at how many people, married people, are looking for affairs. And I spent two days on that website, because I became overwhelmed at the attention and amount of messages I was receiving. And on the day when I was already on the way out, I scrolled down and stopped. That was it. I didn’t have sex with my fourth husband for three years before I went for this. And when I realized that, I thought, Okay, I just need to figure out, am I frigid? Like something’s wrong with me.

And I thought that I don’t want to go find someone who is not married because it may cause trouble for me, and it’s better to be on the safe side that we both are married. So, that was the idea. And it started very symmetrical; we both wanted the same. It was an escape for both of us. I have a very sick child. My second daughter is disabled. And my relationship at home was difficult, despite the fact that my ex-husband is a very nice man. But it didn’t work between us.

It was approximately the same situation on his side. So when we were meeting each other once per week or once every two weeks, we just had a very great time escaping. Then we started to establish feelings for each other and it became more and more serious. I think we both somehow tried to fight this because I had my fears, he had his fears. I have this fear inside me: Am I certain that this is going to work? Or is it going to fail again?

Esther: Is it that? Because in the four marriages, the constant factor is you. There may be four very different men, but there’s four times the same woman. And you probably can begin to identify what are some of the things that happen to you.

When you give up, when you start to feel like I have to escape, when you start to feel that you are talking to these men and experiencing them like you experienced your father, when you start to think: Will this succeed?

You’re right to think I’m not sure of anything. You shouldn’t be. But you have questions about what’s it with me. I mean, you don’t seem to have a challenge finding people. But every time, you find yourself running. And bolting. That’s probably the first question for me. Because what you’re asking me is, what’s inside of me that’s driving me? Is there something broken? Is there something that I’m not aware of? Is there something I should watch out for? Because I’m my worst enemy at this point. Yes. I undermine myself. And I do meet, and I do fall in love, and I do go into la-la land, and I do marry every one of them, and of course they all marry me too, and I don’t know what they think when I tell them about the previous ones, but every single one of them thinks that maybe they’ll be different, or I’ll be different with them.

And so everybody is in magical-thinking land. There’s a lot of fiction here. And now there’s someone whom you care about deeply, who is leaving his family to be with you. And you say, I don’t want him to destroy all of that for me if it’s going to be another short-term thing.

The affairs is the strategy. The affairs is the symptom. The affairs is not the cause. What happens to you in those attachments that you form and in the way that you need to sever them very abruptly?

Caller: I never had many relationships. These four relationships, they have been long, all of them. They took me years. So I’ve been really trying to save all of them, despite the fact that usually in approximately one or two years, it would be already obvious that it’s not gonna work.

Esther: And when you say it’s not gonna work, or even when you say I’m looking for love, you’re looking for what? What’s the fantasy?

Caller: I think I was looking for freedom. They actually put me in a type of prison. So the first one was really dominating. He was eight years older and I was 18. He tried to change me by all means into something else. But I don’t think I really knew who I was because I was not allowed to say “no.”
I was not allowed to say I don’t want to do this or that. I was punished, I was bitten. I was not used to actually expressing my desires. I’m not sure that I actually knew what my desires were. I was so used to doing what I was told to, and that’s why this is the first relationship I felt even comfortable in; it was another person who was saying to me what I should do.

Esther: Like your father had done?

Caller: No, my mom. My father was working a lot. He’s actually a great person. But I didn’t really know him when I was a child. So we found each other much later in my life, when my mom died.
Now we are quite close. I once asked him, “Where have you been? Like why don’t I remember you?” And he said that, well, he traveled a lot. He was working. And my mom, she was dealing with cancer and with two children.

Esther: And your mom is the one who put the restrictions. So every time I met a man, I thought I would finally experience freedom, but every time, I found myself back in another version of the prison that was familiar to me, in which somebody dictates to me, either through soft power, either through overt power, either through being a perpetrator, either through being a victim.

Caller: Exactly. Because if I take my last marriage, my ex-husband became basically my teenage child. He was a very nice person, but he didn’t manage to take care of himself really while we were together. And I had two of my children, where my youngest one is disabled, and his son from his first marriage. Suddenly I had many kids whom I had to take care of, and I’ve been constantly working. I’ve been arranging activities for the children, buying clothes for everyone — including my husband — ordering hairdresser visits for him. Then I realized, Okay, that’s not life. I remember I came home after work late, and he was very good at cooking, so he loved taking care of the kids and making food, so I felt we switched roles, and I stopped feeling myself as a woman and maybe that’s why our sex life stopped as well because you cannot have sex with your son, basically.
And that’s a horrible, horrible, terrible feeling. I remember I was on the couch in front of the TV and I thought, Okay. So this is how my life is going to be. And I really loved life despite everything, what happened to me, all the challenges I had. And I just wanted so much to at least allow myself to think, Can it be different?

Esther: But interestingly, you come to me asking, Why do I cheat repeatedly? Why do I leave my marriages with the affairs? Or why do I resort to affairs, period? And then why do I resort to affairs as a marital escape? I have another question. I mean, it actually is quite obvious to me, and that doesn’t mean it’s true, but that’s the thought that came to me, that if in every marriage you find yourself either the mother or the daughter, then leaving with an affair is leaving as a woman.

Caller: Oh, that’s so beautifully said, isn’t it? Now, you suddenly made me not feel guilty.

Esther: My goal is not about cleansing your conscience. My hope is to help you make sense. If there is a question, it is, Why do I find myself continuously hoping to leave the relationship I had with my mom, but actually re-creating it in all its glory in multiple colors and forms? That’s the question. The fact that I use sex and infidelity to leave because it’s actually more sex than anything else is because once I become sexual, I feel free. Once I am sexual, I am not in a child role. Either restricted, beaten up, abused, clamored. And I’m not in a motherly role, because as a mom, I’m also not having sex. So it takes the form of the affairs, and your partners will experience it as such. But if you ask, What is the meaning? Why is this my strategy? Why don’t I leave simply saying I want out? Because I don’t feel free enough to leave. So, basically, they end up saying, We’re gone. I mean, I am the one instigating it, but they’re participating. And I leave through the use of sex, because sex represents for me being a woman, not a child or a mom, and being free, even if it’s short-term.But the real question is, Why am I trapped in constantly putting myself with the same kind of people? I don’t know. They may be different in color, race, religion, language, etc., but the relationship I develop with each and every one of them always lands me in the same spot. That’s the question. The question is about how do I enter, not how do I exit. What do you think of this?

Caller: You are absolutely right. In two marriages, I felt myself as a daughter, and in the other two marriages, I felt myself as a mother. But the question that remains is: Was it me who influenced those men to become either children or my fathers? Or it was something I didn’t see in the beginning of the relationships? Right now, this relationship that I have now, it hasn’t been six months or a year, it has been three and a half years, the time usually all my previous relationships would end. During the last two years, I’ve been trying to work on my traumas, my childhood traumas, since I worked with a therapist and spent time on learning what do I really like and what gives me pleasure, really trying to meet myself because I felt that I’ve been trying to please everyone in my life.

Esther: How old were you when your mom died?

Caller: I was 30. She was sick for 25 years, basically. She had some remissions, but the cancer would come back.

Esther: And what was the soundtrack that would play in your head when you would think of her.

Caller: You are so sad. You are so angry. You are so gray. You never smile. You never want to celebrate a birthday. You are never happy about Christmas or New Year’s Eve. You never want to have presents. You never want me to be around. You like my friends more than me. You call them nice names, and you never call me that. I can continue …

Esther: Keep going.

Caller: I feel sad. I feel so sorry for small-me because I understand that she had a very tough life. Many years of terrible sickness and having two children to raise, and we didn’t live in a very easy environment at that time. I was 13 when the Soviet Union collapsed, and we had no food for a period of time, so it was long queues just to get food home, that was a big problem.
So in a sense she’s been through a lot, but I feel that it damaged me. I didn’t learn what love looks like, really. I hadn’t seen that between her and my father. And I didn’t experience what love looks like between a parent and a child, either.

Esther: And when you start to distance and remove yourself, and to shut down sexually and to withhold your own affections, what precipitates it? What inside of you predisposes you to that cut off?

Caller: Well, I guess I’m looking for calmness, like to be in my own world and to be safe.

Esther: What is it that you notice a year into your marriages that is giving you the cue time to withdraw. Time to cut off. Time to shut down sexually?

Caller: Disappointments.

Esther: Okay, that’s what it is.

Caller: One disappointment after another disappointment after another. I always gave chances, hopes, and especially in the last one, I learned to speak out and talk about things that I find difficult or I don’t like or I would like to have different. But I had hopes that maybe were not always realistic.

Esther: Tell me more. Because the person who doesn’t know what love is learns love from where? From books, movies, and all that is artificial. Somebody made it up. And then when you meet real people, you maybe want them to be that character. You see some features in them, but then real life happens and you start getting disappointed because the person is not as you imagined it from the very beginning.

So that’s the rescue. The rescue is, You will pick me up and drop me into perfect-love land. Without any boo-boos, no frictions, no fractures, never disappointment. I’ll give you everything I have, and you’ll transport me to this haven where I am cherished and adored and desired and made to feel valued.

And when it starts to become clear that that’s not gonna happen, I basically raise my sails and off I go. I start by withdrawing sexually. Why? Besides the fact that I have a sense I’m the girl or I’m the parent, I withhold sex because I see it as a currency for love. It’s not just that I deprive myself of my own pleasure on anything.

It’s simply, you don’t deserve this, and I’m not giving you squat. Fuck you. You’re not there for me. Because, even though I like it and I enjoy it, in the context of marriage, it’s part of marital duty. It’s the thing I do when I’m nice.

Caller: I don’t think I ever punished any of them by saying “no” if I’d really wanted.

Esther: The wanting goes the moment you start to withdraw. It is the alarm system.

Caller: Yeah.

Esther: It’s the place where I know that I’m open, that I give myself to you, that I invite you in. And when I experience my disappointments, it’s the first thing that closes up. 

Caller: Does it mean that I actually punished them with that and that it was in my power that I can give myself to somebody else?

Esther: You tell me. You don’t experience it as punishing. You experience it more as lack of connection and self-protection. They may experience it as punishing, but for you that’s not the verb that resonates. I protect myself by not wanting to be touched by you. Stay away. Don’t come close. Does that resonate?

Caller: Yes. That was surely an escape. This is how I named it for myself as well. I never had affairs for a very long time, so usually it would take a month, and then I’m off, out of the marriage. But when this last affair started, I called it an escape.

Esther: Do your husbands know them? I mean, do they know of the affairs?

Caller: No.

Esther: They don’t know. So one day you come and you just say, I want out?

Caller: Basically, yes. After I did that, then I had enough energy or power inside me to say that, yes, now it’s over.

Esther: And then what would happen? They would fight, they would hope to convince you to stay, they would say go ahead …

Caller: Most of them were trying to convince me to try more and stay and work on the marriage and such. But usually it would already be a couple of years after I started to express my feelings, disappointments, or needs in something that they were not giving me. And I was trying, actually. I was asking, let’s work on it. And none of them would do that. And then we come to the point in two years’ time that I’m saying, okay, it’s over. And then they are willing, actually, to start doing something. And, um, but for me, when it’s done, it’s done already. So this is kind of a no-return point, and especially if I basically cheated already.

Esther: Right. I’m on my way out and I need something to strengthen me. So I’m not completely alone. So I have someone else who really is with me, even if it’s just for the transition. Those are exit strategies. To call them affairs is just a means to an end. And they may last for a couple of months afterward and then that’s it. They did their job. I feel empowered. I feel like the Heavenly Man by my side. I am not alone. And I basically accomplished my mission. And my mission is to get out of there as fast as I can. To go where? To go for another round. Because if you go to the next one, yes, with the same magical thinking, with the same fantasy that romantic love should basically protect me from ever feeling alone, ever feeling disappointed, ever feeling needy or unmet, ever feeling those longings that I had my whole life, you get to forget something once, maybe twice, by the third time, some very old feelings begin to come back up and it starts to feel so familiar. And it’s a kind of an emotional desert in which we are tied by what? By dependency? By need? By caretaking? By duty? By responsibility?

All words you used for mom and you. And it’s quite fantastic how scot-free your father was. He’s basically just seen as the man who worked.

Caller: I think he was the one who actually knew what he wanted, how he wanted it, and how to live a good life.

Esther: Yes, but he left her with the two children and is not held accountable.

Caller: He was providing for the family. That was kind of normal, at that time, in that country; it was a usual thing.

And women would take care of everything, children and the household. And my mother, she had her own traumas, her own childhood, her own issues, her troubles with her mother. I really don’t know how she was coping with staying alone for long periods of time and being sick and taking care of me and my sister. I never saw them close. I never saw them loving. I don’t remember us sitting around the table and talking with each other even.

Esther: Did you see that in your friends’ homes?

Caller: Oh yes, my neighbor. And we often visited each other, and I was always so — I don’t know if the word jealous is right to use in this particular circumstance — but I admired how her parents were looking at each other. And you know what’s interesting, her father, he was a pilot. My current boyfriend, he’s a pilot too, and he even reminds me a little bit of what my friend’s father looked like.

Esther: And what does that mean for you?

Caller: I’m always happy when I think about it, because that home, maybe that was the only real life, not books and not movies, but actually real relationship where the love was so obvious. Love for children, how they loved their daughters, and how they expressed their love, how they loved, how they celebrated all the holidays, and that was something that I definitely desired for myself.

Esther: How are you with your daughters?

Caller: Oh, I love them very much. I love them very much, but I do not control them.

The youngest one, she is disabled, so she is 50 percent home and 50 percent in a special institution. And she doesn’t speak. But my oldest one, she is 19 and she is moving out this summer. I love her very much, of course. And I’ve been very different with her, compared to how my mother was with me.

Esther: And how has it been for her to travel these multiple marital units?

Caller: She is the daughter of my second husband. She has got her troubles, I guess, because of that. Especially because of my third husband, the father of my second daughter, because that relationship was extremely difficult.
But my fourth marriage, she was already a teenager when it happened, and it was easier, I guess, for me. I was always open with her. I don’t know, but I’ve never been afraid of showing my feelings to her and explaining things.

Esther: But you’re saying, I have been trying with the therapist to address how my relationship with my mother and the emotional desert that I felt I was living in has accompanied me in the course of my life. How it completely created idealistic expectations for me in what love is. You know, in a very childlike way, that love, it should be a permanent state of enthusiasm, that it should have no ripples and no cracks, and that it in a way didn’t prepare me except for knowing how to leave.

I don’t know what to do when I have disappointments, when I am sad, when I am hurt. And it’s not that I don’t tell the partners, but I don’t know how you told, and I don’t know who you chose to tell it to. So then I realized at one point I’m gonna go, and then I basically start preparing myself for a year or two on how to extricate myself from here, financially, emotionally, logistically, and then I, basically, the affair is just a fatal blow. I just bring the big gun to make sure that I succeed and that there is no return possible. I am completely shut down to any of these men. They can talk to me about anything they want. Nothing enters anymore. I’ve opened another little window to another guy on the side, but to the husbands, I’m completely done.

And now I am with someone, and it’s been a bit of a different pattern. And so here’s the question for me. How do I learn? Because once we are just us, and we’ve cleared all the families, what will happen to us? As long as there are other people when he disappoints me, I can also think of it structurally. It’s because he’s not available, it’s because he’s flying, it’s because we have still divorces to go through, etc. But once it’s just him and me, does this put me back in exactly the same situation where I put myself completely at the mercy of everything he says and does to put me back? Where I am just the recipient of what he will or will not bestow upon me.

And that’s the structure that needs to shift. As long as there are obstacles, I can kind of rationalize the shortcomings, the disappointments, the letdowns, etc. But once we are just us, I don’t want to put him in the same examination because I know he will fail, because everybody does. Because nobody’s perfect. No man will undo the legacy of your mother. You will. How? I’m not capable of answering that after one hour, honestly. What I did think is, when they hurt you, the sadness and the anger that come up, like a volcano, much of it doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to you and her. And that rage, which is a combination of sadness and helplessness and anger, erupts inside of you in some interesting way.

She remains in control of your life. You may have left, you may have run four times in marriages and many others, but in effect, she continues to have the control that you so ardently have hoped to escape still.

Caller: I hoped so much that I actually already kind of worked through this mother thing and managed to cut it at least with forgiveness.

Esther: But it’s the moments when the man who has been identified as the source of love, redemption, and repair, when he misses, and even when he misses again, that’s the moment.

Caller: But does it mean that it’s all my fault that all my marriages collapsed?

Esther: Not at all. But you came to ask me about your part. And when you are in them, and you’re about to leave them, you tell yourself the story as they let you down. They became abusive. They became infantilized. They didn’t do their part. They made it impossible for you to tolerate this. When you’re with them, you don’t think, What am I doing? You think, What are they doing to me?

And how am I reacting to that? When you’re with me, you say, this is true, but it sits on a set of expectations.

Caller: So I’m basically escaping not them, I’m escaping my feelings? What’s hurting me?

Esther: Unexpressed expectations are predetermined resentments. When you meet them, you idealize them, and you put on them a host of things that they don’t even know. And then they fall from grace.

Caller: How will I know that now it’s different?

Esther: I don’t know. I wish I could tell you everything like that after an hour, but I can’t. I would be saying just generalities and generalities and generalities and generalities. That wouldn’t be fair to you. So here’s a perfect example of a conversation that will end with frustration. You want to know, is it different? This is the moment you can make it different.

Caller: Yeah. It’s interesting because I felt so much lighter and now I feel again, like, Oh.

Esther: Welcome to life.