Perel wrote Mating in Captivity, a different book, and has written extensively on cheating and infidelity, also talks about it on her show, Where Should We Begin? It’s a really interesting listen. Definitely listen to it. It’s fascinating.
In my mind, that’s like cultivating and creating autonomy between yourself and the person or people that you are with because if you’re with them all the time which is hard right now because we’re all in captivity, no, we’re all like in our home, potentially it’s more challenging to do that but it is still very important. Esther Perel says, “There is nothing like the eroticized gaze of the third to challenge our domesticated perceptions of each other.” Whoa.
Dedeker: Then, like a lot of the stuff that we talked about on the show, Perel also discusses how unlikely it is that our partner is going to provide everything that we could ever want and yet when a partner is not providing absolutely everything that we could ever want, a lot of us are very quick to immediately look for it in others and are sometimes pressured to leave a relationship if a partner is not sexually fidelitous.
Bear in mind that Perel’s mostly writing this book for monogamous people and talking about traditional monogamous relationships, and yet she also straddles the line for sure, of being fairly pro non-monogamy but also trying to bring in a lot of that very natural, again, like that eroticized charge that comes from your partner being someone who is much more autonomous and independent from you and hoping to encourage people to do that even in their monogamous relationships.
In this book Mating in Sarapul girls for marriage Captivity, she suggests cultivating mystery and distance between partners in order to spark erotic excitement is something that people should be doing
What we’re leading up to is Perel has some advice for weathering infidelity, which is one, except that it will probably happen. Two, strip it of its moral power. Which means, don’t think that your partner is this bad, terrible, morally irredeemable person for doing it, and get curious around why they did so in the first place. That’s the most important takeaway for the non-monogamous folk. That right there. This can be an opportunity for curiosity. It doesn’t need to be like super happy curiosity or super excited curiosity but again, curiosity around like let’s say, if your partner violated some kind of agreement or did the opposite of what they said that they were going to do, it’s getting to the bottom of why.
Is there something going on in the ecosystem of our relationship that made it hard to uphold that agreement or was your partner unable to actually agree to that, but felt pressured to or things like that?
Again, getting answered these questions can be really, really valuable. It could be everything from something that could help infuse your relationship with some actual excitement or it could give you a more clear sense of like, Oh, there’s some things we need to work on here, or it could also give you a sense of, Oh, maybe this is not the relationship for me if my partner . Yes, again, always, its okay to break up. It is okay. We promise.
Jase: I’m on board with this like, maybe this term isn’t actually serving any of us so much and we should talk about it differently.
Emily: Yes, well, what are the terms? What are labels? The older I get, the more I’m like, whatever. It’s just I am who I am and that’s fine. All right. For our bonus episode for Patreons, we are going to discuss a little bit about whether or not cheating can exist in relationships like, don’t ask, don’t tell relationships and relationship anarchy if we know of any other frameworks where cheating eworks of relationships, we’re going to dive a little bit into that. I’m interested to hear what you two have to say on those subjects.