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“Sex,” says Jonathan Safran Foer, “feeds off the emotion we feel as we discover, time and again, how little we know ourselves.”
The way we choose to leave our relationships reflects the kind of relationship we have with the unknown and difficult parts of ourselves.
Infidelity is often a way to return to ourselves—to fragments of our former self that we’ve forgotten, long for, and that fill us with meaning; to a different self from the one we’ve become.
Often, it also leads us to new parts of ourselves—parts we never allowed ourselves to be until now, because of other deeply personal reasons. Until today.
We’re trying to reconnect with the values that make up our deeper self.
In infidelity, we’re not negotiating our love for the other person—we’re more often searching for something of our own that we’ve lost. Pieces of our relationship, images of who we are, and our unmet needs. It is a choice and a process that may cause pain, remorse, guilt, and other emotions with complex explanations—for both people involved.
The eyes of the other—the different other—are the place where we meet those lost parts and see ourselves as someone else, someone different. A place where we are not what we’ve become. A space of possibilities—of who we may invite ourselves to become, and who others may invite us to be.
A space where we fit.
