Why Do Happy People Cheat?

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It's one of the 10 commandments: thou shalt not commit adultery.

And yet, people do.

Prominent people, ordinary people, and even people who are perfectly happy with their partners.

Why do happy people cheat?

And what can that teach us about love?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, Executive Editor of The Atlantic.

And with me once again in the studio in DC is my esteemed co-host, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, back from his Gallivance.

Hello, Jeffrey.

Hi, Matt.

I didn't know Gallivance.

Is Gallivance a noun?

I'm going to make it a noun.

I don't know.

That's how

we're going to be Gallivance.

Hey, Alex, you haven't been introduced yet.

You're not allowed allowed to talk.

Remember the rules?

Speaking of podcast rules, introducing, belatedly introducing our esteemed, esteemed co-host.

Wait, she's double esteemed.

Double esteemed co-host, Alex Wagner, over in New York.

Wagner hasn't been traveling, but she's got

Wagnerian wanderlust.

You just came up with that.

Not really.

Do you see how I did that?

Alex, you notice that Matt seems very, very happy today?

Yeah.

I am just happy to see you all.

And with us in the studio today, in our fourth chair, is Esther Perel.

Thank you for joining us, Esther.

My pleasure.

Esther is the author of the just-published book, The State of Affairs Rethinking Infidelity, and wrote a fascinating piece in the October issue of The Atlantic called Why Happy People Cheat.

Esther, you have a super interesting podcast, Where Should We Begin, in which we hear you in your role as a professional therapist, and we get to listen in as you counsel people through difficulties in their relationships.

In the first episode, you talk to a couple about a year after the revelation that the husband had cheated on his wife and they're still living together and they're seemingly in this sort of like chilly, cordial, non-sexual sort of holding pattern, but he seems to want to rekindle the relationship and she's not sure.

We hear them struggling to explain to one another what they want.

This is hopefully the hardest test we'll ever have, but you should survive it.

I feel like something died for me after this.

Like I just cannot get over this.

I felt like we had difficult life.

Like difficult, but leading to good, right?

So I was willing to work for it and I was happy in that.

But after you betrayed me, I was like...

What was all that hard work for?

Yeah, no, I mean, I understand how you feel feel because I felt the same way.

And then you step in at one point, you point out his instinct.

It's very hard

because you want to equalize it.

But if you keep saying, me too, then her answer is going to be, but I didn't do this.

Yeah.

Together we're going to aim for a different conversation, a different exchange.

There's this fascinating moment in the episode where you just flat out tell them.

It's very rare that I just make a blanket statement like this.

Your communication is terrible.

I never knew that.

I thought we were really good at this communication.

No, that doesn't mean as a whole.

But this thing that I'm watching here

is

at the root of a lot of what happens

and happened.

And you don't let him off the hook either.

He's not better at this than you.

Just so you

listening to a failure of communication like that just happening right before your ears is just fascinating.

And your show is filled with these moments.

But it left me with a question, though.

Is anyone good at this?

Are there any couples that you found that are good at having conversations, particularly before an affair might happen, about their desires, what they're going through, what they're experiencing, their fears?

And what can we learn from them if there are?

Yes, I think that

it's a vocabulary.

And some people have

a richer vocabulary for talking about their feelings, their aspirations, their fears, their vulnerabilities.

They have the words for it.

Some people don't necessarily say it with words, but they know how to share a poem,

their hands, their affection, their touch expresses it.

So

yes, I think that

by virtue of having learned, it's like some people see a painting and they just say, oh, I like it, I don't like it, and some people watch a painting and can

wax poetic about it for 20 minutes because they have a vocabulary, because they have learned to see, because they have learned to recognize what they see and to articulate it and not to be afraid of saying it.

So that is a big part of what I definitely try to do today in my work, where I help people navigate the complexities, the challenges of relationships, and that is to have a vocabulary, to speak about things which we used to not need to talk about.

To dwell on vocabulary for a second, I thought the name of your podcast, Where Should We Begin, was a striking little window into how you envision your work.

Because you speak and you write about saying to a couple, in effect, your first relationship together has ended, and now we're going to figure out what your next relationship together looks like.

And I think every relationship of any length goes through these sorts of phase shifts, even if there's not the cataclysm of an affair to provoke it.

And in that light, the question

that you title your show with is fascinating.

Where should we begin?

Since we're talking about infidelity, after the trauma of an affair, what do you think is the most productive shift a relationship can undergo?

You know, you said to me before that you saw that I was trying to bring a more compassionate approach to the the person who strayed.

My goal is to bring a more compassionate approach to the topic altogether.

We need to help children understand their parents.

We need to help friends understand each other.

We need to help the people who choose to stay after an affair not feel that they are living the new shame.

Because the goal is to leave always and then they are betrayed by their beloved and then they can't talk to anybody around it because they're going to be judged for choosing to stay when they have the option to leave.

Everybody here could use more compassion.

So

when I start where should we begin in the aftermath of an affair, the first thing is that there needs to be an absolute acknowledgement and reckoning with how much it hurts.

and what it means to lie and to deceive and to gaslight and to love another and to desire another and the jealousy and all the human drama that is embedded in this story.

When we say that people are cheating, we're looking at it from one way, but when we understand that what really hurts is not always that you cheated on me, but that you actually fell in love with someone else, that your heart opened up to somebody else, that's a very different experience.

When you have a person like I saw yesterday who the father left the mother for another woman and that person can either see their father as he cheated on my mother or that 27 years ago, or he can see his father as a man who actually fell in love with another woman and understood that he was in the wrong relationship and that he had discovered a very different way to be committed to someone and has given a model to his son of a very different way to be together.

Which story do you want to live by?

And we live by the stories that we tell.

Of course, it's not one or the other, but one was sorely missing.

You'd show your remorse, you show the guilt for what you have done to your partner, you show that if you choose to stay together, why it matters to you to continue, what it is that you value here.

An affair is often a devaluation of the other partner.

It means I didn't think about you and I was somewhere else.

It is always selfish.

It is always an entitlement.

By definition, it's something I'm giving to myself that is just for me.

So all of these murkier things have to enter into the picture and then we start to understand why it happened, what does it mean, what's the meaning we're going to make out of this.

Every affair will redefine a relationship, and every relationship will determine what the legacy of the affair will be.

Astair, in your piece, you trace an arc of how society has considered infidelity over the ages.

And you point out that our attitudes towards cheaters have evolved alongside our attitudes towards gender.

There have been times when men could just kind of cheat on their wives with abandon, and society did not give much consideration to a woman whose husband had conducted an affair.

But you make a surprising argument that society doesn't give that much consideration to the cheater today, not to condone their behavior, but to have a sort of empathy for why they cheated.

And I found that counterintuitive.

How do we empathize with people who betrayed their partners?

So there are many pieces to

your questions, you know.

First of all,

to understand modern infidelity, you have to understand modern marriage.

And the meaning of infidelity is completely different.

Indeed, for most of history, it has been a very gender unequal proposition.

I mean, basically, monogamy is an imposition on women, and men have had a privilege, pretty much sanctioned, with all kinds of reasons for why they can do so, why they are natural roamers.

Women are rapidly closing the infidelity gender gap, in fact.

So the notion that it is only men doing so is not accurate.

And first of all, who are those men going with?

Have you observed that in your own practice?

Of course.

You know, I received about 1,500 letters after the TED Talk, and there are two groups that write to me the most.

The women who are string and the men who are wounded.

Because those are the two groups that talk the least.

Interesting.

As a whole, the subject is shrouded in secrecy and in shame and in silence.

But on top of it, the people who write are the ones who have the least permission to speak.

It's interesting, there is this terrible world of cuckold.

Yes, that doesn't exist in the feminine.

To describe...

Right, exactly.

And these men now are communicating with you in ways that they would not have communicated.

It's unbelievable thing, the way that the people have written to me and what they have shared with me.

And

I mean,

I use maybe one-tenth of the stories in the book.

I have so many others.

And it's very, very gripping.

The reason I'm able to...

You're asking me why I'm able to have compassion for something that one would naturally have a gut judgment about, because I am a couples therapist for 35 years and I understand that some issues are massively complex, that we would love to reduce them into black and white, and into good and bad, and into victim and perpetrator, and that, in fact, it is way more complicated than that.

also understand that betrayal comes in many forms and that

indifference, and neglect, and violence, and contempt, and sexual refusal and rejection for years on end are also forms of betrayal.

But that we live in a society in which the betrayal of an infidelity stacks above all others.

So,

you can be a manipulator, an abusive person, a violent person, a neglectful person, a person who has an affair with your job for 30 years on And you will have the moral high ground if your partner has gone elsewhere because

this is the way that the priorities have been organized in our society.

And it is a dishonest conversation.

Aaron Ross Powell, isn't one of the reasons you're able to have empathy, especially

as a therapist, is because you see the person having the affair as exploring actually some deeper part of themselves, perhaps, in having an affair.

I mean, you write in the Atlantic article, the most intoxicating other that people discover in an affair isn't a new partner, it's a new self.

And in some ways, having an affair is kind of a window into people's existential conundrums, as you call it, right?

So there are multiple types of affairs and infidelities.

I think the first thing we should establish is that if I ask an audience,

50 people, 5,000 people, if they have been affected by the experience of infidelity in their lives, 80% of the people raise their hand.

Wow.

We are not talking about a few bad apples.

This is the child whose parent was unfaithful.

This is the child who was born as an offspring of an illegitimate or an illicit love.

This is the friend whose shoulder is wet from someone who's been weeping on them.

This is the third person who completes the triangle.

This is the person who's enthralled in listening to someone else who's in the throes of an affair.

This is a systemic thing.

It's not just a story of two people.

And once you begin to look at it intergenerationally and systemically, you start to think differently than just the traditional model, which is affairs are a symptom of a problem in a relationship.

And if it's not a problem in the relationship, it's a problem in you.

Part of what I took from your article in The Atlantic and much of your work is that affairs are a symptom of the impossibility, as you might describe it, of modern marriage.

Could you talk about what makes marriage so difficult today?

What began, one of the most important findings for me in the research for the state of affairs was this idea that, in fact,

many affairs had nothing to do with the relationship.

This was not a symptom model.

It wasn't a deficiency.

And that often people...

People in good marriages have affairs.

Yes,

that when you marry, and this is an answer to your thing, when you marry, you often inhabit a certain version of yourself.

Certain parts parts of you become the dominant parts that live that story, that life.

And often you curtail many other parts of you and often you become a narrow version of yourself as well.

It's not the fault of marriage, it's the way life unfolds.

Could you give an actual example from one of the couples?

that you dealt with?

I want to understand how this narrowing manifests itself in personality.

So I am a person, man or woman, gay or straight, who

was interested

in literature.

I wanted to be a writer.

Since I'm at the Atlantic, I'm going to use a metaphor like that.

I wanted to be a writer.

I have traveled.

I was an adventurous, curious person.

But I grew up in a family in which I had an alcoholic brother.

My father ended up not being able to support us.

My mother needed me.

I became the responsible caregiver.

to the entire family.

And then I marry and I continue that same role and I have have been holding the shoulders up so that everybody else can rest on me.

I am the provider, I am the caretaker, I am the organizer.

And I feel bad for you.

That can be any person.

And that part of me that used to like open-endedness, that was into exploration and discovery, that liked to sometimes, you know, has been squashed because I have had to to carry all of that.

That is a classic story actually of where you begin to see that that people who have affairs are actually not irresponsible.

They are often people who are crumbling under responsibility and for the first time experience something that is just for them.

And I am not justifying this and I am not condoning this.

It's very important that this is a book that tries to understand it.

But that narrative of I felt dead.

And then I began to listen worldwide, the one word that people would use to describe how they feel when they have an affair.

And the word had nothing to do with sex and excitement.

And it was, I feel alive.

Because the power of transgression, transgressing my own rules, my own lines, my own barriers, the confines of my life,

is what gives me a burst of energy, autonomy, freedom, and aliveness.

That is one of the existential themes that kept coming up in those particular kinds of affairs that happen in perfectly satisfying, loving, caring relationships.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, when you put it that way, I understand why you empathize with that person.

Yeah.

But isn't it also that we have sort of undue and contradictory expectations when it comes to marriage?

I mean, you write that

contained within the small circle of the wedding band are vastly contradictory ideals.

We want our chosen one to offer stability, safety, predictability, and dependability.

And we want that very same person to supply awe, mystery, adventure, and risk.

I mean, even if you haven't been sort of the anchor of a family scenario and you're just, you know,

there are not undue expectations placed on your shoulders, the constraints of marriage or the sort of requirements are almost impossible to fulfill in the 21st century, aren't they?

Yes, but that would imply that there is more infidelity today.

Infidelity has existed since marriage was invented, regardless of the models of marriage.

When marriage was an economic enterprise, it existed.

When marriage is a romantic arrangement, it exists.

So

it would be nice to think this way.

The fact that it's all of these things now doesn't actually increase the level of marriage.

What increases the level is also that we live in an individualistic society in which we feel entitled to pursue our desires.

It's not necessarily true that we have more desires, but we certainly don't feel like we have to sacrifice them the way we've needed to do so throughout history.

What is also true is that we have contraception and so we no longer have to worry that one ex-adventure is going to produce a child whose color of hair is very different than mine.

That I have an economic independence as a woman and that for the first time if anything happens to me, I'm not going to be destitute, ostracized and without my children and with a scarlet letter.

There are lots of things that have changed the proliferation of infidelity.

Asteir, when you talk to couples who are both men or both women, do the conversations go any differently?

Do the things that you surface in your conversations with them take a different cast than they might with a heterosexual couple?

When you will hear it actually in the podcast,

where I have obsessions with lesbian couples, gay couples, trans couples.

And what is very interesting always is that the same dynamics will occur,

which in a straight couple are gender-specific, and in a same-sex couple, couple become really about roles.

When I work with same-sex couples, there are some differences that are very clear around this subject, and it has to do because the meaning of sexuality, especially in gay men couples, is different than it was traditionally organized in straight couples.

That is so,

the understanding.

What does that mean?

That means that

in a heterosexual couple, the social pressure on men has always been to be sexual.

Sexuality is the sanctioned language to which to experience a whole range of emotions that men are not allowed to feel except through sex.

That women have to justify their needs for sex by wrapping it into multiple layers of relatedness.

That when men lie, they lie by boasting up when it's about sex.

And women lie by denying and by minimizing because they need to protect themselves.

When you put two women together or two men together,

the messages that each one has received around the permission seeking, around what is valued, what is allowed and what is inhibited and what are the incentives around sexuality and intimacy and connection are very different.

Two gay men or two men

that are gay will rarely talk about pornography as a form of betrayal.

Watching porn is not a form of infidelity.

in a gay couple.

That's like one big difference, whereas it often is in a straight couple.

That's a classic example I can give you right away.

Gay men understand the pursuit of sex.

They fought for it.

They're not going to now deny it for themselves.

That said, they may have had an agreement that they would be in a monogamous relationship, in the meaning of an exclusive relationship.

At the same time, many more gay men have relationships that are emotionally monogamous and sexually not exclusive.

They don't conflate the meaning of monogamy with sexual exclusivity.

It's those those kinds of differences that are fundamental

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Could I ask another question about culture?

Yes.

Which is Europe versus America?

I'm curious.

We have a

conception here that in France, in particular,

people are crazy, right?

And there's no guilt associated with anything, and it's very, very libertine.

And here we obviously have a huge amount of infidelity, even among public figures, some of whom become very successful despite everyone knowing that they have histories of infidelity.

But we also have a lot of what judgmental people or non-judgmental people might call hang-ups around it.

Could you talk a little bit about

what you've experienced?

I'm very curious about the differences between Europe and...

and America.

We have a lot of complexity around infidelity issues in America.

On the one hand, very judgmental culture.

On the other hand, people, men at least, who've committed infidelity can rise and stay in power.

A woman candidate who has committed an infidelity within the bond of marriage, I don't think, would succeed in politics right now.

But

talk about the differences and are we getting any closer in our common understanding of infidelity?

Look, Americans don't cheat one iota less than the French.

They just feel more guilty about it.

The The CDC took the word pleasure out of the definition of sexual health in the last three years.

What does that mean?

That means that the subject of sexuality in the United States is fraught beyond.

From the complete absence of sex education to sex is dirty, but save it for the one you love, to the fact that it is a subject that is either treated as smut or titillation and rarely as a serious topic of discovery and exploration.

All of that surrounds the attitude towards the infidelity.

When I'm in the US, Europe is like a continent.

When I'm in Europe, there are differences inside of Europe.

But if you want to compare with the Latin culture, the French, the Francophone culture, the big difference is this.

Affairs hurt.

They're not necessarily wrong.

We do...

Makes it sound like a pretty mean society.

It means that it doesn't hurt any less in France, in Belgium, in Switzerland, in Italy.

It doesn't hurt any less than it hurts here.

Affairs hurt,

but they are not necessarily seen as a moral offense.

We understand that inner culture, where you have a choice of your partner and it's a free choice, and it is based on love, and it is no longer based on economic arrangements exclusively and family alliances, that the vagaries of the heart are what dictates the fate of romantic love.

And so it happens.

We are not utterly shocked that such a thing could happen in a long-term relationship.

The feelings are no different, but the conceptualization is not necessarily done in moral terms.

It is done in interpersonal terms.

I guess I would take issue with the qualification that somehow conceiving of it as a moral wrong is in some ways less evolved.

Just because

if we're to sort of

no, but I think that's the suggestion here, right?

That the U.S.

has this kind of backwards puritanical idea about infidelity.

We think of sex in very binary terms and don't have a more nuanced perspective, which may be true.

But I guess if we go with the presumption that having an affair hurts and can be deeply, deeply wounding to the partner who's involved who's not having the affair around the world, Isn't there some kind of, I mean,

isn't it somehow questionable?

And maybe morally isn't the right term for it, but isn't it

an act of

malice in some ways to hurt your partner like that?

A moral hazard.

Or at least to neglect.

Yeah,

I'm not arguing for a sort of puritanical idea about marriage and infidelity, but I do think to take away the the sort of reality that you are, you know, you may be pursuing an affair for very legitimate reasons and very personal reasons, but at the end of the day, it has a cost.

Do you think Americans have an unrealistic understanding or a lack of understanding about human nature?

I think that what is often dominant in the United States is a black and white thinking.

This is not a society that tolerates ambiguity very well.

It likes directness, unvarnished, get to the point, don't beat around the bush, say it as it is.

It favors the pragmatic, it applies the pragmatic to the rules of eroticism.

It does extraordinarily well, therefore, in matters of economics.

It doesn't necessarily bode that well for matters of the heart.

This is a different culture for that, you know.

These subjects are murky.

They are complex.

They are ambiguous.

They are not about malice.

Sometimes some people cheat and they are mean and

they they have utter disregard for their partner.

That kind of infidelity exists as well.

But sometimes people have longing, they have loss,

they are feeling that life is falling away from them and they would like to experience love again.

And that doesn't mean they should divorce for that.

Americans favor divorce.

They marry three times, they don't blink an eye and they have no problem with that.

But the slightest transgression and they have a very different position.

The rest of the world that is more family

has actually opted the other way around.

Not just France, the majority of the world has done compromises around transgression by the courtesy of women in order to protect the family.

Those are two different value systems.

For everything here, it says if you're unhappy enough to cheat, then you're unhappy enough to leave.

And the goal is that you should leave, dismantle the whole system, dissolve all the relationships, and that that is always the solution.

We live the imperfections.

That's true for all Americans.

That is the dominant view in the entire literature.

Yes.

It sounded as if you're saying that Americans lack compassion, that they're willing to end a marriage over an infidelity rather than work on it for the sake of the couple itself, their children, whatever.

In some way, yes.

Yeah, yeah.

But maybe people who leave a marriage in which an infidelity has been committed are judging their partner accurately.

Maybe their partner is just a shit.

Sometimes that's I mean, I don't know, Alex.

I'm not,

I don't want to put words in Alex's mouth.

Let me just pick up from the beginning, and I can just ask you one question, and then you can answer that, and we can move on from there.

I'm surprised that you have an idea about Americans in this country being so different from the rest of the world, because it feels to me, at least, that we have come to embrace the unconventional and non-traditional more closely in the last 20 years, say, than

in comparison to where we were in the 1950s and 60s.

So

you can very easily in this country

say

this is I'm at my fourth marriage.

Nobody will blink an eye.

You probably have very little shame or reservation about making such a statement out loud.

I lead public conversation about the subjects of relationships, dating, mating, separating, loving, all of it

daily.

Every time a person stands up in a public forum and has to acknowledge something about having been unfaithful, it demands enormous courage.

I don't find that obvious.

I'm sorry.

Why is it so obvious to be able to easily be multiply divorced?

That

to me is also a value system.

Ending, starting fresh, dropping the whole thing, don't letting yourself be stepped over,

is valued because of the level of individualism in this country.

Hence, my personal affront affords me the right to say, I'm done with this, regardless of the consequences of others.

When you think more collectively,

you think differently about your individual affront.

Those are much deeper differences than just a matter of Puritanism.

This is really some of the nuances of the difference between a collectivist way of thinking in which you do not exist alone, a way separated from your network of connections, versus a point of view where your comings and goings, your beginnings and endings in relationships are seen as affecting only yourself.

It's actually fascinating because this actually

matches our

unusual lack of rootedness.

I mean, entire states, Florida and Arizona, exist for people to have fresh starts.

They just pick up and they go and they make believe they're someone new.

And

maybe this is a direct link to the sort of the size and space and mobility and

transience of American culture.

It's fascinating, actually.

Yeah, but you see how that applies to the way that people deal with the connections, the disconnections, and the repair.

What I'm talking about is a model of repair, which is repair and repair and resilience that actually believes in the ability of people to overcome crisis.

And when you look at people who experienced affairs in their relationships and you meet them five, ten years later, you understand that this was a very difficult period in their life, but it wasn't

the defining feature of their entire lives together.

What changed today is that more than cloning, more than suicide, this has become the number one moral affront that Americans are concerned with, and it has become one of the leading causes of divorce.

And it stands the possibility of eradicating 20, 30 years of very fertile married life together.

It's like people, it erases everything.

It's a fraud, it's a lie, it's a failure.

Everything people have built, the parents they have buried, the children they have birthed, the homes they have built and rebuilt, the economic downturns they have had to face together.

None of this has any value because somebody cheated.

And that is not fair to the lives of people and the hard work that went in there.

That's part of what I'm trying to say when I say we need a new conversation that is a little bit more encompassing of the multiple layers of people's lives.

And sometimes you have a person that you just say, I'm not, there's nothing to save here, and you leave.

But in the therapist office, the majority of people we meet are not chronic philanderers.

You know, they are narcissists and they are the presidents and there is all of that.

But this, what we see are people who have been faithful for decades, and one day they cross a line that they themselves never thought they would cross.

And we should ask, why?

What for?

What did this mean?

Why did they risk losing everything that they've worked so hard to build for a glimmer of what?

Great questions.

A thought-provoking and lively conversation.

By the way, narcissists and presidents.

I want to make that a separate topic.

Is it the next podcast?

That's the next podcast.

And so let us turn from narcissists and presidents and relationships and regrets and talk about what we want to remember.

Time again for keepers, our closing segment, in which I ask you all, what do you want to keep?

What have you encountered recently that you do not want to forget this week?

I'll go first.

I went back after our conversation with our colleague Tanahasi Coates

the other day.

I found myself going back to my own blog,

Snark Market, which I started.

Yes.

Yes, Snark Market, which I started with a good friend something like 15 years ago, 14, 15 years ago.

And haven't blogged in a while because blogging is kind of, you know, dissipated.

Blogging is so 2013.

So 2004, I guess.

But it was such a pleasure to go back and visit this earlier incarnation of myself to re-encounter my own thoughts.

I actually enjoyed most just the simple links that

I used to share,

discovering things on the internet that

I hadn't thought about or seen in

years,

but are still delightful.

One of them was this video that I'll drop in the show notes called Muto, a stop-motion animation of a mural

that tells an entire story all through the streets of this city, on the walls of this city.

It was a reminder to me of how much we collect in the course of a year, a week, a day.

and how wonderful it is to actually revisit it.

It's a mundane little pleasure.

It's a simple little remembrance, but it was delightful to be reminded of it.

Alex, how about you?

At the risk of being a total downer.

That's okay.

So

this

summer has been an well, I guess it's now fall.

So the past summer had been, has, was a difficult one and a great one in my life.

We had our first child,

but also there was a fair amount of death in my family.

My dad passed away in June, and my husband's grandmother passed away a few weeks after that.

And as part of

the memorial process, we've both been looking at all these old family photos.

And we spent last weekend just sifting through a bunch of my husband's grandmother's photos.

And I'm working on this book that's coming out on March 13th, pre-sale now.

And as part of that, I've gone through a lot of his old family photos stretching back to almost the turn of the century.

And I think it's all particularly with me right now because we have this new baby and we're documenting his life, but it's all on an iPhone.

And

I cannot stress to you the importance, listeners out there, of having an actual photograph that is printed on a piece of paper that you can hold.

Having that has been so

invaluable in terms of, you know, revisiting the contours of someone's life.

And it's made me

really focused on taking photographs with a camera and getting them printed because one day the iPhone will no longer exist and we'll have chips in our ears or whatever.

And just having mementos is huge.

I mean, talk about something that you want to keep.

It's like the material object is really, it's not overrated.

So take photos on film or whatever.

Take them on an iPhone and print them out.

So I went back to 2005.

Alex, you're taking us back to the physical camera era.

Jeff.

Let me take you back to 1857, the founding of the Atlantic.

Or we can do that another time.

That's a separate podcast.

I think we've been dating.

We've been dating 57 quite a bit on this podcast.

I am going off next week to interview the mayor of Manchester, England.

And

one of the things we're going to talk about is the terrorist terrorist attack at the Ariana Grande concert.

And a terrible attack, obviously.

We've been through a season of terrible attacks of all sorts.

But I want to note this.

It's a small point, and it's sort of an odd point.

But because of the terror attack in Manchester, I started listening to the music of Ariana Grande, and

I really like her.

And I don't know if I like her just to be kind of oppositional, obstreperous, like I'm not going to let the terrorists win, so I'm going to download a lot of Ariana Grande music.

Although, by the way, there's worse reasons to download music, right?

But I dig her.

She's got a wonderful voice.

I dig her.

I think you've just firmly

digger.

All right.

She's lit, okay?

She's lit.

She's totally lit.

Is that better?

Sorry.

I don't think so.

I cannot wait.

By the way, I just want to say, I cannot wait till Alex's child and then children, God willing, are old enough to mock her.

Okay.

To mock her.

I can't wait.

I have a very earnest appreciation for your newfound art.

Thank you.

Thank you.

It's all I wanted to say.

May we

just say that.

May we never forget Ariana Grande.

I'm going to bring her every week from now on as a few people.

What would you like to keep?

What have you encountered recently that you don't want to forget?

The first project that I worked on when I came to the United States was a two-year book and film about the relationship between blacks and Jews.

And

I realized that I actually had never told my boys, my sons, who are 21 and 24, about

this project.

And because they've actually known me more in the work that

I'm doing now.

And I went back to look at it.

And

I was 25.

and it was an amazing thing to see me trying to understand

certain aspects of this society and entering through a subject that at the time was very hot and relevant.

And I thought that was naive, but it was actually not, it was this real thing of what happens when you look at something yet you've done when you were young.

It was actually solid and naive at the same time.

I wouldn't hide it.

I want them to watch it.

Was there anything that you in it that you that you were surprised to encounter when you reread it?

I mean it was really what is the relationship between minority and minority.

Everybody had always looked at majority, minority.

And I was at the time very interested in intermarriage.

So I have always looked at race, cultural, religious intermarriage.

I have a long history, I suppose, of going to look at the subjects that people don't want to talk about, hence infidelity.

And

it was exactly the same thing.

It's all the dynamics that are underneath that which you don't just see at face value.

And I have always been drawn to that, to the complexities of identity,

to all of this.

And that was what

I just thought, I'm so happy I found it again.

I need to digitalize this out of the way.

Absolutely.

How did a young Belgian scholar find her way to a fairly obscure American domestic issue?

Because I have been an identity theorist for quite a while.

I was studying actually the nature of Jewish identity and how it unfolds in different cultural contexts.

I had done race relations in Israel.

I had done a lot of other kinds of group relations.

And at that time, it was after the Jesse Jackson statements and and I thought oh this is so interesting you know what do we know about how these two groups who seem to have marched together in Alabama and all of that

what actually really goes on between these two groups here I come from Belgium we have we know the strife between the francophone and the Flemish I lived in Israel and I knew the fights between the Israelis and the Palestinians and the Arabs I've known this conflict of internal groups like that and I thought that would be an an amazing way to enter this society.

Well, I look forward to reading the digitized paper when you post it online.

Esther,

thank you very much

for joining us.

Jeff and Alex, a pleasure as always.

Thank you, Matt.

Even when we're talking about infidelity and relationship.

Yes.

Yeah, right there.

You're getting a little choked up.

Maybe a little bit, maybe a little bit.

Once again, that'll do it for this week's Radio Atlantic.

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Kim Lau and engineering support from Paul Ruist at Argo Studios.

The first season of Esther Perel's fascinating podcast, Where Should We Begin, will soon be joined by a second season on October 24th.

You'll find the full series at audible.com/slash Esther.

That's audible.com/slash E-S-T-H-E-R.

Check the show notes if you just want the link.

Her new book, The State of Affairs, Rethinking Infidelity, is now available in stores.

Thanks to John Batiste, creator of our theme, whose rendition of the battle hymn will play in full after these credits, and to Jeff and Alex, my esteemed co-hosts, I have a feeling many of you will have some thoughts about this week's episode, so give us a call at 202-266-7600 and leave us a voicemail with your contact info.

202-266-7600.

As always, check us out at facebook.com slash radioatlantic and theatlantic.com slash radio.

Catch the show notes in the episode description.

And if you like what you're hearing, rate and review us in Apple Podcasts and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

But most importantly, thank you for listening.

May you find the right words to convey your love to those who have it.

We'll see you next week.

Lord,

glory

to

the coming of the Lord.

He is trapped in the venting where the great rattlesnow.

Handled the faithful lightning of the terrible Swiss war.

His troop is marching on.

Glory, glory,

hallelujah.

Glory, glory, high.

Hallelujah.

do.