Real answers about affairs
by Mira and Charles on May 5th, 2010Ripped from the headlines!: Reporter interviews Mira yesterday
Mira was interviewed by a journalist yesterday. The subject, as so often in these trust-challenged times, is When Good People Have Affairs. And here’s what we think is the best quote. Mira said, “For many people, only an affair has the ability to change the most desiccated landscape on the planet: the inner landscape where hopes of love and romance and passion and connection feel as if they’ve dried up and gone away forever.” Now here’s the raw Q and A:
Q: Your advice is extremely reasonable, and very much the voice of the therapist. Do you think that people would be able to distinguish between your 17 types of affairs? When you’re madly in love, it’s often so hard to see reason…
Mira: The 17 types of affairs were presented to answer a question people themselves ask me all the time: “Why am I doing this? What is going on with me? Why would I risk my marriage, my family, my happiness maybe, for this mad affair?” Of course no one asks Why? when they are lost in the midst of new-found passion. But there is always a kind of waking up to the realities of life that happens, and that’s when people can find themselves in the 17 kinds of affairs. I present a tested diagnostic question in this book for each of the 17 motives for affairs. If a person answers honestly, they will know immediately which of the 17 reasons is theirs.
Q: Are affairs more frequent than they used to be, or are we just more open about it? Divorces are certainly more common. Do people give up too easily, and for the wrong reasons?
Mira: We have no solid data on how frequent affairs used to be. But we can guess: few things have been more written about, more joked about, more denounced from the pulpit, and had more laws passed against them than infidelity. So we can only guess that affairs have always been incredibly common. As for whether we are more open about it, that depends on what gender, social class, country, and time period you are talking about. There have been periods of history even more open than ours. As for divorces, while some people give up too easily, it must not be thought that there is any great prevalence of casual divorces. Most people are incredibly reluctant to divorce and only do so after a lot of time and pain has passed. At the same time, many divorces are unnecessary. It’s not because divorces are entered into casually, but because people usually let far too much time pass in marital misery before they seek help.
Q: You talk about ‘good’ people having affairs. Do you make a strong distinction between them and what you might call ‘bad’ people—I suppose you mean serial cheats?
Mira: Of course it is far too easy to pass around labels like good and bad. But for the purpose of helping readers of When Good People Have Affairs, bad people are the minority (10 to 15 percent) of people who truly seem not to care if their spouse is hurt if they have an affair. They don’t want to get caught, but only because they don’t want the inconvenience of the uproar that usually follows. Good people cheat because they are unhappy in their relationship and it bothers them a great deal when they discover how much pain their affair has caused their spouse. They truly do want to do what’s best for everybody; while bad people just want to do what’s best for themselves. The more affairs a person has, the more likely it is that they don’t care very much about how their partner really feels.
Q: I loved the bit about the people you shouldn’t fall in love with: the bunny boilers, the mad ones, the extremely ugly ones… Yet there are people who keep falling in love with, say, alcoholics, or philanderers. How can they be made to realize what they are doing and
is therapy the only solution for them?
Mira: People have rescue fantasies about how they can help someone they get involved with. It’s like buying a lottery ticket: you probably won’t win, but how wonderful it would be if you did win, you think, and that’s what keeps people playing the lottery [or gambling of any sort].
Q: One thing that struck me - and which you may feel is extremely silly: we are so strict with ourselves in so many other ways these days. So many women are on diets, spend hours in the gym, need to be good wives and mothers and workers - does that make it more tempting to have an affair? You mention type 6, the treat-yourself affair. Would it not be easier to have a huge ice cream?
Mira: Way back in 1959, sociologist C. Wright Mills said that nowadays men [and women] often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. Little has changed since then; much has gotten worse. Today we are just as trapped, less perhaps by rigid mores, but more by our busy schedules and the insane expectations we have of ourselves and one another. In this context, an ice cream is a treat for the taste buds, but where we are really starving is for the opportunity to burst out of the tight and numbing confines of our daily lives. Travel can do this, but we are not much transformed by our travel. For many people, only an affair has the ability to change the most desiccated landscape on the planet: the inner landscape where hopes of love and romance and passion and connection feel as if they’ve dried up and gone away forever.
Q: You talk about rebuilding trust. Do you feel that the partner who was cheated on can EVER trust the other person completely again? And what about the expression ‘Once a cheat, always a cheat’?
Mira: People can learn to trust again the person who has cheated on them; I see it all the time. It can take a long while, but if you see that your partner truly understands and cares about how much pain he has caused you and if he is truly willing to work to regain your trust, then it is only a basically suspicious nature that will prevent you from eventually being able to trust again. “Once a cheat, always a cheat” is true for people who don’t care how others feel. But I’ve seen something dramatic in my office time and again: someone cheats, his partner finds out, and he is totally stunned at how much pain he has caused. And this realization prevents him from ever cheating again. What kind of person would ever want to hurt someone else that much again?
Q: My editor would also like to know how you can tell that someone is having an affair, and if you suspect, how can you be sure? I know it’s not relevant to the book, but she’s my boss 
Mira: You can’t tell if someone is having an affair. It is really important to understand this. A lot of people have been hurt by smugly thinking they can tell. If your partner doesn’t want you to find out, you won’t find out. The only reason affairs are discovered is that people are surprisingly careless. Thinking you can tell is the surest way to lull yourself into a false sense of security. The only way to real security is to make sure you’re in a good relationship with a good person.
