Infidelity does not begin in bed. It begins in language.


THE ASYMMETRY OF DESIRE

When everything changes without anything seeming to change, an event occurs. The sheer amount of information that erupts makes it impossible to return to what came before.

Infidelity does not begin in bed. It begins long before awareness and action, when something stops being said and begins to shift subtly without anything visibly appearing different. When desire is no longer recognized and one of the two has already moved elsewhere. When discomfort is archived in silence under the illusion that time will resolve it. The body is given later, but the real rupture often begins earlier, in that zone where two people stop looking at each other.

Infidelity is not sex, it is asymmetry. Sex, at its core, is not even about sex; it is about the confirmation of the self. When infidelity erupts, it reveals an imbalance: on one side, the enjoyment of secrecy, the forbidden, the parallel scene, the whisper, the photo, the risk, the promised or completed sexual act; on the other, the illusion of reunion after prolonged absence, the hope that something will realign, the expectation sustained by the gap left by the other who is no longer there as before. It is not the same, yet both poles sustain the same structure: one affirms itself through the expansion of desire, the other becomes fixed in denial and waiting.

Deception is not merely a physical act, but the unequal management of information. One lives in the illusion of a shared project. The other maintains a double scene, lying to the partner and lying to oneself about the future of the relationship that is still maintained while emotional investment shifts elsewhere. Infidelity can thus take on a narcissistic and even utilitarian dimension: confirming that one can still attract and be desirable, while preserving the material, emotional, or social securities of the prior bond. The one who is deceived receives an implicit message: I do not see you, I do not choose you, you are not enough.

There is a decisive moment: discovery. While infidelity remains in the territory of ambiguity, desire can be sustained by fantasy. It can even be eroticized. The forbidden and the imagined preserve a margin of ambivalence. But when the scene becomes explicit and the asymmetry is exposed, something reorganizes. Evidence destroys the shared illusion. What once could excite as fantasy becomes confirmation of displacement and exclusion. Evidence of exclusion does not always transform desire; sometimes it erases it. In that instant, not only is the illusion broken, but the circuit of desire itself. And in that erasure, sometimes the one who was excluded discovers that what was desired was not the other, but the possibility of being desired.

The one who is unfaithful often rationalizes their behavior in the name of freedom or neglect. There may be partial truth in that. In some cases, unprocessed resentment also operates: a wound that was never spoken and finds in secrecy a form of compensation. Yet partial truth does not eliminate the asymmetry sustained in silence. The issue is not openness or closure of the bond, but the absence of explicit consent. When there is no clear dialogue, one person’s freedom can become the other’s prison.

Within this asymmetry, a form of structural emotional abuse can take shape: one administers information, time, and intimacy while the other remains in ignorance and waiting. It is structural manipulation: sustaining oneself through the partner’s desire while shifting emotional investment elsewhere.

This manipulation does not arise from nowhere. It has a deeper root: the distortion of desire. Desire cannot be manufactured by decree. It requires space and recognition to emerge naturally. It is not only about having sex, but about feeling seen and chosen among others. To be desired is a form of being recognized.

Why do certain patterns repeat? The psyche is not neutral toward the past. It tends to recreate familiar scenes, even painful ones. In pain, the self can also affirm itself: the one who suffers feels they exist. Not because they want to suffer, but because they attempt to rewrite the old from a new position. “This pain is mine, this suffering confirms me.” Such repetition rarely produces closure; it more often anesthetizes. And within that intensity, it can be mistaken for life itself.

The truth hurts once. Ambivalence hurts every day.

In the end, infidelity forces a structural decision. Can the bond be rebuilt through radical transparency? Yes. Can it be redefined with clear rules? Also yes. What does not work is a fiction sustained by only one person.

Fidelity is not surveillance. It is coherence between what one feels, what one says, and what one does. And it begins with a brutal question: am I choosing this bond, or merely tolerating it out of fear?

Betrayal does not always destroy a relationship. Sometimes what it destroys is only the illusion. And although that hurts, it can open the possibility of a truth that no longer needs concealment to sustain itself.

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