Is The Key To A Long And Happy Marriage Serial Self-Infidelity?
By
Leonard Zwelling
To my conservative readers, it will come as no surprise that I am supporter of National Publlic Radio. As a supporter, I can stream all of their podcasts commercial-free. That’s usually what I listen to in the car. My favorite podcast is Fresh Air especially when Terry Gross is the host. She has been with the show since its beginning in 1975. In 2023 she began to share the hosting with others, but she is still the best.
Another benefit of membership is extra bonus podcasts, usually on weekends. These are often rebroadcasts of previous episodes that the editorial staff think particularly interesting or timely.
On Monday morning, August 10, I listened to the one attached above. You too may need to become a member to hear it, but the guest is widely known from her own podcats, TED talks, and books, although I had never heard of her.
Terry Gross’ guest on this rebroadcast from 2017 was Esther Perel, a noted psychotherapist, human relations counselor, and expert on infidelity. In the course of the discussion, Ms. Perel (she is not a doctor of any kind) talked about how each of us wants and needs change in the course of a lifetime. In essence, if I understood her premise, over the course of a lifetime, we each need to change our own identity and how we feel about who we are. This now presents a challenge in any long-term relationship like marriage.
Two people meet and marry. Over the course of their relationship each will seek to change in one way or another. For example, they will have children and each now becomes something new, a parent. Perhaps one of the partners will want to pursue a new vocation or go back to school. Sometimes one partner gets a great job offer in a new city which offers that person desired self-change, but the other partner likes his or her current job and location. These life events provide challenges to any marriage.
People change. They may no longer wish to be who they were and who their partner married. In effect, when we seek to change, we seek to alter our relationship with our view of ourselves. We are cheating on the person our partner married.
Thus, for a marriage to withstand serial self-infidelity, even when there is no affair, sexual or otherwise (Ms. Perel goes on at length about what an affair is. It seems it can be far more, or far less, than having sex outside the marriage), it is best if one partner recognizes the change occurring in the other, and adjusts accordingly. Of course, no one tells you any of this when you get married.
This idea of serial self-infidelity (it’s not what she called it. It is what I called it) made a great deal of sense to me because it completely defined my marriage (54 years on August 27).
Neither of us had even graduated from medical school when we were married in 1972. Early on, it was very obvious that Genie had the makings of a great investigator. She won every research award at her medical school graduation, had her choice of internships, and was highly sought as a fellow at the National Cancer Institute when she completed her housestaff training. Even then Genie was accommodating my becoming a medical oncolofgist and avoiding Vietnam by going to the NCI in Bethesda, MD as a fellow. She could have been a CHOP or Hopkins intern, but went to D.C. Children’s instead so we could see each other on occasion.
I prided myself in being an ace clinician and was sure I would be a patient care medical oncologist. When I told Genie this on our first date, she laughed.
“You’re no medial oncologist,” she said over bagels at the Ivy Room in Durham, NC.
She was right way back then. As soon as I got to the National Cancer Institute as a fellow, I realized that I would make a lousy medical oncologist. So many of the patients had already been worked up by the time I saw them. To me, diagnosis was the interesting part of internal medicine. Long-term relationships with cancer patients, many of whom would die of their disease in 1975, was simply not for me. Thus, I faced my first real crisis that would require a little self-infidelity. I needed to shift from the patient care mode to that of a lab-based investigator. I had to get good at what Genie was already good at.
I got lucky and found a perfect mentor in the late-Dr. Kurt Kohn who turned me into a scientist. Sort of. Looking back many years later, I came to realize that I was really just collecting gold stars in the form of publications and then grants. However, I was pretty good at research, but I didn’t love it. I loved the accolades more than I loved the work.
A close friend of mine says of me that ”when the going gets tough, Len goes to school.”
At the urging of my then boss, Irv Krakoff, and his wife, Rosemary Mackey, I followed in Rosemary’s footsteps and received an MBA at U of H even as I kept my lab open and funded. It was another affair with a different part of myself, the student and the budding administrator.
But Genie and I had two children at home when I was either in the lab or studying. She had to accommodate my new persona.
Flash forward a few years and now I am a real administrator trying to form a Clinical Research office for David Hohn. Again she has to accommodate. Then, very shortly thereafter, she has an affair with another part of her personality, that of a clinical leader as a Division Head. Now it is I who has to accommodate her need to be a leader just as I had when I followed her to Houston so that she could express another part of her personality, that of clinical investigator developing a new therapy for kids with bone cancer. As far as I know, she is the only current member of her division to have developed a treatment for cancer.
Anyway, you get the picture. We both were constantly changing. We both had to accommodate the new personality of the other all the while still trying to be a married couple and parents with all that entails.
I never thought of our married life in these terms, but I think Ms. Perel is exactly right. It is the ability to roll with the changes in your partner’s relationship with himself or herself, not so much dealing with affairs in the normal use of the word, that can sustain a happy marriage. If I understood Ms. Perel, those “real” affairs married people have is because the couple cannot accommodate the changing needs of each other and are looking for something their partner used to supply—sex, intimacy, freindship. I have heard it said that affairs can be prevented by men who take their wives to romantic weekend getaways at exotic locations instead of doing the same with a girlfriend.
Both of us keep changing who we are, and how we look. We may also shift our professional passion from time to time in order to fulfill a part of ourselves that had not been acknowledged or about which we were not even aware before. My latest change was to lose 33 pounds and grow a beard. Why? Partly I was sick and tired of being too heavy and partly because I had decided, once again to be someone else so why not look like someone else? Now I am a writer. Thank goodness I never had to make my living at writing books or blogs. I would have starved.
I have no idea what my next change will be or what Genie wants to try next. Her golf game is getting better and better and I am now a passable country polka dancer.
I think this kind of infidelity to your former self is healthy. It makes life interesting. It makes my marriage strong. And perhaps it has kept the old-fashioned infidelity away from our door.
