After an affair
24 March 2026
When an affair is discovered, a betrayed partner will often say: "I don't know who you are anymore." Their partner is sitting there, looking and acting just the same as they did the day before. What this statement points to is the gap between reality and our fantasy of the other person. After an affair, that fantasy collapses.
But this fantasy is not a mistake. It is, in fact, a necessary part of how relationships work.
We need a sustaining image of the other — not a perfect one, but a good enough one — to navigate the everyday disappointments inevitable in any long-term relationship. At the beginning, it is all we have. But years in, we still need it. Couples who work well together will often share these images with each other, and with friends — and in doing so, give each other something to live up to.
So is this self-deception? An escape from reality? No. It is precisely what allows us to live in it. This fantasy also manages something deeper: the anxiety that comes
with never fully knowing what we are to the other person, or whether their desire will hold. The affair makes that uncertainty suddenly, painfully legible.
Affairs are devastating not simply because of the betrayal, but because they collapse the very mechanism through which loving relationships are conducted. The betrayed partner isn't only hurt. They are disoriented — because the image that organised their experience of their partner was also, quietly, organising their experience of themselves.