This weekend, a person whom I know attempted suicide and was almost successful. My head spun and my heart thudded heavily in my chest as I listened to the news from the hospital. Compounding the horror of the situation was the apparent motive behind this person’s breakdown (I’ll call them “K” from here on): the unanticipated dissolution of a passionate love affair they were conducting behind their spouse’s back. It was hard to believe. After all, I had spent time with K and K’s spouse, and they seemed so happy, so well-suited for one another. They had shared my sofa only recently, sipping sangria and nuzzling one another affectionately. How could such a thing be possible? Somehow, the news of the affair made it so much more disturbing than if K had been morbidly depressed, or had been fired from work or something. My sorrow is indigestible, the pit of a bitter peach sitting in the basement level of my gut.

This weekend’s event recalled to me a conversation I had with a friend last week about why people cheat. It is commonly suggested that men and women are unfaithful for different reasons; men cheat to enjoy a little sexual variety, and women cheat for some sort of emotional rush they aren’t getting from their partners. I cannot testify to the validity of either theory, but I do have one of my own, and it might apply to both men and women. But being a woman myself, I can only make conclusions from my own experiences and from what other women have confided to me. My theory is this: people (or women) are unfaithful because it allows them to see themselves as they want to be seen, through the fresh eyes of a new lover. The lover represents a clean slate- someone who has never seen you squeeze your pimples in the bathroom mirror, heard you fart, or call their mother a bitch. I suspect that cheating is less about the lover than it is about oneself, about needing to validate to oneself that yes, you are that passionate person with the infectious laugh, you are that elegant beauty swaying like a reed over your high heels, you are intoxicating, devastating, compelling, inspiring, dangerous, etc. — and you are more that than you are anything else. It a chance to re-sketch your own dimensions, to animate a fictional You and dance it like a marionette through the mind of another. It’s no wonder so many people give in- taking a lover is a quick and easy way to challenge the existence of those dull and unappealing parts of yourself through your lover’s sheer ignorance of them.

Another way to look at it might be that infidelity is an opportunity to have those things about yourself that you most cherish appreciated anew (or at all). Complacency and Routine are the enemies of a relationship that is both satisfying and enduring, and they are stealthy guerrilla warriors, lurking under beds, hiding in the drawer with the holey underwear, and laying in wait beneath the remote control. Sometimes we fight to defend our partner from their maiming assaults, but forget to protect ourselves. And, as K perhaps demonstrated this weekend, the staleness of self can be utterly devastating.

To wit: In the summer between high school and college, I went to Europe, presumably to participate in an archaeological dig. But instead of sifting endless shards of Etruscan pottery in the broiling sun, I found myself caught up in an intoxicating, eating-ice-cream-on-a-stolen-pedal-boat-at-midnight affair with an older man. He was dark-haired, green-eyed and brooding, and he fell desperately in love with me. Being the fickle, vain thing that I was, I returned home and promptly forgot all about him. For many years he tried to contact me, sending love letters to my parents’ house, and leaving heavily accented messages on their telephone answering machine. “Whatever did you do to that poor man that he cannot forget you?” my mother asked me, when packages were still arriving by post even six and seven years after our fling. I simply shrugged, because I didn’t know the answer. In truth, I often thought about returning his calls. I savoured the deliciously romantic idea of two fated lovers, estranged for ten years, coming together again against all odds. I imagined our reunion like two stars colliding, a deafening explosion followed by a shower of brilliant sparks. But I couldn’t bring myself to follow through with the fantasy. After all, nearly a decade had passed. Perhaps he was now sporting a flabby paunch. Perhaps the alluring furrow in his brow had matured into a bitter crease. Brooding wasn’t as sexy to me as it had once been- maybe he hadn’t changed at all and the magic would be absent because I had matured. For that matter, I was no longer likely to recall to him to him the wild, blonde girl flitting through the shadowy forest of his memory. To see him again would be to kill that girl and bury her in the leaves, and it was this I could not bear to do. I liked the idea that somewhere, somehow, that girl, with her hair uncut and her face unlined, still existed- even if she was like a suit of clothes I had long outgrown.

I mention this story only to illustrate the idea that other people’s perceptions of us can powerfully influence the way we see ourselves. Even after being revived, K continued to sorrowfully insist upon a terrible, deep love for the person with whom they had been carrying on. Perhaps K was in love- I am in no position to argue. But I have to wonder who it was that so enchanted K, that so captured K’s imagination. Was it indeed the illicit beloved, or was it simply K, redefined and re-varnished with a fresh coat of glitter? And when the lover ended their affair, did K’s heartbreak come from watching the marionette crumple lifelessly onto the stage?