Infidelity Rhetorical Analysis

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Why do we cheat? Why do happy people cheat? When we talk about "infidelity," what exactly do we mean? A case, a love story, paid sex, an exchange of messages, a happy ending massage? Why do we think men betray us out of boredom and fear of intimacy, while women do it out of solitude and yearning for more intimacy? Is an affair always the end of a relationship? These are some of the questions that introduce the lecture by the Belgian psychotherapist Esther Perel about infidelity in TED Talks. This text gathers some of the answers offered by it.
Perel comments on how the concepts associated with relationships have changed over time. Monogamy, for example, has already meant spending a lifetime with the same person, whereas today we only have one …show more content…

One of Perel's justifications is related to our romantic ideal: we expect our couple to fill an endless list of needs, such as being the best lover, best friend, best parent, faithful confidant, emotional partner, intellectual partner, etc. If this configuration works, we feel the right person: the chosen, the unique, the indispensable, the irreplaceable. What infidelity tells us is that we are nothing of the sort. As our self-esteem threatens, infidelity is more than painful: it is almost always traumatic. What explains, then, the current inclination of people to have cases? It is not a matter of having new desires now, but of the fact that we live in an era in which the quest for the realization of our desires prevails. We live the "I deserve to be happy" culture. Perel says, "If we used to divorce because we were unhappy, today we divorce because we could be happier." If divorce was a shame before, today, the new shame is choosing to stay when you can …show more content…

The very inability to have the lover is responsible for keeping the desire. Incompleteness would therefore be a machine of desire. In addition, there is the attractive power of the forbidden: who does what he should not feel doing what he really wants. The psychotherapist comments: "I have told many of my patients that if they brought a tenth of the boldness, imagination and vivacity they put into their extramarital affairs into their relationships, they would never need me."
Although most couples experiencing betrayals remain together, few make the crisis an opportunity; Some just survive. For the betrayed partner, the discovery of the case may be a chance to demand more; So he no longer has to sustain a condition that certainly did not work well for him either. Accountability following a betrayal can open space for deep and honest conversations that have not happened for decades. Fear of loss, in such cases, can rekindle

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