The affair that does not need sex
David has an affair!
A quarter of a year ago, my friend calls Beth and tells me in a tear-stained voice: "David has an affair." Since I know her husband, I find it hard to believe that. He's one of those men who most likely served as a rescue brigard duty in their previous lives - a bit cumbersome but affectionate, good-willed and, in any case, loyal.
Helped with the move
"An affair, your David, are you sure?" I ask Beth. "Yes," Beth sobbed, "he admitted it." Gradually, I get her out that David has helped a longtime colleague who is currently living in divorce to move to her new apartment. He made her bed and shelves, repaired the shower, had dinner with her a couple of times? and not immediately telling Beth about it. "Did he sleep with her?" I ask. "Of course not!" Says Beth, as if I had just accused her of adultery. - "And not with her, well, messed around?" ? "No," says Beth, "it was not sexual, it was a feeling affair."
Living in the US means that affairs are always possible
Aha. I could have actually known that "affair" in the US is a very elastic term. So elastic, that basically everything can be an affair, what the cheating partner explains. And just as individually interpretable as the word sex.
Trust can be easily lost.
Bill Clinton had indeed sincerely asserted in the late 90s that he did not consider the extramarital blowjobs he had indulged in in the White House to be sex. Whether that has traumatized the nation so much that sex is no longer the sole criterion for marital infidelity? No longer desire, but every act of familiarity can represent a breach of trust and a "betrayal of the intimacy" of a couple, as Beth explains to me. There is enough already a secretly repaired shower. The logic behind it is as simple as it is infamous: if Beth thinks that David betrayed her, then he betrayed her, because Beth suffers after all, right?
The victim is always right in the couple's American war. Poor David, I think. Because now he is in all likelihood a month-long ordeal before. Where a victim is, must also be a perpetrator, and an alienating spouse can expect in the US to be punished for his affair like a felon - then break the puritan-prudish roots of this people with unrestrained indignation.
Emotional affair must become a marriage counselor
A week later, Beth calls again. "I'm getting a divorce," she howls. Because of a shower head ?, I want to ask, but barely deny me this profound European pragmatism. He would not arrive well now. David, it turns out, does not express sufficient remorse and simply refuses to carry his emotional affair to the marriage counselor. He reported to Beth about his relief services, so where is the breach of trust?
Idea of perfect honesty
This in turn implies Beth, who has now ordered half a dozen manuals on "How my marriage survives an affair" on the Internet, refusing to be her "partner in the healing process". Who just thinks up such phrases? Of course the same experts who convinced America that marriage can only work with complete honesty. And that an affair is always the symptom of a deeper relationship crisis. And that only one thing helps to overcome this crisis and avert the divorce: to talk about it. Pronounce everything, bring everything to the wall, confess everything - and of course under the supervision of said experts who demand several hundred dollars per session.
The found food for psycho culture.
With their irresistible mixture of sex, drama and trauma, affairs are the found food for US psycho culture. Even the Clintons spent a year together in Therapy after the internship.
I've had the experience that it's better for a relationship to conceal a foreign quickie, but I'm not a psychotherapist either. Or American. Who knows what unprocessed breaches of trust I carry around with me? Maybe my father never loved me? Or my teddy left me too soon?
Questionnaire on adultery
With her divorce threat, Beth gets her David to a marriage counselor. "She says I can ask for details until I get over the shock," Beth says after the first session.In order to help Beth, the marriage counselor has given her a questionnaire: Where did you meet the other? How often? Did you think about me? Did you have feelings of guilt? What did you say about our marriage? And of course the classic: What does she have that I do not have? David, however, had to sign a solemnly formulated contract in which he committed himself from now on to eternal loyalty.
Processing takes longer than the affair
I can not help it: I'm reminded of a witch hunt with this scavenging system, except that thumbscrews and stretched beds are replaced by hundreds of hours of therapy. As a rule, American couples need much longer to process an affair than they have lasted-one occasionally gets the impression that their guilt-and-atonement number is the only thing that still binds them together. David called me recently. He really loves Beth, he said, and he also fully understands her disappointment. But meanwhile, he's really thinking about divorce.
