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Private Lies: Infidelity and the Betrayal of Intimacy
Why do half the people in marriages have affairs? What problems are they trying to solve? Using actual case studies, as well as examples from music, literature, and film, Dr. Pittman identifies four basic patterns of infidelity―the accidental encounter, habitual philandering, marital arrangements, and romance―discussed how to limit the damage that affairs do, and offers practical suggestions on how to make a marriage work.
309 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1989
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August 12, 2016
Thankfully infidelity hasn't been an issue in my marriage. The author, a therapist with a lot of common sense, offers practical suggestions on making marriage work. All infidelity isn't the same. Dr. Pittman uses case studies from his practice to illustrate the various types of affairs. This is not just a book for those who have experienced cheating in their relationship. There's value here for those about to be married as well as those who have been married for a while. We can all learn something new that can enhance our relationships.
August 13, 2015
Smart insights throughout -- 4 stars for insights. Some of the case studies were rather far-fetched. Published ~1989 but still relevant and helpful.
Some notes:
Private lies: Infidelity and the Betrayal of Intimacy
Frank Pittman
Affairee ... Not lover, which implies a bond that didn’t yet form. Not spring from love, but unfaithful secretive behaviors/decisions/actions. Affairee a better term.
Cuckold cuckoo lays eggs in another’s nest, tricks to incubate.
Affairs thrive on secrecy, conspiracy and adventure and tricks produce an alliance in the affair, while the lies and deceit increase the discomfort at home. We feel bound to those who share our secrets , and uncomfortable with those to whom we are lying. The power of an affair may be in its secrecy. The weakness of the marriage may be in its avoidance of issues.
Honor agreement is fidelity.
Values, monogamy.
Deliberated dishonesty.
Some: ok is affair secret.
Morality a middle-class concern.
Guilt is good for you if lasts only 5 minutes and brings a change of behavior.
But does affect others. Sex outside is a betrayal and destructive, and even anti-sexual. Deceits, lies hurt deeply and change lives.
Disrupter.
The crises that follow infidelities fill the offices of family therapists layers and plastic surgeons.
But concluded extramarital affairs among couples who agreed on being faithful are symptoms of problems.
Long-held misconceptions about affairs (normal, can revie marriage or end in divorce, affairee sexier, cuckold failed in some way) are like the proverbial stopped clock right some of the time.
It’s not that we fall out of love and thus have affairs, but that we have affairs and thus fall out of love by breaking an instinctual bond.
For some, don’t know how to (or want to) have a friendship with someone of a different gender.
The choice of an affair partner seems based on the other person’s difference from the spouse rather than superiority to the spouse. The point of difference may diagnose a problem for which the affair is seen as a cure.
The one being betrayed can’t make affairs happen, can’t make the betrayer stop, and can only make him- or herself available for solving whatever problems are in the marriage, though those are going to be grotesquely distorted and exaggerated as long as the affair is continuing or being defended.
Ignorance of affairs puts people in the position of not having to acknowledge problems or do anything to solve them. (Whether the problems are the infidel’s, such as work life or ego, or between the spouses.)
Some affairs committed intentionally to reduce intimacy and create distance (barrier in our case).
Disorient, distract, distance...destroy--like in giving directions you note one wrong left turn.
Honesty is the only way to restore understanding, know what to do to work towards restoring the relationship and rebuilding intimacy.
Sexual independence - regardless of the degree desired, make it understood early in the bonded relationship.
Gender stereotypes and gender expectations and upbringing: people taught in society to regard partner as man/woman vs. fellow human being. (competitiveness, antagonism.)
Belief in chemistry.
People are not taught the skills to maintain a relationship.
Women taught domestic skills, men handy skills. But not how to ground and maintain intimacy.
Marriage partners are not made in heaven but the product of on-the-job training.
Romance seduces people into expecting too much [too easy]. Like new=car smell, fades quickly. Romance, said Webster: a fictitious and wonderful tale. Not the same as love.
The least workable matches are the most intense/
Cult of virginity.
belief would automatically have great sexual relationship.
Marriage does reduce the variety of adventurous experiences and sexual variety.
Couples who have sex infrequently, and after days or weeks of awkward conflict and flirtation, may never get comfortable enough with it either to enjoy it or to let it make the relationship safe, close and special.
Nuclear family a societal ideal.
Happiness, like sweat, is a byproduct of hard work.
“Don’t try to be happy,. It will only make you miserable.” - Lovers and Other Strangers.
Be prepared to experience together the transitions and crises of life - and whatever time and space throw at them.
“Having a bad day” ...happened between 2 coworkers who put selves in tempting position.
Woman more likely to choose some they know well for affairee and just as likely to say spouse withheld sex, busy.
Men often blamed the affair on their sense of defeat in other sectors of their lives.
Decisions: a meaningless careless act, to more infidelity, to end relationship.
Many believe themselves they can’t be trusted.
Keep dalliance secret, it leads to more philandering and the decision the marriage is incurably flawed. “I must be unhappily married.”
Digging out of the wreckage:
Report the episode, take full responsibility, , apologize profusely and avoid even the slightest hint of blaming the spouse.
Realize this may trigger a crisis.
Cuckolds: feel whatever you feel: angry, upset, frightened, insecure and insulted, and to express this fully until it is perfectly clear to your unfaithful partner how much this has hurt you.
Philanderer - crave steady change of sex partners. Consumes women. Figures envied.
Philandering is time-consuming, often expensive and likely to interfere with more productive pursuits. So philanderers, despite their basic competitivess and aggressiveness, are likely to set up roadblocks to their success.
Charming philanderers: There is a refreshing innocence to their guiltless sense of entitlement and the childlike pleasure they take in doing whatever they like.
Each woman I haven’t had is a mystery and she obsesses me. I just can’t stop looking at her…. All I want is to know her and to give her pleasure. I will make her feel good.
Female philanderers are most often affairees, enjoying the opportunity to break up another woman’s marriage and mess up a man’s life.
Some score their marks, humiliate all concerned.
If a woman is determined to live with a philanderer, she must be careful to keep her distance. She must realize that she is the feared enemy, that the reason for his behavior is that he believes his life is dependent upon escaping her control. There is no way in which she can please him sufficiently, or impress him enough so that he declares her his equal. She must pursue her own life, giving him as much independence as he requires, while she (works) to develop her own self-esteem. Guilt-producing dependency will only bring out the worst in him, and deprive her of a life that could be fulfilling.
Don’t take blame for someone else’s actions. But since some things will have to change; consider with your mate how things should be different.
You can get a new romance going in the marriage, find interests together, become attentive and involved with each other, be with each other and try to recapture whatever it was that once made the relationship special and personal enough for you two to sign on for life and then panic when it appeared about to end. You might have to give up some of your more irritating habits and develop skills you had previously avoided.
Rearrange priorities and experience each other as people do when they are courting.
Think about partner when not together, why special.
Philandering is addictive behavior and like all addictive behavior, is difficult to change without great honesty and the willingness to put yourself under someone else’s control.
Degradation. Some: marital arrangements.
Romantic affairs: temporary insanity:
Unlike loving and being loved, which gives us the security to find comfort and joy, falling in love can be a dangerous episode of torture and adventure and emotional exercise.
Idealistic.
Marriage now seen as disposable.
Problem when one partner wants closeness, the other distance.
Constant conflict: one starts fights requiring interaction and discussion and attention being paid. Other avoids.
Marital aides - mistress to hang with.
Sexual hobbyists rule-breaking appeal.
Affair catastrophe for marriage.
Divorce more the result of broken, vs. bad, marriage.
90% of divorces involve infidelities.
“Grew apart” often code for affair, due to secrets, deceit, loss of intimacy, betrayal.
75% of time the marriage was serviceable prior to the marriage and became awful after - because the marriage bond was broken.
Accidental affairs: few divorces result and those that do due to panic attacks.
If get secrets out in the open, this can lead to resolution and intimacy.
Incongruity - betrayer appears confident, betrayed shattered, afraid.
Later, as betrayed recovers, infidel sees disadvantages. No longer illicit.
May find someone more sexually compatible.
Remarriage
Key problem: the intervention of reality.
Romance changes people’s lives without changing them.
* People risk everything on the hope that they can achieve joy by changing everything in their lives except themselves.
The human animal has an unfortunate tendency to identify the source of any unhappiness as coming from outside itself. The fault, as Cassius informed Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves Our unhappiness is not in our marriages, but within us.
Cole Porter lyric: “We should have been aware...That our love affair...Was too hot not to cool down.”
“love is no use unless it’s wise, and kind, and undramatic.” Noel Coward, Private Lives
Monogamy works.
Despite some in love with their masc or feminine ideal, or the idea of romance.
Marry sane people who like you, who have nonsexual friends of your gender, and who are friends with their own parent.
Be sure you and partner now/agree on what is an infidelity and what is not.
Fidelity is a decision.
Honesty is the central factor in intimacy. No truth is as destructive as any lie.
Don’t keep secrets from your partner.
If you’re doing something you feel you should lie about, your guilt [conscience] is telling you to stop doing it.
Reveal your imperfections at home, so you can be understood and loved.
During marital conflict, work to understand the issues and the emotions, rather than determine who is the winner. You can’t be right and married at the same time.
Philandering might be treated as an immaturity, a defect. Infidelity is not the hurt partner’s fault.
Some notes:
Private lies: Infidelity and the Betrayal of Intimacy
Frank Pittman
Affairee ... Not lover, which implies a bond that didn’t yet form. Not spring from love, but unfaithful secretive behaviors/decisions/actions. Affairee a better term.
Cuckold cuckoo lays eggs in another’s nest, tricks to incubate.
Affairs thrive on secrecy, conspiracy and adventure and tricks produce an alliance in the affair, while the lies and deceit increase the discomfort at home. We feel bound to those who share our secrets , and uncomfortable with those to whom we are lying. The power of an affair may be in its secrecy. The weakness of the marriage may be in its avoidance of issues.
Honor agreement is fidelity.
Values, monogamy.
Deliberated dishonesty.
Some: ok is affair secret.
Morality a middle-class concern.
Guilt is good for you if lasts only 5 minutes and brings a change of behavior.
But does affect others. Sex outside is a betrayal and destructive, and even anti-sexual. Deceits, lies hurt deeply and change lives.
Disrupter.
The crises that follow infidelities fill the offices of family therapists layers and plastic surgeons.
But concluded extramarital affairs among couples who agreed on being faithful are symptoms of problems.
Long-held misconceptions about affairs (normal, can revie marriage or end in divorce, affairee sexier, cuckold failed in some way) are like the proverbial stopped clock right some of the time.
It’s not that we fall out of love and thus have affairs, but that we have affairs and thus fall out of love by breaking an instinctual bond.
For some, don’t know how to (or want to) have a friendship with someone of a different gender.
The choice of an affair partner seems based on the other person’s difference from the spouse rather than superiority to the spouse. The point of difference may diagnose a problem for which the affair is seen as a cure.
The one being betrayed can’t make affairs happen, can’t make the betrayer stop, and can only make him- or herself available for solving whatever problems are in the marriage, though those are going to be grotesquely distorted and exaggerated as long as the affair is continuing or being defended.
Ignorance of affairs puts people in the position of not having to acknowledge problems or do anything to solve them. (Whether the problems are the infidel’s, such as work life or ego, or between the spouses.)
Some affairs committed intentionally to reduce intimacy and create distance (barrier in our case).
Disorient, distract, distance...destroy--like in giving directions you note one wrong left turn.
Honesty is the only way to restore understanding, know what to do to work towards restoring the relationship and rebuilding intimacy.
Sexual independence - regardless of the degree desired, make it understood early in the bonded relationship.
Gender stereotypes and gender expectations and upbringing: people taught in society to regard partner as man/woman vs. fellow human being. (competitiveness, antagonism.)
Belief in chemistry.
People are not taught the skills to maintain a relationship.
Women taught domestic skills, men handy skills. But not how to ground and maintain intimacy.
Marriage partners are not made in heaven but the product of on-the-job training.
Romance seduces people into expecting too much [too easy]. Like new=car smell, fades quickly. Romance, said Webster: a fictitious and wonderful tale. Not the same as love.
The least workable matches are the most intense/
Cult of virginity.
belief would automatically have great sexual relationship.
Marriage does reduce the variety of adventurous experiences and sexual variety.
Couples who have sex infrequently, and after days or weeks of awkward conflict and flirtation, may never get comfortable enough with it either to enjoy it or to let it make the relationship safe, close and special.
Nuclear family a societal ideal.
Happiness, like sweat, is a byproduct of hard work.
“Don’t try to be happy,. It will only make you miserable.” - Lovers and Other Strangers.
Be prepared to experience together the transitions and crises of life - and whatever time and space throw at them.
“Having a bad day” ...happened between 2 coworkers who put selves in tempting position.
Woman more likely to choose some they know well for affairee and just as likely to say spouse withheld sex, busy.
Men often blamed the affair on their sense of defeat in other sectors of their lives.
Decisions: a meaningless careless act, to more infidelity, to end relationship.
Many believe themselves they can’t be trusted.
Keep dalliance secret, it leads to more philandering and the decision the marriage is incurably flawed. “I must be unhappily married.”
Digging out of the wreckage:
Report the episode, take full responsibility, , apologize profusely and avoid even the slightest hint of blaming the spouse.
Realize this may trigger a crisis.
Cuckolds: feel whatever you feel: angry, upset, frightened, insecure and insulted, and to express this fully until it is perfectly clear to your unfaithful partner how much this has hurt you.
Philanderer - crave steady change of sex partners. Consumes women. Figures envied.
Philandering is time-consuming, often expensive and likely to interfere with more productive pursuits. So philanderers, despite their basic competitivess and aggressiveness, are likely to set up roadblocks to their success.
Charming philanderers: There is a refreshing innocence to their guiltless sense of entitlement and the childlike pleasure they take in doing whatever they like.
Each woman I haven’t had is a mystery and she obsesses me. I just can’t stop looking at her…. All I want is to know her and to give her pleasure. I will make her feel good.
Female philanderers are most often affairees, enjoying the opportunity to break up another woman’s marriage and mess up a man’s life.
Some score their marks, humiliate all concerned.
If a woman is determined to live with a philanderer, she must be careful to keep her distance. She must realize that she is the feared enemy, that the reason for his behavior is that he believes his life is dependent upon escaping her control. There is no way in which she can please him sufficiently, or impress him enough so that he declares her his equal. She must pursue her own life, giving him as much independence as he requires, while she (works) to develop her own self-esteem. Guilt-producing dependency will only bring out the worst in him, and deprive her of a life that could be fulfilling.
Don’t take blame for someone else’s actions. But since some things will have to change; consider with your mate how things should be different.
You can get a new romance going in the marriage, find interests together, become attentive and involved with each other, be with each other and try to recapture whatever it was that once made the relationship special and personal enough for you two to sign on for life and then panic when it appeared about to end. You might have to give up some of your more irritating habits and develop skills you had previously avoided.
Rearrange priorities and experience each other as people do when they are courting.
Think about partner when not together, why special.
Philandering is addictive behavior and like all addictive behavior, is difficult to change without great honesty and the willingness to put yourself under someone else’s control.
Degradation. Some: marital arrangements.
Romantic affairs: temporary insanity:
Unlike loving and being loved, which gives us the security to find comfort and joy, falling in love can be a dangerous episode of torture and adventure and emotional exercise.
Idealistic.
Marriage now seen as disposable.
Problem when one partner wants closeness, the other distance.
Constant conflict: one starts fights requiring interaction and discussion and attention being paid. Other avoids.
Marital aides - mistress to hang with.
Sexual hobbyists rule-breaking appeal.
Affair catastrophe for marriage.
Divorce more the result of broken, vs. bad, marriage.
90% of divorces involve infidelities.
“Grew apart” often code for affair, due to secrets, deceit, loss of intimacy, betrayal.
75% of time the marriage was serviceable prior to the marriage and became awful after - because the marriage bond was broken.
Accidental affairs: few divorces result and those that do due to panic attacks.
If get secrets out in the open, this can lead to resolution and intimacy.
Incongruity - betrayer appears confident, betrayed shattered, afraid.
Later, as betrayed recovers, infidel sees disadvantages. No longer illicit.
May find someone more sexually compatible.
Remarriage
Key problem: the intervention of reality.
Romance changes people’s lives without changing them.
* People risk everything on the hope that they can achieve joy by changing everything in their lives except themselves.
The human animal has an unfortunate tendency to identify the source of any unhappiness as coming from outside itself. The fault, as Cassius informed Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves Our unhappiness is not in our marriages, but within us.
Cole Porter lyric: “We should have been aware...That our love affair...Was too hot not to cool down.”
“love is no use unless it’s wise, and kind, and undramatic.” Noel Coward, Private Lives
Monogamy works.
Despite some in love with their masc or feminine ideal, or the idea of romance.
Marry sane people who like you, who have nonsexual friends of your gender, and who are friends with their own parent.
Be sure you and partner now/agree on what is an infidelity and what is not.
Fidelity is a decision.
Honesty is the central factor in intimacy. No truth is as destructive as any lie.
Don’t keep secrets from your partner.
If you’re doing something you feel you should lie about, your guilt [conscience] is telling you to stop doing it.
Reveal your imperfections at home, so you can be understood and loved.
During marital conflict, work to understand the issues and the emotions, rather than determine who is the winner. You can’t be right and married at the same time.
Philandering might be treated as an immaturity, a defect. Infidelity is not the hurt partner’s fault.
June 12, 2022
“Secret Lies” by Frank Pittman reviews four kinds of affairs: Accidental, Philanderer, Marital arrangement, and Romantic. It's an easy read and I enjoyed reading this book.
The Accidental affair holds guilt.
The Philanderer affair holds anger and one-sidedness.
The Romantic affair has a total inability to see clearly the incompatibility.
The Marital affair works to keep a healthy distance between the affair and the steady partner.
The Accidental affair holds guilt.
The Philanderer affair holds anger and one-sidedness.
The Romantic affair has a total inability to see clearly the incompatibility.
The Marital affair works to keep a healthy distance between the affair and the steady partner.
August 5, 2011
This is definitely the best of all the books concerning personal and marital relationships I have read in the last 6 months - highly recommended!
February 14, 2016
Infidelity is BAD, divorce is WORSE and marriage is BETTER. That about sums it up.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews