Eroticism After Infidelity: Desire, Betrayal, and the Possibility of a Different Relationship

By Arin Clarke-Visser, MCP:AT, CCC

Infidelity can profoundly alter the experience of intimacy within a relationship. For the partner who discovers an affair, sexuality may become associated with comparison, rejection, deception, or the fear that they were somehow not enough. For the partner who had the affair, there may be guilt, shame, confusion, or a recognition that parts of their sexuality or identity had been neglected within the relationship. Some couples experience a renewed intensity of sexual desire after discovery, while others experience an abrupt or prolonged loss of desire.

There is considerable variability in these responses, and none of them should be treated as inherently healthier or more appropriate than another.

Esther Perel's work has been particularly influential in examining the relationship between infidelity, intimacy, and eroticism. In Mating in Captivity and The State of Affairs, Perel challenges the assumption that emotional intimacy and erotic desire operate according to the same psychological conditions. Her work suggests that long-term relationships involve a tension between our need for security and our desire for novelty, autonomy, mystery, and psychological distance.

This framework can be useful following an affair, but it requires a gentle approach. Understanding the erotic dynamics surrounding an affair is not the same as explaining the affair away. A relationship may have contained unmet needs, sexual difficulties, emotional distance, or significant relational strain. At the same time, the decision to deceive a partner remains the responsibility of the person who made it - and both realities can co-exist.

Infidelity changes the meaning of intimacy

The discovery of an affair is often experienced as a profound relational injury. Gordon, Baucom, and Snyder described infidelity as a “traumatic relationship event that can alter the way partners process information about one another and disrupt established patterns of interaction.” Their integrative treatment model emphasizes the cognitive, emotional, and behavioural consequences that can follow an affair.

This helps explain why a person may continue to experience distress even after the affair has ended.

The injured partner may become preoccupied with details, comparisons, timelines, or questions about what happened sexually. They may repeatedly revisit conversations or memories in an effort to establish a coherent understanding of the relationship. Sexual contact can become particularly complicated because it may activate both attachment and threat.

For some people, there is a temporary increase in sexual activity following discovery. The intensity of the crisis can produce a powerful desire for reassurance and closeness. For others, touch may feel unsafe or emotionally intolerable.

Neither response necessarily tells us whether a couple will ultimately recover.

Research examining couples who remain together following infidelity has found that injured and involved partners can have considerably different experiences of the recovery process, particularly around sexual relationships, responses to reminders of the affair, and needs for comfort. At the same time, both partners identify communication and the rebuilding of safety and trust as important components of recovery.

This is one reason that sexual reconnection cannot reasonably be treated as a requirement of reconciliation.

Perel's distinction between intimacy and eroticism

A central theme in Perel's work is that the conditions that support attachment are not always the same conditions that support erotic desire.

Long-term attachment tends to involve familiarity. We know our partner's routines, vulnerabilities, habits, responsibilities, and history. We develop a shared life. This familiarity can provide considerable psychological security, but it can also change the experience of eroticism.

Erotic desire can involve novelty, anticipation, imagination, separateness, and the experience of encountering another person as someone who remains somewhat unknowable. Perel's argument is not that intimacy destroys desire or that couples need emotional distance to have satisfying sex. Rather, she draws attention to a tension within long-term relationships: we want to feel deeply known and securely attached while also wanting to experience our partner as an autonomous, desirable person rather than simply as the familiar person with whom we organize our lives.

This tension becomes particularly relevant when considering an affair.

An affair often takes place outside the ordinary structure of domestic life. The people involved may encounter one another primarily in circumstances that are different from those of a long-term partnership. There may be anticipation, secrecy, fantasy, novelty, limited exposure to everyday responsibilities, and an opportunity to experience a different version of oneself. This does not necessarily mean that the affair relationship was more intimate, more compatible, or more authentic, but that the conditions surrounding it were different.

Novelty, desire, and the research

There is empirical support for some of the broader ideas underlying Perel's discussion of eroticism, although the research is more nuanced than the popular version of the argument sometimes suggests.

Research on sexual functioning has examined the effects of familiarity and novelty, with evidence that sexual arousal and desire can change in response to repeated exposure and novel stimuli. A review by Morton and Gorzalka found that sexual arousal and desire tended to decline with greater partner familiarity and increase in response to partner novelty, although these effects varied across studies and appeared to be more pronounced among men. These findings offer one explanation for the role novelty can play in sustaining erotic interest within long-term relationships, but they do not suggest that desire inevitably diminishes with familiarity. Rather, they raise a broader question about how couples continue to experience one another as developing, changing people over time.

Self-expansion theory offers one way of understanding this process. Self-expansion refers to experiences that broaden an individual's sense of self through new activities, perspectives, skills, and experiences. Research suggests that when couples engage in novel, self-expanding activities together, they may experience greater sexual desire and relationship satisfaction. More recent research suggests that part of this effect may come from seeing a familiar partner differently. Goss and colleagues found that self-expanding experiences were associated with sexual desire through both increased closeness and the experience of seeing one's partner in a new light.

Clinically, this distinction is important. Sustaining eroticism within a long-term relationship does not require creating artificial distance or introducing instability. It may instead involve allowing each person to continue developing as an individual and creating opportunities to encounter one another outside the familiar roles and routines of the relationship.

This becomes particularly relevant when considering infidelity. The goal is not to recreate the conditions that made an affair feel compelling, but to understand what the affair may have revealed about desire, identity, autonomy, novelty, or unmet relational needs without confusing that understanding with an explanation that excuses betrayal.

The affair partner can become a symbol.

For the betrayed partner, the affair partner can begin to occupy an outsized psychological space. They may become a point of comparison, representing everything the betrayed partner fears they are not: younger, more attractive, more sexually adventurous, more interesting, less demanding, more confident, or somehow more desirable.

This kind of comparison is understandable, particularly when the details of the affair have left the betrayed partner questioning their own desirability and the history of their relationship. Over time, however, it can become deeply corrosive. The relationship between the partner and the affair partner existed under very different circumstances from the primary relationship. It did not carry the same shared history, responsibilities, routines, vulnerabilities, or accumulated disappointments. The betrayed partner may therefore find themselves comparing the full complexity of a long-term relationship with another relationship that existed within a much narrower and often highly idealized context.

Recognizing this difference does not diminish the significance of the betrayal or the pain it has caused. It can, however, help create some separation between the question of "What happened?" and the much more personal and painful question of "What was wrong with me?"

They are not the same question.

An affair does not, in itself, establish that the betrayed partner was sexually inadequate, unattractive, emotionally deficient, or incapable of meeting their partner's needs. The choices made within the affair belong to the person who made them. Understanding the relational context may be important in therapy, but that context should not be confused with diminished responsibility for the betrayal.

There is also room for the experience of the involved partner

It is equally important to make room for the experience of the person who had the affair without minimizing the impact of their choices. An affair may have been accompanied by a powerful sense of aliveness. Someone may have felt desirable, sexually confident, spontaneous, independent, or more connected to parts of themselves that had become less accessible within their primary relationship. Those experiences may hold important psychological meaning, but they do not negate the deception, breach of trust, or harm experienced by the other partner.

Therapeutic exploration can therefore move beyond the question of whether the affair was simply "about the relationship" and consider what was happening within the person who entered into it. What did the affair allow them to experience? What had become inaccessible in their sense of self? What were they avoiding or seeking? What needs had become difficult to acknowledge or communicate? And why did secrecy become the way those needs were pursued?

These questions can help develop a fuller understanding of the circumstances surrounding an affair, but they should not be used to redistribute responsibility for the decision to the injured partner. Relational difficulties may provide context, but they do not cause someone to choose deception. Understanding the context of an affair and holding responsibility for the choice to have one are not competing positions, and both can be true.

Reconciliation is not synonymous with forgiveness

There can be considerable pressure on couples to decide quickly whether they are going to "work through" an affair. In practice, there is often value in allowing some time before making decisions about the future of the relationship. The period immediately following discovery can involve intense emotional and physiological reactivity. A person may not yet know whether they want to remain in the relationship, may move between wanting closeness and needing distance, or may feel certain about leaving one day and uncertain the next.

This does not necessarily represent pathological indecision. It can reflect the difficulty of making significant relational decisions while simultaneously trying to understand and process a profound rupture in trust and attachment. For some people, clarity develops only after the initial intensity of the discovery has begun to settle.

Research on couple therapy following infidelity suggests that recovery is possible for some couples, but that the process is neither simple nor uniform. Therapeutic approaches commonly focus on understanding the impact of the affair, establishing accountability, rebuilding trust and emotional safety, and examining aspects of the relationship that may be relevant to its future. Importantly, understanding those relational dynamics does not require assigning responsibility for the affair to both partners.

Recent research has also emphasized the value of understanding recovery from the perspectives of both the injured and involved partners, rather than assuming that there is a single pathway through infidelity. A 2026 international mixed-methods study involving more than 5,000 people affected by infidelity similarly highlighted the considerable variation in how people experience recovery and what they find helpful in therapy.

For some couples, this work may eventually support reconciliation. For others, it may provide the clarity needed to separate. Neither staying nor leaving is, in itself, evidence of therapeutic success or failure. The measure of the work is whether each person is able to understand what has happened, make informed choices, and move forward with greater clarity and agency.

What happens to sexuality after betrayal?

Sexuality often needs to be approached as its own area of healing rather than as a measure of whether a relationship is recovering. For an injured partner, sexual touch may no longer feel emotionally or physically safe. They may experience intrusive images or comparisons, difficulty becoming aroused, changes in orgasm, avoidance of sex, or, conversely, an increased desire for sexual contact and reassurance. These responses can fluctuate considerably over time, sometimes shifting from one extreme to the other.

There may also be grief for the sexual relationship that existed before the affair. Sex may have once represented intimacy, familiarity, reassurance, or a shared history, and the discovery of an affair can alter the meaning attached to those experiences. What once felt private or mutually understood may now be experienced through the knowledge that another sexual relationship existed alongside it.

For some couples, erotic reconnection eventually becomes part of rebuilding the relationship. This does not necessarily mean trying to restore the sexual relationship exactly as it was before. Once the reality of the affair has entered a relationship, that knowledge cannot simply be removed, and attempts to return to a previous sense of normal may not account for what has changed.

Instead, if a couple chooses to remain together, the question may become whether they can develop a sexual relationship that acknowledges what has happened while creating something that feels safe, mutual, and genuinely chosen. That process may take time, and it cannot be separated from the broader work of rebuilding trust, restoring agency, and determining what each partner wants from the relationship going forward.

Rebuilding eroticism requires choice

Eroticism depends, in part, on agency. After an affair, sexual connection can become complicated by the desire for reassurance, comparison with the affair partner, or a wish to restore a sense of closeness. A partner may find themselves wanting sex as a way of feeling chosen again, while another may need considerable time before sexual contact feels comfortable. Neither response needs to be understood as a problem. Similarly, the partner who had the affair may experience uncertainty about how to approach sexuality while trying to repair trust and understand what has happened.

Sexual reconnection is more likely to become meaningful when both partners have room to make genuine choices about intimacy, rather than feeling that sex needs to serve a particular purpose in the recovery process.

For some couples, this may eventually involve introducing greater novelty into their shared life. For others, it may mean creating more room for individuality, developing new interests, changing established relational roles, or allowing each person to be encountered outside the predictable routines of the relationship. Research on self-expansion supports the idea that novel experiences can contribute to relationship satisfaction and sexual desire, while research on individual self-expansion suggests that personal growth can also influence passion.

This does not mean that every couple needs to become more adventurous or sexually experimental. Novelty is not a treatment for betrayal. Rather, it is one possible part of creating a relationship in which both people continue to experience themselves and one another as psychologically alive, autonomous, and capable of change.

The relationship may not be the only thing that needs rebuilding

After an affair, much of the therapeutic attention understandably focuses on the relationship, but there is also an individual process.

The injured partner may need to rebuild a sense of self disrupted by comparison and betrayal, and the involved partner may need to develop a more coherent understanding of their own behaviour and take responsibility for the ways they managed desire, conflict, dissatisfaction, or vulnerability.

Both may need to reconsider assumptions they held about commitment, sexuality, autonomy, and what it means to be a long-term partner.

A relationship can survive an affair without returning to the way it was. In some cases, the most meaningful outcome is not a restoration of the previous relationship but the development of a relationship that is more explicit about boundaries, sexuality, individuality, expectations, and emotional responsibility.

In other cases, the healthiest outcome is separation, and good couple therapy should leave room for both.

There is no single correct response to infidelity

Infidelity is often discussed in binary terms: stay or leave, forgive or do not forgive, divorce or marriage. The psychological reality is considerably more complex. A person can remain deeply in love with their partner while also experiencing profound hurt, anger, grief, or a loss of trust. Someone may come to understand the circumstances surrounding an affair and still decide that the relationship is no longer one they wish to continue. Reconciliation does not require immediate forgiveness, and forgiveness, when it occurs, does not necessarily mean remaining together.

Research also suggests that remaining together after infidelity is not uncommon, although the available statistics vary considerably. A representative U.S. study using data from more than 16,000 participants found that more than half of people who reported extramarital sex had subsequently separated or divorced, meaning that a substantial proportion did not. In a five-year study of couples receiving behavioural couple therapy, some couples who had experienced infidelity remained together and showed increases in relationship satisfaction over time that were comparable to couples without infidelity, while other couples experienced significant deterioration and divorced. These findings are important because they challenge the assumption that an affair necessarily determines the future of a relationship in either direction.

The partner who had the affair may experience genuine remorse while also needing to examine the relational and personal circumstances that contributed to their choices. Understanding those circumstances is not the same as excusing the behaviour or shifting responsibility onto the injured partner. Similarly, choosing to remain together does not require viewing the affair as necessary, constructive, or beneficial to the relationship.

Research with couples who have remained together following an affair suggests that recovery is often shaped by the rebuilding of safety and trust, open and meaningful communication, commitment to the relationship, and the ability to respond to one another's needs. At the same time, partners may experience the recovery process very differently, particularly around sexuality, comfort, and responses to reminders of the affair.

A clinically useful approach makes room for these complexities without reducing the work to a question of who is right or whether the relationship should survive. The focus is on understanding the impact of the betrayal, the experiences and needs of each person, the choices that were made, and what each person wants moving forward. For some couples, this work supports reconciliation and the development of a different relationship. For others, it brings greater clarity that separation is the healthier choice.

Neither staying nor leaving is, in itself, evidence of therapeutic success or failure. The more meaningful measure is whether each person can understand what has happened, take responsibility for their own choices, make decisions with greater clarity, and move forward in a way that is consistent with their values and wellbeing.

Moving forward

Esther Perel's work is useful in this area because it asks questions that extend beyond the immediate facts of an affair. What happened to desire? What happened to the individual's sense of self? What did the affair make possible psychologically? What was missing, wanted, avoided, or unspoken? And what might intimacy and eroticism look like now?

Contemporary research adds important context to these questions. Infidelity can be experienced as a significant relational injury, and recovery often requires sustained attention to trust, communication, emotional processing, and accountability. At the same time, research on desire suggests that erotic connection within long-term relationships is not necessarily dependent upon perpetual novelty. Shared growth, new experiences, and the capacity to encounter a familiar partner in new ways may all contribute to maintaining desire.

For some couples, this becomes part of rebuilding a relationship after betrayal, and for others, the work is about understanding what happened, establishing boundaries, grieving the relationship, and moving forward separately.

There is no requirement to make the affair meaningful before you are allowed to acknowledge that it was painful, and there is also no requirement to return to the relationship you had before - whatever that means for you.

The more useful question may be what becomes possible once the immediate crisis has been understood: what kind of relationship, sexuality, boundaries, and sense of self do you want to build from here?

Further Reading

Perel, E. (2006).Mating in captivity: Unlocking erotic intelligence. Harper.

Perel, E. (2017).The state of affairs: Rethinking infidelity. Harper.

References

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Gordon, K. C., Baucom, D. H., & Snyder, D. K. (2005). Treating couples recovering from infidelity: An integrative approach. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 61(11), 1393–1405. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.20189

Morton, H., & Gorzalka, B. B. (2015). Role of partner novelty in sexual functioning: A review. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 41(6), 593–609. https://doi.org/10.1080/0092623X.2014.958788

Muise, A., Harasymchuk, C., Day, L. C., Bacev-Giles, C., Gere, J., & Impett, E. A. (2019). Broadening your horizons: Self-expanding activities promote desire and satisfaction in established romantic relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 116(2), 237–258. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000148

Goss, S. C., Raposo, S., Balzarini, R. N., Rosen, N. O., Benyamin, V., & Muise, A. (2022). Feeling close and seeing a partner in a new light: How self-expansion is associated with sexual desire. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 39(8), 2478–2506. https://doi.org/10.1177/02654075221081137

Carswell, K. L., Muise, A., Harasymchuk, C., Horne, R. M., Visserman, M. L., & Impett, E. A. (2021). Growing desire or growing apart? Consequences of personal self-expansion for romantic passion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 121(2), 354–377. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000357