'My marriage looked perfect. My body knew something was wrong long before I did.'

This edited article originally appeared on the Substack, Avalon. Sign up here.

"The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek." – Joseph Campbell

Writing about relationships, affairs, and betrayal is tricky terrain. People can rush to flatten the story — an instinctive move to categorise and remain at a safe distance.

I would never!

We turn the betrayer into a caricature: greedy, impulsive, lacking discipline or morals. This reduction allows the story to stay tidy in our minds. An arm's length open-and-shut case — guilty as charged, nothing to see here.

Watch the hosts of Mamamia Out Loud discussing whether cheating is grounds for firing someone. Post continues below.

I see this behaviour inevitably, predictably, appear in the comments whenever someone shares truth in this territory. There is almost always at least one wayward attempt to revise the facts — a too-late bellower who wields shame and condemnation as if they can not only restore order, but also revise history — instead of getting curious about how this could possibly happen in the first place.

Because it does. With a staggering frequency that is far higher than we care to admit.

And in a million years, I never thought it would be me.

Wishing it otherwise, shouting about it, or judging it does little to change the facts around the occurrences — and can even increase the statistics by driving the behaviours that cause affairs even further underground.

I'm talking about how many of us learn — slowly, quietly — to betray ourselves inside relationships long before anything visible breaks. How we are conditioned to prioritise stability over aliveness, goodness over truth, loyalty over our body's warning signals. How marriage, in particular, is often treated as a structure that should hold everything, even when the self inside it is eroding.

Esther Perel's book The State of Affairs is a valuable resource for those interested in this terrain. She invites us to examine the conditions that make these patterns so common, rather than clinging to moral outrage that may feel righteous but does little to address the deeper dynamics at play.

There is a particular kind of marriage — the kind I was in for over two decades — that doesn't raise alarms.

There's no overt discord. No chronic conflict. From the outside, it looks stable, responsible, even admirable: two capable adults managing a life together with competence and care.

A good marriage.

Sturdy. Predictable. Built to last.

And those very qualities are often what put it most at risk.

Because when nothing is clearly wrong — nothing you can overtly point to — we become skilled at going through the motions. We slip into autopilot. By cultural standards, the absence of visible cracks is taken as proof of health.

Over time, though, the energy that once animated the relationship begins to wane. Children grow. Interests shift. Stimulation is outsourced — to work, achievement, consumption — while we feel the undeniable sense of something quietly eroding within.

I was in a 'good enough' marriage. Image: Supplied.

We turn our gaze outward and tell ourselves everything is good.

What is there to complain about?

On one side is the life that functions.

On the other is the self that feels unfulfilled.

Looking back, I can see that one of the clearest signals of that split was the disappearance of sexual desire.

We are taught to normalise this. To explain it away with stress, hormones, ageing, busy lives. To assume that not wanting sex with your partner is simply part of being mature and responsible.

I believed that completely.

For years, I thought I just didn't like sex anymore. I told myself it wasn't that important. I intellectualised my way around it. Stayed focused on the machinery of daily life.

What I misunderstood — entirely — was this: sexual desire is not a preference.

It is a diagnostic.

Desire reveals where energy is flowing and where it has shut down. When it disappears, it is rarely random. Quite often, it is the body refusing to participate in a dynamic that no longer feels alive, reciprocal, or honest.

I didn't dislike sex.

I disliked sex in a relationship that had become companionate, managerial, and performative.

This distinction matters.

The conscious mind knows how to endure. It follows rules, honours commitments, preserves appearances. It knows how to make a life "work," even when something essential has gone missing.

But the body operates differently.

Before I had language for what was happening, my body knew. It registered a truth it somehow knew my mind would wholesale reject — because accepting it would mean disrupting a carefully choreographed life as well as the people inside it.

It is in that gap — between what the mind can justify and what the body knows — where dissonance should not be ignored.

We have language for commitment, for repair, for working on things. We have steps, models, and formulas. Bids for attention. Turning toward one another. Sophisticated ways to manage narratives.

What we lack is language for the felt erosion of self that can occur inside a long-term partnership — especially when everything looks functional from the outside.

Listen: Open marriages and a new kind of divorce is on the rise. Post continues below.

Bodies do not respond to the reframes our minds find temporary comfort in.

Most of us are more influenced by appearances than we care to admit. We learn early that stability is rewarded and disruption is costly. The psyche — shaped by social rules and survival — learns to stay loyal to the structure of marriage, often rationalising, enduring, and performing in order to keep what it understands as "life" intact.

The body, meanwhile, responds to that performance with its own language: loss of desire, fatigue, numbness, depression, even panic attacks. Unlike our analytical heads, it cannot rationalise indefinitely. It keeps a quiet ledger of what is lived versus what is performed, registering the discrepancy long before it may even enter into our consciousness.

What looks like discipline in the mind can feel like self-abandonment in the body.

This is where self-betrayal becomes normalised.

And here is the deeper truth beneath that: the body is not trying to destroy anything. It is trying to be heard.

For generations, many of us have been trained to override this listening — to treat the body as something to manage, shame, or chastise in service of stability and performance. We learn that its signals are inconvenient, disruptive, even dangerous to our outer reality. We adapt. We endure. We perform. And in doing so, we slowly relinquish authorship over our own physical experience.

Listening to the body is not easy — and it is also a privilege denied to many, which is a separate essay entirely.

The body's language can be terrifying. It is nonverbal and unfamiliar, and it often arrives long before the mind catches up to what is trying to be expressed. But ignoring it carries its own cost. When the body speaks and we refuse to listen, it does not disappear. It finds another way to be known.

The truth about my affair.

My affair was not a moral lapse; it was one of the most honest and defining acts of my life.

For me, it marked the moment I dropped the performance and set down logic as a governing strategy. What followed was not novelty-seeking, but a refusal to keep performing a life shaped by things outside of me: marriage, expectation, and a culture that demanded too much pretence — fake orgasms included. Claiming my body as my own and choosing what to do with it, what it wanted, was the first time I trusted myself as a living, sensing being rather than a role for someone else.

Many affairs, sudden exits, and choices that look inexplicable from the outside are rarely about desire alone. They are attempts to reclaim selfhood and agency after long periods of disembodiment — to feel something real after years of managing and prioritising appearances. They arise when analysis and control break down and the body insists on being included.

From where I stand, this feels important to say plainly: the greatest gift we can give ourselves and one another is to come into honest relationship with our own bodies. To trust them. To listen to what they are trying to reveal. This may be the most important work of our time.

And an essential part of this is normalising relational transitions — not as failures, but as features of living systems. Many of us are inhabiting structures built for another place and time, and are no longer aligned with who we are becoming. We are more than machines built for output. We are humans designed for sensation, responsiveness, and change.

If we want fewer ruptures, fewer implosions, fewer lives endured instead of fully inhabited, we need to take the "good enough" marriage seriously — not as a success to preserve at all costs, but as a signal to pay closer attention.

When desire disappears, the task is not to fix it or override it.

The task is to listen and get brutally honest—because the body will not keep consenting to a life built on its own suppression.

Postscript.

I'm writing from my own embodied experience as a woman. I don't inhabit a male body, and I can't speak for how men experience theirs.

What I do know for certain — and hold with great compassion, especially as the mother of two sons — is that many men are also taught to fear, mistrust, or disassociate from their bodies rather than listen to them. It's from a different position than women, but is just as important to investigate. There is deep work to be done here as well.

My own reclamation was specific. It was the act of claiming my body for the first time in my life — and trusting it as a primary source of truth, rather than something to override, manage, or subordinate to someone else's needs. This is not a universal prescription, but an honest account of what listening made possible for me.

May everyone trust themselves enough to do the same.

This edited article originally appeared on the Substack, Avalon. Sign up here.

Avalon writes about marriage, desire, and identity, and the cultural scripts women have been trained to endure. Her work explores embodiment and eros, focusing on the societal shift underway as more people learn to trust themselves and choose from the inside out. You can follow her work on Substack.

Feature image: Canva.