Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Affairs
    Affairs
    Affairs
    Ebook63 pages1 hour

    Affairs

    By The School of Life

    5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Part of The School of Life's Love series, Affairs delves into the question of affairs and why they happen so often

    One in four people will be involved in an affair during their lifetime. Rather than condemning affairs as morally corrupt, this book helps us understand them.

    Society tells us that affairs are unequivocally bad. Our culture casts those who engage in them as monsters, and their victims as deserving of unending sympathy. But most of us will be involved in an affair during our lifetimes. This book ventures beyond the cultural caricatures and provides psychological context for this entirely common occurrence. This book seeks to help us through affairs, offering couples a better understanding of each other's motivations and moods-and the practical tools needed to save a relationship.


    • PRACTICAL ADVICE ON AFFAIRS: and on dealing with the aftermath of an affair.
    • WHY DO AFFAIRS HAPPEN?: historical and psychological framework to help us understand affairs-both the lead up, and the aftermath.
    • A FRESH TAKE ON INFIDELITY: and how it impacts our lives.
    • PART OF THE SCHOOL OF LIFE'S LOVE SERIES: focusing on the joys and sorrows of relationships.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe School of Life
    Release dateJul 23, 2020
    ISBN9781912891344
    Affairs
    Author

    The School of Life

    The School of Life is a global organization helping people lead more fulfilled lives. Through our range of books, gifts and stationery we aim to prompt more thoughtful natures and help everyone to find fulfillment. The School of Life is a resource for exploring self-knowledge, relationships, work, socializing, finding calm, and enjoying culture through content, community, and conversation. You can find us online, in stores and in welcoming spaces around the world offering classes, events, and one-to-one therapy sessions. The School of Life is a rapidly growing global brand, with over 5 million YouTube subscribers, 343,000 Facebook followers, 183,000 Instagram followers and 160,000 Twitter followers. The School of Life Press brings together the thinking and ideas of the School of Life creative team under the direction of series editor, Alain de Botton. Their books share a coherent, curated message that speaks with one voice: calm, reassuring, and sane.

    Read more from The School Of Life

    Related to Affairs

    Related ebooks

    Relationships For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      Freedom And Solitude

      Nov 26, 2020

      YOU COULD HARDLY IMAGINE a more fortuitous moment to publish a book on the politics of loneliness. Although Noreena Hertz began work on The Lonely Century long before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the current crisis pulls together all the different stra

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      No Adultery Is Bloodless

      Mar 7, 2022

      No Adultery Is Bloodless
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      On Normalizing Polyamory

      Feb 8, 2022

      On Normalizing Polyamory
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Beyond Romantic Consumerism

      Jan 31, 2018

      Beyond Romantic Consumerism
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Previews

      Feb 9, 2020

      Previews
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Trump Administration Has Finally Brought Us to Dystopia

      Sep 17, 2018

      1. Donald Trump was hardly into his first full calendar year as president before a chorus of critics and pundits began to use the word “dystopian” to describe his administration and the social milieu that it seemed to precipitate. In March 2017, nove

      10 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Becca Rothfeld’s Exuberant Ode to the Risks of Rapture

      May 16, 2024

      There is no experience of longing that is not, at the same time, an ethical revelation.  The post Becca Rothfeld’s Exuberant Ode to the Risks of Rapture appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Our Library

      Jan 27, 2020

      Grandstanders often talk as if their views are utterly obvious. Anyone competent at making moral judgements would surely come to the same conclusions. This sort of talk can be used to signal that one’s moral sensibilities are more finely tuned than t

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Adult Nonfiction

      Mar 13, 2024

      By Nicholas D. Kristof. May 2024. 480p. Knopf, $32 (9780593536568). 070.1. This hefty account of Kristof’s life and career will remind readers of the ground-breaking, insightful, often influential work Kristof has produced throughout his 40 years wit

      37 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Around The Web

      Mar 7, 2022

      Around The Web
      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Flying Solo

      Mar 7, 2022

      Flying Solo
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Books

      Jun 12, 2022

      by Eva Baltasar, translated by Julia Sanches (And Other Stories, ISBN 9781913505387) andotherstories.org Being told by your new lover that she doesn’t like your name and that she is going to call you Boulder instead might be considered an inauspiciou

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      What Happened

      Oct 26, 2024

      TAFFY BRODESSER-AKNER’S NEW NOVEL, LONG ISLAND Compromise, begins with a kidnapping. The year is 1980; Carl Fletcher, a wealthy Jewish factory owner living in the fictional Long Island town of Middle Rock, is getting into his car one morning when he

      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Connection Recession

      Apr 10, 2023

      The Connection Recession
      10 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Adult Nonfiction

      Jun 5, 2024

      Dharma para la vida diaria/Everyday Dharma: 8 hábitos esenciales para alcanzar el éxito y hallar satisfacción en todo lo que haces. By Suneel Gupta. Tr. by Oscar A. Unzueta Ledesma. July 2024. 224p. HarperCollins Español, paper, $19.99 (9780063358812

      30 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Hot Right Now!

      Jul 15, 2021

      A true story following the remarkable, long-lasting and unlikely friendship that develops between two strangers – a London housewife bringing up four children and a British prisoner incarcerated in Thailand. As they begin to exchange letters, each te

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Love And Death

      Jan 23, 2018

      Love And Death
      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Affairs

    5/5

    1 rating0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Affairs - The School of Life

      A BRIEF HISTORY OF AFFAIRS

      An affair is a romantic or sexual story between two people, one of whom (at least) is ostensibly committed to someone else. Most importantly, in our times, an affair is a catastrophe, pretty much the greatest betrayal that can befall us, a harbinger of untrammelled suffering, frequently the end of the marriage it has violated and almost always an occasion for fierce moralising and the division of participants into ‘goodies’ (those who have been betrayed) and ‘monsters’ (those who have betrayed).

      However, in trying to understand affairs and make sense of their pains, as well as their less frequently confessed attractions, we should grasp that the way in which we interpret affairs today is very particular to our own times; we are remarkably contorted about the whole business, as judged against the long span of human experience. People have always had affairs, but what an affair means has been subject to huge changes across societies and eras. In order to gain a deeper picture of what we are doing when we look beyond our primary relationships, we need to glance backwards into the history – as well as briefly forwards into the future – of affairs:

      Quito, modern-day Ecuador, 1532

      The Inca sun-king Atahualpa owns private harems scattered across his empire; he is said to have had affairs with 3,000 women. Few subjects appear to think any less of him for this. All nobles have hundreds of concubines. There are official regulations concerning the number of mistresses that anyone in government is allowed: a provincial governor can have up to twenty, the administrator of a small village, eight. Having affairs is no sinful slip; it is a central indicator of dignity and status.

      Versailles, France, June 1745

      The 35-year-old French king Louis XV has been married for twenty years, since the age of fifteen, to Marie Leszczyńska, daughter of Stanisław I, the deposed king of Poland, a woman whom no one expected him to love – and whom he duly doesn’t. Now, Louis has developed a passion for the beautiful and gracious 25-year-old Madame de Pompadour, who is herself married. She quickly becomes the most prominent in a long list of Louis’s lovers. The court is delighted for Louis and no one feels especially sorry for the queen, who devotes herself to music and reading and in time takes a few lovers of her own. A royal marriage is understood in terms of political and dynastic considerations, just as at other levels of society it is seen in terms of property or business interests: a way of uniting two pieces of land or of bringing a useful son-in-law into the family workshop. To marry for love is judged an entirely irresponsible eccentricity as well as a wasted strategic opportunity. The idea that a person should spontaneously want to have sex with their spouse once children have been conceived is deemed bizarre and – in essence – perverted.

      Leipzig, Germany, April 1774

      Johann Wolfgang von Goethe publishes The Sorrows of Young Werther, which becomes the most popular novel in Europe for the next thirty years. It is the preeminent expression of certain new Romantic ideas around marriage: that we should only marry for love and that to sleep with someone outside of marriage is a grave offence, emotionally rather than religiously or socially. Nevertheless, the novel acknowledges that it can be deeply tempting to have an affair and that desire doesn’t neatly follow legal rules. The hero of the novel has a flirtation with a married woman, but, because he cannot go further with her and yet is overwhelmed by his own longing, ends up seeing no other option but to kill himself. The novel emphasises that an affair or even the prospect of one can be both a source of extraordinary delight and the harbinger of calamity. The stakes feel a lot higher now that marriage is meant to be so much more than a practical alliance.

      Paris, France, 7th February 1857

      The French writer Gustave Flaubert is narrowly acquitted on obscenity charges brought against his novel Madame Bovary, the first detailed fictional description of sexual infidelity. The heroine of the novel, Emma Bovary, is driven to have an affair for a reason which her society now thoroughly condemns (though it would have been wholly unsurprising to Louis XV): She no longer sexually desires her husband, Charles. We are firmly in the era of Romantic marriage, and affairs have become appalling phenomena because of the expectation that marriages should be lifetime unions based

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1