Cheating - Esther Perel's TED Talk
 

I thought this was a very interesting talk, it carefully avoids trying to punch through to a conclusive judgement, and instead chains together pearls of wisdom into a much richer and nuanced framework with which to understand not only infidelity but relationships as a whole.

• "We have a romantic ideal in which we turn to one person to fulfill an endless list of needs. To be my greatest lover, my best friend, the best friend, my trusted confidant, my emotional companion, my intellectual equal. And [for my partner] I am it, I am chosen, I am indispensable, I am irreplaceable, I am the one."
  
  
• "...And infidelity tells me I am not, it is the ultimate betrayal, infidelity shatters the grand ambition of love, so if throughout history infidelity has always been painful, today it's often traumatic, because it threatens our sense of self."
  
  
• "When we seek the gaze of another, it isn't always our partners we are turning away from, but the person we have ourselves become, and it isn't so much that we are looking for another person, as much as we are looking for another self".
  
  
• "Because of this romantic ideal we are reliant today on our partner's fidelity with a unique fervor. But we also have never been more inclined to stray, and not because we have new desires today, but because we live in an era where we feel that we are entitled to pursue our desires, because this is the culture where I deserve to be happy, and if we used to divorce because we were unhappy, now we divorce because we could be happier ".
  
  
• "We know from trauma, that the healing begins, when the perpetrator acknowledges their wrong doing. So for the partner who had the affair, Nick, one thing is to end the affair, but the other is the essential important act of expressing guilt and remorse for hurting his wife".
  
  
• "I would no more recommend you to have an affair then I would recommend you to have cancer, and yet we know that people who have been ill often talk about how their illnesses has yielded them a new perspective"

The first 3 are fascinating - without the vilification of ego, it acknowledges that to a large extent, modern romantic relationships are not only about the love for another but also about the sense of self you gain from intimately seen yourself from the perspective of another who loves you. For all parties involved - The cheated is threatened with the loss of that sense of self, and the cheater is doing it in order to seek a new sense of self.

That combined with the 4th pearl - the ultimate entitlement to be happy, which touches upon something challenged at the core by philosopher Julian Baggini and analyzed further in it's role in modern society by historian Yoval Harari, which is that much of our modern culture is reliant on the sanctity and authority of an idea of a "real self" which is in some way independent from reality and mechanics, ranging in impact from philosophizing about finding yourself to the politics of personal sovereignty and a culture focused on the pursuit of happiness, and indirectly here Esther is adding modern relationships to this as well. Edit: I decided to make a dedicated thread for this part here.

The 5th and 6th points are also interesting - the 5th I feel is very true, not only in romantic relationships but also in friendships and family relations and any relationship built on trust, and yet it also challenges another ideal while doing so through a conflict of interests - that desiring the happiness and well being is inherit to love - because while it's very clear that the cheater was probably far from thoughtful about the chances of hurting their partner in pursuit of something else, here you have a situation that at face value it seems the cheated is pursuing the suffering of their partner for it's own contextual merit, wanting to see that the cheated is suffering inside for their decisions, so if the cheater was egoistical, the cheated seems outright sadistic, and yet - while extremely hard to find - is essential for trust to be healed.
The last point connects it to a larger whole and reframes the 4th point, while she doesn't ask it herself - rather she seems to view it as a rhetorical question, but I do - which is the question of persuit of happiness as a whole, or as philosopher Slavoj Žižek puts it, "why be happy when you can be interesting", and shouldn't that in some way justify - if not an outright pursuit - then an openness towards suffering, the hammer and chisel to the statue of the self, and an essential tool in the building or healing of of trust in relationships, both as in the case above and in the case of self sacrifice. But if we open that can of worms, we also need to ask what does it mean when it is not only something we are willing to provide the other through our own suffering but are also desiring the capacity for it in another - is there sadism in attraction to bravery.

Discuss (any of it - there is no ultimate conclusion here - just pick and edge of the fabric that peeks you interesting and pull the string).