The late Shirley Glass, a prominent infidelity researcher, encouraged an ideal script at the outset. Her suggestion is that when a married person notices a spark with another, it is highly advisable to discuss this spark with one’s spouse. To say something like:

“I was having coffee with Lucy today and I felt surprised that our conversation quickly became both personal and flirtatious. I was also surprised that I enjoyed it. It reminded me of how you and I used to be with one another, and I want to try to get that back. Can we work on that?”

If only more married adults chose to run this script.

Elizabeth Stroud’s latest novel, Tell Me Everything, is one of her very best. In a showcase that feels something like a finale, she allows her beloved, previously unacquainted characters from her various critically acclaimed series to intersect and collide with one another in the small town of Crosby, Maine. Set during the later part of the pandemic, the novel begins with the meek, brilliant novelist Lucy Barton having recently befriended the angsty attorney Bob Burgess. The friendship has become romantic, though Lucy and Bob remain in denial of their palpable romantic spark. They believe they are good friends and insist their frequent walks are covid-friendly and purely platonic. Quirky local fixture Olive Kitteridge (of Stroud’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same name) understands the blossoming romance between Lucy and Bob and easily sees straight through their blind spots. Olive’s friendships with Lucy and Bob animate the novel as does the plot’s unfolding murder mystery.

Stroud understands that intimate life happens in the small quiet moments rather than the large romantic gestures. Lucy and Bob cherish their deep unfiltered conversations. Lucy calls Bob a sin eater because she understands that Bob has sacrificed to much for others, especially his older brother. Lucy opens up about her impoverished and abusive childhood:

“But I don’t remember feeling envious a lot, Bob, and I don’t understand that. You would think, I would think, that I would have been envious of people from the start, all these mothers who seemed to love their children as they picked them up from school, all those kids who seemed to have normal lives, but I just somehow understood: That’s not my life. And I was always inside my head, and I remember thinking: I’m glad this is my head.”

Even Bob’s bad haircut illuminates the intricacy and hilarity of the human connection. He and Lucy both agree that it makes him look like a twelve-year-old with a man’s face, and their dual experiences of this unfortunate new style represent their powerful connection and the unexpected path forward.

Bob loves his wife, the minister of their local church. And Lucy loves her ex-husband William. Lucy and William reconnected during the pandemic and are giving it another go. Despite these satisfying unions, the chemistry fueling Lucy and Bob’s conversations anchor the plot and transfix these two central characters.

Emotional repairs, infidelity, betrayal, sexual abuse, neglect, isolation, therapy and memory are all important themes explored with rich emotional intelligence. And yet, as a therapist, what stays with me most about this beautiful story is its exploration of the road not taken.

Of my pre and post-surgical reading, Sarah Polley’s Run Towards the Danger offered the most meaningful and memorable frame for navigating physical adversity. The book chronicles her fascinating career in film and television but focuses on the long-standing psychological impact of trauma and the challenges of recovering from traumatic a physical injury.

Polley is widely known throughout Canada for her childhood role as Sara Stanley in the wildly popular television series Avonlea (1990-1996). She has starred in several films including Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter. But it is Polley’s work as a screenwriter and director which fully showcases her astonishing talent.

She has written and directed two of the most realistic films about infidelity ever made. Away From Her (2006) won Polley the Canadian Screen Award for Best Director and demonstrates how one can forgive a spousal betrayal but may never forget it. Take This Waltz (2011) stars Michelle Williams, Luke Kirby, Seth Rogan and Sarah Silverman in a study of the human tendency to want what we don’t have. I often suggest one or both films to therapy clients who are navigating the discovery of a spousal betrayal.

Polley’s 2012 The Stories We Tell won the best film of the year award from the Toronto Film Critics Association. The film unpacks a family secret about Polley’s parents’ marriage years after her mother’s death. This unforgettable autobiographical documentary showcases the director’s depth and innate understanding of complex familial bonds and the power of denial. Interestingly, this film and its revelation are not explored in her book.

Polley also wrote a memorable New York Times article about Harvey Weinstein soon after the revelations surfaced about his predatory crimes.

Clearly, I am a fan of her work. So if Polley writes a book about how trauma shapes the body and her journey through multiple health challenges and a concussion that forced her to drop out of plans to write and direct the film Little Women, I am keen to read it regardless of my foot surgery.

Polley writes earnestly and honestly about the traumatizing underbelly of childhood stardom. Part of Polley’s appeal is that she may be the least vain, least materialistic film star with the smallest ego in entertainment history. She was breaking ground for female filmmakers way before it became a hashtag or a movement. Weinstein tried to seduce her by telling her he could make her an even bigger star, but even as a young girl, she did not want to be a star, she wanted to write and direct. This depth and resolve fuse her account of the myriad of trauma and adversity she faced as a child actor with somewhat absent parents, vicious scoliosis, dramatically lopsided breasts and chronic pain.

At times, it seems Polley may not fully appreciate the breadth of rare door openings her stardom affords her. But maybe that’s because she seems so profoundly disinterested in being a star. The book is full of powerful behind-the-scenes accounts of her experience as a young actor, as a patient hospitalized with a high-risk pregnancy, as an early member of the Me Too movement and a tireless activist. But it is her journey fighting to recover from her three-year concussion that resonates most with my therapeutic training. Polley works with multiple experts and specialists and remains largely incapacitated for several years. As the title suggests, healing comes only when she finds a doctor who insists she run toward rather than away from her pain. Diving into excruciating physical pain runs a parallel track with excavating her traumatic childhood history. The book reads as if it was necessary that she write it in order to fully heal. By running toward her danger, this strong woman comes out even stronger on the other side.

Discovering infidelity leads many couples to seek therapy. The road to repair such a betrayal is a painful one that takes patience, commitment and hard work. As a couples’ therapist who believes in the power of prescriptive film-viewing, I often suggest that couples working through the discovery of infidelity watch movies on this topic. The Last Kiss, Away from Her, Maybe He’s Just Not that Into You, Take This Waltz and The One I Love are some of my favorites. Being the Ricardos recently dropped on Amazon and could also offer a meaningful viewing experience for people suffering in the aftermath of a betrayal of this nature.

Most of the film unfolds on the turbo-charged set of the I Love Lucy show, in 1952, and traces the rehearsal and production process of a single episode. The cast convenes to read the lines the day after Walter Winchell reported that Lucille Ball was listed as a member of the communist party. Nicole Kidman is entirely convincing as Lucille Ball and Javier Bardem is equally captivating as Desi Arnaz. The episode’s assembly timeline frames a plot which is interspersed with flashbacks documenting how each half of this couple factored heavily in the other’s stunning professional success.

From a psychological perspective, what is most interesting about the film is its ability to capture the deep the bond between this prolific power couple while simultaneously exploring their marital pathology. Lucy and Desi are creative soulmates. Desi commands the big picture of their artistic vision and Lucy pays meticulous, relentless attention to every minute detail of their performance. When they first meet and fall in love, it is Desi who pushes Lucy to conceive of herself as more than a typical Hollywood starlet. It is he who notices her natural comic genius. It is Lucy who challenges powerful male executives and faces down brutal racial stereotypes, refusing to sign onto the I Love Lucy show if she cannot have Desi as her co-star. (She is warned by bullying studio bigwigs that America will not accept their marriage and that if Desi plays her husband, the show will fail.) Their creative chemistry seems so magical that viewers may understandably long for the couple to prevail. It is so easy to see why Lucy is drawn to Desi. He gets her – he protects her – he respects her artistry and he has her professional back. Their ability to complement each other’s strengths and limitations offers a rare window into how suspecting or unsuspecting partners can overlook infidelity. The film is a compelling essay on the pulls of denial and the pains of discovery.

Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina opens with the sentence: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The same could be said about happy and unhappy marriages. Few couples have shared the level of synergetic collaboration and shared professional success as Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. And one distinct feature of this “unhappy” marriage is the tremendous joy and pleasure that their union brought to the American public.

Years ago, I worked with a therapy client who reached out when she learned that her twenty-three-year-old daughter was addicted to opioids. Remembering early days of motherhood, my client sobbed recalling her struggles to balance a demanding career as an academic with her daughter’s pleas for attention and affection. Her daughter’s needs were obviously understandable. Nevertheless, life as a young working mother felt incredibly overwhelming and clashed with her understanding how women are socialized to envision motherhood.

“I would give anything to return her hugs now. And to play with her with abandon on our messy apartment floor. At the time I felt suffocated. I resented how much she needed, and I have so few memories of letting go and enjoying it.”

Streaming The Lost Daughter on Netflix yesterday, I naturally remembered this client. During our work together, she was able to drop everything and help her daughter become clean. But as a very young mother, her daughter’s pleas that she drop anything felt torturous.

In her directorial debut, Maggie Gyllenhaal adapts Elena Ferrente’s novel exploring the complex emotional experience of motherhood with depth and honesty. Olivia Coleman plays the protagonist, Leda, who has rented a Greek seaside apartment for an extended visit. Viewers quickly discover that Leda is awkward, elegant, distant and strange. She becomes transfixed with a young, glamorous, bikini-clad mother, Nina (Dakota Johnson), and her young daughter who are close to her beach chair. Leda longingly eyes Nina frolicking in the sand, while Nina’s daughter clings to her mother’s taught body like an oversized choker. Late one afternoon, Nina’s daughter is lost on the beach, Leda finds her, and the two begin an odd and captivating acquaintance.

Nina’s manner with her daughter stirs Leda’s memories of young motherhood, and the film then begins to toggle between young Leda (Jessie Buckley) in her early twenties as a mom and present-day Leda (Coleman) in her mid-forties. Gyllenhaal does not look for tidy solutions or conclusive explanations. This is a messy film that asks deep questions about motherhood, freedom, sexuality and vitality. I found myself curious to know more about Leda’s own mother and her childhood experience. But the film works best in the contrast between what taboos it is willing to unpack and what it fails to explain.

In this modern version of this classic Greek tragedy, Medea and Jason are instead named Anna and Lucas. They are ambitious laboratory scientists, and the play begins when Anna is released from a psychiatric facility where she was mandated to receive treatment after trying to poison Lucas when she learned he was having an affair with their boss’s daughter.

Every corner of Stone’s remake is modernized, so technology itself becomes a central character. When audience members enter the spacious, stylish theater, Anna and Lucas’ sons, Edgar and Gus, are kicking back on the stage, quietly enjoying games on their iPads. Edgar spends a significant portion of the play filming his family members for a school project, and his work is often projected on a large screen above the stage for dramatic effect. Technology is used to hurt various characters throughout the play, reminding the audience of the extent to which technology has edited the landscape of romance and relationships. There may be new and modern ways to discover and experience betrayal. But the emotional complexities of the impact of betrayal have not changed.

Anna’s psychological disintegration frames the shape of the play and the trajectory of the family’s unraveling. Stone’s Anna seems like a much less sympathetic character than other versions of Medea’s from the past. What resonates most with each version of this haunting tale is that affairs are complicated. With many affairs, it can seem like it all works out in the end. Most do not unfold like this tragedy, but trauma is a frequent hallmark in its aftermath. And the repercussions of affairs often have lasting consequences reaching far beyond their conscious intent.

The unintended consequences of infidelity fuse the content that I work with each day as a therapist, and it was jolting to experience a dramatic depiction of the worst-case scenario.

A common thread is a collective awareness that scrawny little Lucy Barton made it out of small-town Amgash, Illinois to become a famous writer in New York City. Who would have thought that this unlikely underdog from a destitute family of misfits would amount to such prominence?!?

Stroud writes with her signature honest sparseness, rounding out the complexities of Amagash’s cast of characters through simple moments and heartfelt observations:

“Once he had been in a department store with his son and daughter-in-law; Janet needed a sweatshirt. Charlie had just been following along, not interested one way or another. But his son was interested, and when Charlie glanced over, suddenly paying attention, he saw his son talking thoughtfully and earnestly to his wife – Janet was a plain and pleasant woman – and it was the glimpse of this, the engagement of his son in this small domestic exchange, that almost brought Charlie to his knees. What a son! What a man he was, this grown boy who would stand so decently and discuss with his wife exactly what sweatshirt she desired in a store that smelled like a circus tent of cheap candy and peanuts and who knows what. His son caught his eye, his face opened. ‘Hey Dad, how you doing there” Ready to go?’ The word arrived: Clean. His son was clean.”

Emotional paralysis is a theme – Lucy’s brother still reads children’s books and rarely leaves the house. Lucy’s sister is obese and bitter about her sister’s success. Several characters are veterans crippled with post-traumatic stress:

“Alone in the room with silence he understood the previous hiatus which returned to him, that spaciousness of calm: Long ago he’d assigned a private name to it. The hit-thumb theory. On his grandfather’s room as a child one summer, hammering tiles down hard, he’d discovered that if you hammered your thumb by mistake, there was a split second when you thought: Hey, this isn’t so bad, considering how hard I was hit…And then – after that moment of false, bewildered, and grateful relief – came the crash and crush of the real pain. In the war this had happened so often, in so many forms…”

Stroud writes with psychological sophistication about infidelity, loneliness, love and loss. She understands that childhood wounds create unexpected and unpredictable scars. Her poignant characters have jumped off of the pages of Lucy Barton’s first introduction to tell an equally memorable story all their own.

The clearest sign of emotional infidelity is a sense of discomfort with a particular person in your partner’s life. Maybe you notice flirtatiousness in the email that was left open on the computer or overly familiar postings on your partner’s Facebook page. Maybe you notice the way this person is excessively affectionate with your partner in social situations, or that something about their eye contact with each other looks intimate.

Most infidelity that lasts longer than a one-night stand begins as a flirtation that blossoms first into an “emotional affair” and only then progresses and becomes sexual. It is surprising, in the aftermath, how often the betrayed partner will acknowledge long-standing concerns about this “friendship.” Sometimes the betrayed partner identifies poor boundaries in their partner’s relationship before the straying partner is even aware of, let alone ready to acknowledge, the chemistry developing.

Of course, if your significant other suddenly develops a pattern of leaving the room while on his or her phone, this may be a more concrete behavior that could be questioned.

If your instincts tell you that your partner is involved emotionally with another, say something like:

“I know you and Sam are friends, and I want to support your friendships. But there is a flirtatiousness in your rapport that gives me the sense that he is not a friend of our relationship. It also reminds me of how you and I used to be when we first met, and I miss that. Do you think we might be able to get back to that way of relating?”

The answer may be yes, and you may be able to extinguish the flame before it becomes a fire. If the answer is no, time and honest discussions will make that clear. In your partner insists on an intimate friendship with someone who is not a friend of your relationship, and you are not able to get back to a place of feeling secure and connected, you are better off on your own.

In my work as a couples therapist, I often discover marriages that have experienced infidelity but that clash with this popular conception. In my post-graduate training as a couples, family and sex therapist, I was taught that infidelity is a symptom of a marital flaw. Therefore, the thinking goes, couples therapy following the discovery of infidelity should seek to identify and address the underlying flaw, while re-building trust to attempt to repair the pain and suffering caused by the infidelity.

But I would amend this message to include the possibility that not every affair is a symptom of a marital problem. Sometimes is an affair is an indicator that the person seeking involvement outside the marriage is suffering or struggling while not consciously aware of the extent or impact of their internal pain. This analysis is not meant to excuse infidelity, but is intended to explore how affairs sometimes occur within the context of a good marriage.

Denzel Washington’s intensely human direction of a film based on the legendary, Pulitzer Prize willing August Wilson play Fences represents a cinematic depiction of a marriage full of love, respect and passion that, nevertheless, succumbs to infidelity. Troy (Denzel Washington) is a trash collector and Rose (Viola Davis) is a homemaker. They are struggling to make ends meet in their working-class 1950s neighborhood. The bulk of the film’s narrative unfolds in the backyard of their small, understated but lovely home where Troy makes sporadic and inconsistent efforts to construct a household fence. This fence exists as a metaphor for the question of boundaries. Relationships and boundary testing between Troy, Rose, their teenage son, Troy’s grown son from his first marriage, Troy’s disabled brother and their greater community unfold with candor, dignity and compassion. The chemistry and love between Troy and Rose feels present and potent despite the array of adversity swirling around them.

Despite their relational strengths, conscious and unconscious conflicts lead to life-altering sabotage and suffering. In addition to demonstrating how a good marriage might succumb to infidelity, Fences is a psychologically sophisticated tale that demonstrates the human vulnerability to repeating the most painful dimensions of one’s past. Fences also celebrates the power of family love and how, if each generation can emotionally give just a bit more than they received, inter-generational progress is possible.