Can an Extramarital Relationship Help Preserve a Marriage? 

It is commonly assumed that an extramarital affair inevitably destroys a relationship. 

However, Otto Kernberg describes clinical situations in Love Relations: Normality and Pathology (1995) in which an extramarital affair may temporarily serve the opposite function. As he writes: 

Sometimes when one partner maintains a relationship with a third party, the affair is preliminary to the destruction of the couple (that is, the couple or the marriage dissolves and gives way to a new couple formation); 

And sometimes the marriage seems to stabilize with the presence of a third party. 

In the latter case, various outcomes can materialize.Frequently, when one of the partners has an affair, it permits the stabilizing expression of unresolved oedipal conflicts. 

A woman who is frigid with her husband and sexually satisfied by her lover may experience a conscious thrill and sense of satisfaction that sustain the marriage, though unconsciously she enjoys her husband as a hated transference representative of her oedipal father. 

In the dual relationship, she experiences an unconscious triumph over the father who had had both her mother and her under his control, whereas now she is the one who has two men under hers. 

The wish for the affair may also stem from unconscious guilt over experiencing her marital relationship as an oedipal triumph while not daring to establish a total identification with the oedipal mother; thus the conflict between desire and guilt is acted out in her playing Russian roulette with the marriage.

Paradoxically, the deeper and fuller these parallel marital and extramarital relationships become, the more they tend toward self-destruction, because the splitting of the object representation attained through the triangular situation eventually tends to be lost.

Whether such relationships are maintained secretly or accepted openly, of course, depends upon other factors, such as the extent to which sadomasochistic conflicts play a role in the marital interaction. 

"Openness" about extramarital affairs, more often than not, is a sadomasochistic interaction and reflects the need to express aggression or defend against guilt feelings.

Sometimes a couple's actual relationship is obscured by a liaison established in response to social, political, or economic pressures.

 For example, a couple can have a meaningful, often secret relationship that for each partner exists parallel to a merely formal one, such as a marriage of convenience. 

There are other instances in which both parallel relationships in a triangular situation are basically formalistic and ritualized, as in subcultures in which having a lover is a mark of status expected of a person from a certain social stratum.

Kernberg emphasizes that triangular situations, especially those that include a long-term, stable extramarital relationship, may have complex, variable effects upon the relationship of the primary couple. 

Stable triangular relationships usually reflect various types of compromise formations involving unresolved oedipal conflicts. They may protect a couple against the direct expression of some types of aggression, but in most cases, the capacity for real depth and intimacy declines, the price exacted for this protection.

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(c) Yuliia Holoporova,

Ukrainian Association of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy