Affair
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Affair may refer to professional, personal, or public business matters or to a particular business or private activity, as in family affair or private affair.
Political affair may refer to the illicit activities of public officials, such as the Watergate affair or to a government department for example, United Nations Department of Political Affairs.
An affair may also refer to a form of nonmonogamy, to infidelity or to adultery. Where an affair lacks both overt and covert sexual behaviour and yet exhibits intense or enduring emotional intimacy it may be referred to as an emotional affair, platonic love, or a romantic friendship.
An affair also may be referred to as sex with the opposite sex dramatically. Affair may also describe part of an agreement of an open marriage such as swinging, which sanctions some forms of extramarital sex and not others. When one of the non-sanctioned affairs occurs it is described as infidelity and often experienced as a betrayal both of trust and integrity.
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[edit] Extramarital affair
Extramarital affairs are relationships outside of marriage where an illicit romantic or sexual relationship or a romantic friendship or passionate attachment occurs.
An extramarital affair that continues in one form or another for decades, even as one of the partners to that affair passes through marriage, divorce and remarriage, could be considered the primary relationship and the marriages secondary to it. This may be serial polygamy or other forms of nonmonogamy.
The ability to pursue serial and clandestine extramarital affairs whilst safeguarding the secrets and conflict of interest inherent in the practice, requires skill in deception and duplicitous negotiation. Even to hide one affair requires a degree of skill or malicious gaslighting. All these behaviours are more usually called lying.
Deception can be defined as the "covert manipulation of perception to alter thoughts, feeling, or beliefs". The presence of deception may indicate the degree to which the deceiver has breached fundamental conditions of fidelity, of reciprocal vulnerability and of transparency. Sometimes these are explicit or assumed pre-conditions of a committed intimate relationships.
[edit] Famous affairs
- Affair of the diamond necklace
- Cunningham-Agee Affair
- Harden-Eulenburg Affair
- Hemings-Jefferson Affair
- Lavon Affair
- The Lewinsky Scandal (Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky)
- Lillehammer affair
- Stevenson-Lloyd George Affair
- The Makropulos Affair (play and opera)
- Profumo Affair
- Sokal Affair
- Spiegel Affair
- The Thomas Crown Affair
- Spitzer Scandal
- John F. Kennedy's affair with Marilyn Monroe
- Robert F. Kennedy's affair with Marilyn Monroe
- John Edwards affair
[edit] Further reading
- Schmitt, D. P., et al. (2004). Patterns and universals of mate poaching across 53 nations: The effects of sex, culture, and personality on romantically attracting another person's partner. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86, 560-584.
[edit] See also
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Look up affair in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
