Ambient Infidelity, In-Laws, and the Ancient Suspicion That Marriage Was Never Just About Two People (opens in new tab)

The laugh arrives instantly for strangers and three seconds late for him. Not occasionally. Reliably. She smiles at her phone before breakfast. Reacts to texts with animation. Replies to people she has never met with a kind of reflexive psychological immediacy that used to belong to the marriage. At first he tells himself not to become dramatic. Nobody is cheating. Nobody is sneaking into hotels wearing baseball caps and a look of exhausted moral confusion. There are no mysterious credit card...