The Balance Sheet of the Me-Society
What the interview in 2001 still tentatively called the “me-society” and the “competition of egoists,” sociology has since mapped with precision. Andreas Reckwitz describes the society of singularities, in which the particular has become a duty and one's own life plan a work of art that tolerates no compromises. By now, the singularities find themselves confronted with the “disillusionment of the utopia of personal happiness.”1
Eva Illouz dissects a relationship culture whose basic operation is no longer bonding but unbinding — the freedom to exit at any time, without reasons given.2 And Eli Finkel shows how marriage has been overloaded with demands for self-actualization until it suffocates under the weight: the partner is now expected to deliver what an entire village used to be responsible for — lover, best friend, therapist, coach, and audience in one person.3
Readers of the interview will find that its diagnosis - self-actualization, elevated to a virtue, breeds “pathological egoism” and ends in loneliness - anticipates Finkel's finding by sixteen years.
The figures for the harvest of singularization are official. In Switzerland, roughly two out of five marriages end before the divorce judge4 — and fewer and fewer people enter into one at all. In Germany, 41.6 percent of all households now consist of a single person — making the one-person household the most common form of household; calculated against the population, one in five residents of the country lives alone.5
Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation
The consequences have since been declared an “epidemic”6 by the highest health authority of the United States: loneliness and social isolation, it warns, “can increase the risk for premature death as much as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.”6 Does this not call for a warning label of the kind found on cigarette packs: “Chronic loneliness can be fatal”?
Beyond that, the U.S. Surgeon General — the nation's top government health advisor — notes that loneliness and “poor or insufficient social connection [...] is associated with increased risk for anxiety, depression, and dementia.”6
Read, against this background, the sentence the psychotherapist gave the MAX editors in 2001: “More and more people are very lonely in their supposed independence.” That was not an opinion. That was a prognosis, and it has come true — announced in advance and now bearing an official stamp.
More is at stake here than private unhappiness. Hannah Arendt showed that the “fears of modern people in the jungle of an atomized society” are the soil in which total domination thrives — the isolated individual who no longer trusts anyone is the ideal subject.7 Trust between two people is therefore fundamental in the literal sense of the word: first for the foundation of the partnership, then for that of the family, and in the end for that of a free society. Whoever forfeits it loses more than a relationship.
What Actually Makes Couples Happy
The counter-calculation is supplied by the longest study psychology possesses. Since 1938, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has been following the lives of hundreds of men and, by now, of their descendants — and its finding is of disarming simplicity: not wealth, fame, or achievement predict a healthy, satisfied life, but the quality of one's close relationships. Its director, Robert Waldinger, sums up 85 years of data in two sentences: “Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.”8
And couples research has measured what relationships break on: John Gottman identified contempt as the strongest single predictor of divorce and described the stable marriage as an emotional account into which more must continually be paid than is withdrawn.9 Readers of the interview below will find this concept under the name of the “relationship account” — along with the recommendation always to pay in a little more than one takes out.
None of this is new; what is new is only that it had to be proven again. Erich Fromm defined love as an art that, like every art, demands knowledge and effort — not a feeling one falls into, but an activity in which one practices: “Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort.”10
Søren Kierkegaard went a step further: only where loving is a duty is love secured against every change — against the moods of a feeling that swears today and gives notice tomorrow: “Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally secured against every change, eternally made free in blessed independence, eternally and happily secured against despair.”11
Rainer Maria Rilke called love from one human being to another “perhaps the most difficult task entrusted to us, the ultimate thing, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is only preparation” — and described the achieved bond as that love which we “strivingly and laboriously prepare: the love that consists in two solitudes protecting, bordering, and greeting each other.”12
Saint-Exupéry, finally, captured this turning-toward in the image that “love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”13 That is exactly the movement at issue: partners who develop toward each other instead of apart — not because the zeitgeist rewards it, but because everything else demonstrably makes people unhappy.
The interview distills all of this insight into a single sentence:
“Love is therefore the only good that grows when you squander it.”
Relationship Crises Are Thinking-Error Crises
That leaves the question of what to do when the foundation shows cracks — after an affair, in creeping estrangement, in constant quarreling. The answer of cognitive psychotherapy comes from its co-founder himself: with “Love Is Never Enough,” Aaron Beck showed that couples do not fail because of their feelings but because of their thinking errors — mind reading (“He ought to know what I need”), silent expectations never spoken aloud, the catastrophizing of every criticism into a matter of principle, and that disappointment which is nothing other than the grown-up child of the initial idealization.14 This is exactly what the interview describes as the “relationship concepts” that each partner brings along from his learning history — and merging them is the real work of love.
Cognitive Couple Therapy
Cognitive couple therapy is therefore not a relationship simulation with a weekly talking-it-over subscription, but instruction: both partners learn to examine their interpretations, to recognize their thinking errors, and to correct them themselves — the changed behavior toward each other follows the changed thinking about each other, without having to be trained by the psychotherapist.15
Written Cognitive Psychotherapy (WCP) by Dr. Dietmar Luchmann, LLC, provides assistance for self-help to enable the self-healing of psychological disorders:
1. Discover WCP
2. Take Suitability Assessment
3. Start Self-Therapy
Whoever wants to take this path as a couple - or alone, after a separation, in loneliness, still searching - has the three formats of cognitive psychotherapy open to them, from the written form through video to in-person treatment. A relationship crisis is not a verdict. It is, as the interview puts it, a touchstone for the partners' capacity to learn — and learning is exactly what can be guided.
1 Reckwitz, A.: Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten. Zum Strukturwandel der Moderne. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017, p. 439. [German original: «Desillusionierung der Utopie des persönlichen Glücks».]
2 Illouz, E.: Warum Liebe endet. Eine Soziologie negativer Beziehungen. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2018.
3 Finkel, E.J.: The All-or-Nothing Marriage. How the Best Marriages Work. New York: Dutton, 2017.
4 Swiss Federal Statistical Office (BFS): Scheidungshäufigkeit [Divorce frequency]. [Total divorce rate 2024: 39.8 percent.]
5 Federal Statistical Office of Germany (Destatis): Mikrozensus 2024. [17 million one-person households; 41.6 percent of all private households; 20.6 percent of the population live alone.]
6 Office of the U.S. Surgeon General: Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation. The U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community. Washington, DC, 2023, p. 8.
7 Arendt, H.: Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft. Vol. II: Imperialismus. Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1975, p. 176. [German original: «Ängste moderner Menschen in dem Dschungel einer atomisierten Gesellschaft».]
8 Waldinger, R.; Schulz, M.: The Good Life. Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023, p. 10.
9 Gottman, J.M.: Why Marriages Succeed or Fail. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994.
10 Fromm, E.: The Art of Loving. New York: Harper & Row, 1956. [Opening lines of the preface. The German version of this article quotes the Erich Fromm Gesamtausgabe, Vol. IX, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1981, p. 440.]
11 Kierkegaard, S.: Kierkegaard's Writings, Vol. XVI: Works of Love. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995, p. 29.
12 Rilke, R.M.: Briefe an einen jungen Dichter [Letters to a Young Poet]. Leipzig: Insel, 1929. [Letter of May 14, 1904, to Franz Xaver Kappus; German original, pp. 37 and 43: «Liebhaben von Mensch zu Mensch: das ist vielleicht das Schwerste, was uns aufgegeben ist, das Äußerste, die letzte Probe und Prüfung, die Arbeit, für die alle andere Arbeit nur Vorbereitung ist» and «... der Liebe, die darin besteht, daß zwei Einsamkeiten einander schützen, grenzen und grüßen».]
13 Saint-Exupéry, A. de: Terre des hommes. Paris: Gallimard, 1939, p. 198. [In the original: «Liés à nos frères par un but commun et qui se situe en dehors de nous, alors seulement nous respirons et l'expérience nous montre qu'aimer, ce n'est point nous regarder l'un l'autre, mais regarder ensemble dans la même direction.»]
14 Beck, A.T.: Love Is Never Enough. How Couples Can Overcome Misunderstandings, Resolve Conflicts, and Solve Relationship Problems Through Cognitive Therapy. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.
15 Luchmann, D.: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Cognitive Psychotherapy — the Difference. Psychotherapie. June 4, 2026.
The following interview was conducted by editor Stefanie Hellge of the lifestyle magazine MAX with Dietmar Luchmann for a special issue on cheating as a national sport; it first appeared on July 26, 2001, in MAX, issue 16/2001, page 32. The interview is reproduced here in English translation of the original — retaining the terminology of the time. The scenic lead-in by the MAX editors has been replaced by an editorial summary.
Why We Cannot Be Faithful — Cheating as a National Sport
MAX
(issue 16/2001), page 32
The Psychology of Infidelity and Affairs
For a special issue on the phenomenon of cheating as a national sport, Stefanie Hellge of the editorial team of the monthly magazine MAX interviewed the psychologist, psychotherapist, and couple therapist Dietmar Luchmann of the Angstambulanz, the anxiety outpatient clinic at the Institute for Cognitive Psychotherapy and Behavior Therapy in Stuttgart.
The interview, first published in the MAX issue 16/2001 of July 26, 2001, on page 32, bore as its title the position Dietmar Luchmann explicitly advanced on the subject:
“Trust Is the Foundation of the Partnership”
The scenic lead-in by the MAX editors sketched the moral portrait of that summer: Boris Becker, it noted, was not alone — most people did not take fidelity and loyalty to their partner too seriously; cheating counted as a peccadillo, hardly anyone reckoned with scandal or private catastrophe — one simply did not get caught. Serving as illustration was the precisely timed lunch break of a certain Martin, who is already being awaited at the by-the-hour hotel by the “wife” who is not his own — the champagne on ice, back at the office by 2:30 p.m. Against this panorama, the editors put their questions to the couple therapist.
The Interview
Stefanie Hellge: Many psychotherapists see an affair as a clear indication of a problem in the existing partnership. What problems are these, as a rule?
Dietmar Luchmann: A couple enters a partnership with relationship concepts that can be very different. Each partner brings along the experiences, expectations, and competencies regarding a close human and sexual relationship that were acquired in his or her individual learning history. Where love strikes, however, what is seen at first is not the natural imperfection of the other; rather, the partner is idealized on the basis of individual qualities. In everyday life together, the initial infatuation gives way to a growing familiarity. Then the weaknesses, too, emerge clearly. The other's as well as one's own. For weaknesses and mistakes, most people have experienced devaluation since childhood. If one partner now begins to address the other's weaknesses and to press for change, many react as they did back then — deeply hurt. That is why many people avoid, even within the partnership, engaging with their weaknesses and understanding mistakes as an opportunity for shared development. They have not learned to communicate their needs through open, constructive conversations and to merge their different relationship concepts through constant joint work on themselves. If, at this moment, a person frustrated by the inadequacies of his relationship meets someone else who seems to have exactly what he misses in his own partner, the affair appears to be a simple and convenient solution. One's own relationship concept can seemingly be maintained without change.
You regard the affair as a consequence of deficient communication and a lack of relationship work?
Luchmann: Yes, those are, in the majority of cases, the reasons couples fail. But a communication style that practices mutual recognition, respectful sincerity, and deep affection, and that makes one's own experience, condition, and feelings transparent to the partner, can be learned. Often, however, interaction patterns and communication styles from the me-society are carried over into the couple relationship and destroy the foundations of closeness, security, and support that are bound up with partnership. Couples who fail have frequently overlooked that a successful partnership lives on not being a competition of egoists, but rather on giving each other support and warmth in the storms of life. Love is therefore the only good that grows when you squander it. The boundless greed of modern society for pleasure easily creates the impression that the fidelity and constancy of the monogamous relationship serve merely as an excuse for the simple-minded. The opposite is true: more and more people are very lonely in their supposed independence. Whoever wants sexual highlights and wins over to his needs the partner to whom a sound and proven relationship already binds him has better long-term chances of being happy than starting over after an affair. An intimate and satisfying couple relationship is a great happiness earned through constant relationship work.
Are there also affairs that simply happen and have nothing to do with the existing partnership?
Luchmann: Certainly. That is the conflict between the demands of a high culture and real individuals whose behavior is still often hormonally controlled by the simplest key stimuli. It is not only advertising, with its principle of “sex sells,” that lives on this. We have to take note that our short cultural era cannot always compensate for millions of years of biological development that oriented men and women alike, driven by pleasure, toward producing as many offspring as possible. Thus, in the domain of sex, they underestimate their susceptibility to reacting according to biologically preprogrammed behavior patterns. The psychoanalysts who routinely abuse their female patients sexually demonstrate this discrepancy between appearance and reality in its most unpleasant form. This mechanism is what the crude saying means: when the dick is hard, the brain shuts down.
Can one distinguish between “good” affairs and “bad” ones? Is, for example, an affair with a stranger, where it was only about sex, a “good” one, and sex with someone you are also fond of as a person a “bad” one?
Luchmann: Such an evaluation is not helpful. There are, it is true, couples who consensually grant each other a certain measure of sexual license. If both partners respect the agreed rules, such a relationship can function very well and satisfyingly, the health risks of the AIDS era notwithstanding. In an open relationship, a shared girlfriend, a shared boyfriend, or a befriended couple may also, by mutual consent, contribute to sexual enrichment. In all other cases, however, any kind of affair, being an actual breach of faith, will lastingly call the bond into question. For most people today, love consists in exclusivity — in not having to share the partner. In contrast to this claim, erotic attractiveness and sexual activity in a relationship often decline over time. Moreover, contrary to the impression created by some media, most couples practice rather plain meat-and-potatoes sex. The less a couple perceives and shapes the inevitable field of sexual tension between the inside and the outside in which every long-term couple relationship moves, the greater the shock will be when the case has occurred that one partner, contrary to the expected fidelity and exclusivity, has succumbed to his “biological programming.” At most, then, it is the handling of the affair that can proceed in a way that is “good” or “bad” for the relationship.
In an interview with the newspaper “Welt am Sonntag” you spoke about the importance of confessing. Why is confessing so important for the continuation of the existing partnership?
Luchmann: An affair changes a relationship profoundly. For the one who committed it as much as for the one who was betrayed. The one knows it; the other can usually sense it. As little as a car enthusiast would ignore sudden engine misfires in his prized possession, just as little should an affair be passed over. What has happened signals a serious conflict in the partnership, and working on that conflict imperatively requires involving the partner. The partner will often be able to recognize the gravity of the relationship crisis only when the affair is disclosed to him. If the current events and the underlying conflict are not worked through by both together, the relationship can slowly be corroded from within. It is a widespread misbelief that a couple relationship breaks apart the sooner, the more frequently arguments take place. What is decisive is rather how constructively mistakes and conflicts are dealt with and how unavoidable injuries are balanced out by love and passion.
Is it not better, in certain cases, simply to keep one's mouth shut?
Luchmann: Hardly. Even if some advice literature prefers concealment — I recommend respectful openness instead of self-deception. Sex is a natural desire like eating or drinking, whose satisfaction we need and with which we can learn to deal in an appropriate and partnerly way. Many problems arise from the idealization of sexuality and of the couple relationship. Recognizing this and working out a realistic relationship concept may be painful for a time, but for a fundamentally sound relationship it is always a gain. Of course there can be constellations in which one partner, through illness or disability, is no longer able to satisfy the other's sexual needs. If one partner cares for the other and nevertheless practices sex outside this relationship, it is conceivable that mutual trust and mutual respect can lead a couple to an arrangement that establishes consent without burdening or hurting through details.
How can couples cope with the breach of trust?
Luchmann: A crisis does not mean the end of the relationship. Even the supposed dream partner has not only strengths but weaknesses as well. The problems with him might not be the same, but they would certainly be different ones. Every couple always consists of two independent human beings, each with a different learning history, worldview, and set of needs. The couple can use the crisis to engage with these weaknesses without immediately reacting hurt, with withdrawal or refusal. It is important to learn to open up to and look at each other in such a way that each can help the other overcome his weaknesses. That takes courage, openness, patience, and the capacity to put oneself in the other's place. It is indispensable to take time to listen to each other. In no way helpful are criticism, devaluation, and self-justification. Assigning blame does not really lead anywhere. In this situation, a couple can meaningfully ask itself only one question: What can we learn from what has happened for the future? Here, sincerity and openness are the key to the trust of the partner, who has to decide whether he can forgive the breach of trust. In this respect, the crisis is a touchstone for the partners' capacity to learn and for the value of the relationship. Often they are glad, later on, to have fought for their relationship.
Most affairs are not planned; you get into a situation and have to decide: should I or shouldn't I. Many people would surely like some kind of guide. Are there criteria by which one can assume: now, and with this person, an affair is a very bad idea?
Luchmann: I consider every affair that goes behind the partner's back a bad idea. Trust is the foundation and the most precious good of every partnership. The brief gain in pleasure and illusion bears no reasonable relation to the risk of a loss of trust that can no longer be repaired. True, we live in an age that elevates self-actualization to a virtue. For many, the result is a pathological egoism. But self-actualization at the partner's expense kills every relationship in the long run and ultimately leads to loneliness. Mature people will always regard their responsibility toward their partner as responsibility for themselves as well. With sex it is no different than with the cherries in the neighbor's garden: if you steal them, you get a load of buckshot in your backside; if you ask for them, you are sometimes given the finest cherries as a gift.
What possibilities of prevention are there? The mere fact that a partnership also demands sacrifices of one's own ego (in this case: sex with someone else) often does not really help.
Luchmann: An affair can no more be completely ruled out than a traffic accident — unless one refrains entirely from taking part in life. The statistics prove it: the less people talk to each other, and the more freedom society gives them, the more marriages fall apart. Whether one experiences it as a sacrifice or as a gain for one's own ego to be free of the risk of having to consort with constantly changing sexual partners is a question of personal maturity and of how one defines one's values. Social freedom therefore includes learning to limit oneself. One good way is to make realistic agreements at the beginning of a partnership for this situation as well. A better way of prevention is the tireless cultivation of one's own couple relationship. People in a happy relationship are, as a rule, distinctly less susceptible to an affair. I advise my clients to devote to their partner the same attention and devotion they wish for themselves. Whoever takes distinctly more time for his partner than the ten minutes that married couples, according to statistical findings, spend talking to each other on average, and who always pays a little more into the joint relationship account than he withdraws, will keep his relationship alive for a long time.
Can having an affair also be positive?
Luchmann: Once the affair has happened, coping with it can become a great challenge for both partners. It will shake the relationship, but this shock can bring forth a new quality. One must not forget: in perfecting their couple relationship, too, two partners remain lifelong learners. In this way, an affair can become the salt in the soup of a maturing couple.
First published on July 26, 2001.
Text from: MAX, July 26, 2001 (issue 16/2001), p. 32. Hellge, Stefanie: Psychologie des Seitensprungs. «Vertrauen ist das Fundament der Partnerschaft». [Interview with psychotherapist and couple therapist Dietmar Luchmann.]
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