Amazing Graze

I've been married for seven years, and I'm cheating on my husband. I've heard that if you're cheating, it's because something's missing in your relationship. But my husband is fantastic. I love him. I just long for something new and different. Help.

--Torn

Marriage vows are annoyingly comprehensive. Take that "Forsaking all others..." thing. Do they really mean "allll others"? Even that hot guy in board shorts in Spin class? There are people who are under the impression that life should be COMPLETELY FUN AND EXCITING AT ALL TIMES. We call them 5-year-olds. The grown-up view acknowledges that the typical day includes a good deal of bummer management and that choices in life require making trade-offs. Marriage, for example, gives you intimacy, security, and tax breaks -- with the downside that the nookie tends to lack the zing of boning some hot stranger in the self-help section at Barnes & Noble. To understand how unfair you're being to your husband, don't just look at your cheating in sexual terms. You're doing what neuroeconomists and anthropologists call "free-riding" -- sucking up the benefits of a situation while ducking the costs. Meanwhile, if you get cancer and all of your hair falls out and getting to the toilet feels like the third leg of a triathlon, the man carrying you there will for sure be the one you meet for nooners at the motel. As for what's missing, you have no motivation to heat up your marriage if you're getting your heat on the side. But a relatively new area of research -- embodied cognition -- finds that action drives emotion, meaning that if you keep acting loving and passionate, the feelings are likely to follow. You also jazz things up by being surprising and going a little crazy -- in good ways. As the country song goes, "Sing like you don't need the money ... dance like nobody's watchin'" -- but have extramarital sex like there's a private detective across the street with a lens the size of something NASA puts into space.