Strangers When We Meet is not a novel about adultery.
That interpretation belongs to a later moral economy.

It is a novel about American adulthood at the moment emotional dissatisfaction became common but remained culturally illegible—when lives worked, marriages held, and silence passed for maturity.

This is not a love story.
It is a cultural document.

1958 America: stability was solved, interior life was deferred.

By 1958, the United States had achieved something rare and deeply misleading: mass adult stability.

The war was over.
The middle class was expanding.
Marriage was normative.
Divorce was still embarrassing.
Work followed predictable arcs.

The system functioned.

Modern relationship culture has made a quiet discovery:

it wants intimacy,
but not the vulnerability of wanting it.

Once, emotional investment signaled seriousness.
Now it is more often treated as a design flaw.

Care too openly and you risk being called anxious.
Ask for clarity and you’re “moving too fast.”
Expect consistency and you’re advised—gently, therapeutically—to focus on yourself.

None of this is happening because people no longer want connection.

It is happening because nonchalance has been upgraded into a virtue.

Being unbothered now reads as emotional intelligence.
Low investment passes for regulation.
Detachment is framed as self-respect.

Modern American relationship culture is fluent in one language above all others: adult autonomy.

Who chose whom.
Who consented.
Who owed what—and to whom.

This framework has done real good. It dismantled moral panic, reduced sexual shaming, and re-centered personal agency where it belongs.

But it has a blind spot.

Children.

The term home wrecker has long since become unfashionable.

It is often dismissed as sexist, crude, or morally hysterical—a relic of an era that blamed “the other woman” while excusing the person who actually broke their vows.

Sometimes that criticism is deserved.

But removing the term entirely has created a different kind of confusion—one where third-party involvement in the destabilization of intact family systems is treated as conceptually invisible.

Stripped of caricature and gender panic, home wrecker does not describe a personality type.
It describes a relational role.

Instrumental celibacy inside marriage rarely announces itself as a sexual decision.

It appears as a prioritization pattern.
A scheduling logic.
A seriousness ethic.

Sex does not disappear because it is unwanted.
It disappears because something else is repeatedly treated as more essential.

As a couples therapist, I want to be clear and kind about this: instrumental celibacy is not about repression, morality, or pathology.

It is about how a life—and a marriage—gets organized when attention is treated as scarce and productivity is treated as virtue.

America has always been suspicious of pleasure.
Not in a European, tragic way.
In a managerial one.

We don’t ask whether sex is good or bad.
We ask whether it interferes.

For nearly two centuries, American self-help and success literature has advanced a quiet but persistent proposition: sexual intimacy competes with ambition.

It drains focus. It softens edges. It introduces relational variables that cannot be optimized, scheduled, or cleanly contained. It makes you linger where you should be building.

What changes over time is the tone.
What never changes is the logic.

Instrumental celibacy does not describe a new behavior.
It describes a moment of cultural honesty.

Silicon Valley has rediscovered abstinence.
Not for spiritual reasons.
For productivity.

Among young tech founders, “locked in” has become both a badge of honor and a personal policy. It signals seriousness.

Discipline. Resolve.

The gym, the laptop, and the company come first. Dating apps are deleted. Nights out declined. Sex is quietly postponed until some future milestone—Series A, Series B, exit, or maybe just relief.

This isn’t prudishness.
It’s instrumental celibacy.

And it tells us far more about modern work culture than it does about libido.

There is a stubborn modern belief that refuses to leave the building:

If a man feels sexually aroused, someone must be arousing him.

A recent study published in Behavioral Sciences suggests something quieter—and more unsettling.

Sometimes the confusion doesn’t begin with women’s behavior at all.

It begins with men mistaking their own internal state for external evidence.

This is not a story about flirtation gone wrong.

It’s a story about attribution error—about how desire rewires perception and then presents the result as fact.

There are relationships where sex disappears for reasons that make sense once someone finally says them out loud.

New babies. Old grief. Medication. Menopause. Depression. Exhaustion.

The long, beige middle of life where two nervous systems are doing their best and still missing each other.

And then there is the other category—less Instagrammable, more destabilizing—where sex doesn’t simply fade.

It goes silent.

Not dramatically. Not with slammed doors or shouted ultimatums. It just… stops.

And when it stops, nothing else arrives in its place. No explanation. No timeline. No shared language.

Just a vacancy where intimacy used to live, like a storefront with the lights still on but no one inside.

This is not an accusation.
It’s an attempt to name what that silence often does.

Alienation of Affection laws feel awkward because they are.

They persist like legal fossils—half-embarrassing, half-revealing—reappearing whenever modern culture insists that infidelity is a private matter and the law quietly disagrees.

But defending an old statute is not the same thing as claiming it is the best tool we have.

The more serious question is this:

If adult autonomy is protected—but children still absorb predictable harm—what modern framework should exist to account for that harm without reverting to sexual moralism or denial?

Modern American culture has no clear answer.
And children are paying for that absence.

What follows is not a defense of outdated law, but

a proposal for something better: child-directed relational accountability.

When a North Carolina civil lawsuit invoked the state’s so-called home-wrecker law in connection with former Arizona senator, Kyrsten Sinema, the reaction was swift and dismissive.

The statute was labeled archaic.
Puritanical.
Hostile to adult sexual autonomy.

I understand the reflex.

But I am a quiet friend of laws like this—not because I want to police desire, but because they are among the last places in American law where children and family systems are still treated as real interests rather than sentimental afterthoughts.

Most folks assume infidelity is a private moral failure—painful, destabilizing, but ultimately beyond the reach of the law.

That assumption is wrong in seven U.S. states.

In Hawaii, Illinois, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Dakota, and Utah, engaging in an affair with a married person can expose the third party to serious legal and financial liability under what are known as Alienation of Affection statutes—often called “homewrecker laws.”

These laws are not symbolic. They are enforceable. And in some cases, they are extraordinarily expensive.