Infidelity: A Love Story

It is estimated that an alarming four out of five married couples experience infidelity. Growing up with a mother and grandmother who painfully accepted the existence of their respective husbands’ mistresses, Ann Pearlman set out to beat the odds. She embarked on a career as a therapist who helped hundreds of unhappily married patients build new lives. She also found a husband with whom she felt secure. But after thirty years of rewarding marriage and parenthood, she discovered that her husband was having an affair with one of his art students. Infidelity is the moving account of her shattered trust, and the women in her family who endured similar wounds in the radically different climate of America before 1960.

Written in precisely drawn, vivid scenes, Infidelity traces Pearlman’s first understanding of unfaithfulness through her father. A gifted and intelligent man, he took the time to explain Freud’s theories to her during dinner, a meal often served late because of his after-work trysts. Falling in love with Ty, an African American football player and artist, she basked in a strong marriage that even shrugged off interracial bias and inspired her to write a book on how to foster vitality in a marriage. Yet as her own unraveled, she arrived at a turning point that would test everything she had taught and believed. Compelling reading for men and women alike, Infidelity is an eye-opening testament to commitments made and broken, and the experience of matrimony across three very different yet strikingly connected lifetimes.