"The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop"

John Updike’s observation that “the first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop” captures both the intoxicating sense of liberation that accompanies the initial act of transgression and the inevitable entanglements that follow. That initial moment, when boundaries are crossed and forbidden desires are fulfilled, carries an exhilarating sense of autonomy and possibility. Longings suppressed by routine and social convention erupt into vivid, uncharted experience. Nothing is required in that instant but the assertion of one’s own will, free from the negotiations and compromises that structure established relationships.

However, Updike’s sentence swiftly undercuts this fleeting freedom, pointing to the pattern that follows. Once the threshold has been crossed, what once felt liberating soon begins to mirror the very institutions that the affair defies. Constraints, those subtle, often unspoken demands and responsibilities, start to appear. Lovers negotiate time, attention, jealousy, secrecy, and expectations, mimicking the emotional entanglements and power dynamics of marriage itself. The secrecy may initially heighten attraction, but it also breeds anxiety and moral conflict. The participants, hoping for escape or novelty, encounter instead a new set of emotional economies and tacit obligations.

Updike’s insight lies in recognizing that the pursuit of freedom through adultery is paradoxically self-defeating: what begins as an assertion of individuality quickly becomes another form of dependency and routine. Desire, once released, demands maintenance; affection yearns for reciprocation; fantasy slips toward repetition, all of which constitute the “constraints aping marriage.” In seeking to break away from the confinements of monogamy, individuals may unwittingly reconstruct them in a new guise, finding themselves subject to familiar patterns of negotiation, expectation, and disillusionment. The supposed escape becomes another system of regulation, highlighting the persistence of human yearning for connection, and the inescapability of its attendant complications.