And then dying will be the end of something dazzling: dying will be one of the most important acts in my life. I’m afraid of dying: I don’t know what nebulae and milky ways await me ~clarice lispector

People who have affairs always speak as if they are the first humans to discover desire. I've mistaken novelty for transcendence a lot of time as a kid, but I'm surprised adults do it more often as if the shelves are not already heavy with the corpses of people who thought they were special. There's no criminal psychology to answer for affairs (i.e. why people do it?) but literature (as well as gossip, religion, court records and living memories, but I'm talking literature for this) answered it unironically many times. One of the greatest answers IMHO is Anna Karenina, it's rarely discussed in the context of exceptionalism, which is what I would like to do.

Exceptionalism is the belief that rules are for other people. That patterns exist until I arrive. IMO affairs are not driven by desire which is (IMHO) common and boring. What drives affairs (I'm tired of implying that this is my humble opinion, so take it as an implicit from now on) is the conviction that consequences are negotiable if your interior life feels sufficiently profound.

Anna Karenina is not a story about love but about a woman who mistakes intensity for transcendence and sincerity for immunity. Anna does not think she is immoral she thinks she is honest. She thinks her suffering sanctifies her choices and that because her feelings are real, the structure of the world will rearrange itself around them. I used to think something similar, until I didn't (plot twist; the world does not).

Tolstoy was so damn merciless because reality is indeed merciless. Anna stepped outside the social order not quietly but so loudly, it acknowledge her pain as justification. The punishment is not divine or some sort of magic it's literally structural, just like mechanics (I need to assure you society does have dynamics, but maybe I can elaborate on that somewhere else. Or never.)

She lost anything socially speaking. Doors close. Rooms go quiet. People do not scream at her anymore. They simply stop seeing her as human. Vronsky does not turn evil but he turns finite. His ambition and pride assert themselves because love does not abolish psychology and for Anna’s identity, it collapses inward. People do not scream at her anymore because screaming still acknowledges a human subject. They simply stop recognizing her as one.

This is what structural punishment looks like, aka ontological downgrade. Anna becomes an inconvenience in the social grammar. A disruption. Something that makes others uncomfortable by existing. And discomfort is always managed by distance.

Vronsky does not become a villain (my guess is that it's a fantasy belongs to sentimental readers). However, like I mentioned, he becomes something much worse, finite. Psychology (or mind, for the lack of a better word) does not evaporate in the presence of passion. It waits then it collects its debt.

Now let's restate the obvious; the affair does not free her from social structure. It expels her from it. And outside structure there is no meaning, only exposure. Every glance becomes a trial and every silence becomes a verdict. Without shared norms, there is no shared reality.

This is why exceptionalism always fails. Not because society is vindictive, but because systems do not tolerate permanent exceptions. Anna believes her feelings should count as a new law and sadly laws are not persuaded by sincerity.

People love to say she was punished for loving too deeply. That is a so biased analysis. She was punished for believing depth conferred exemption and that her interior life outranked external order. For believing that because something felt necessary, it therefore was.

It's untrue that love destroyed her. Love survives all kinds of bad decisions. However, she mistook love for sovereignty. And, again, sovereignty claimed without structure always ends the same way: isolation, paranoia, collapse.

Now imagine the counterfactual people love to hide behind. What if she cheats and nothing collapses? What if the affair is civilized and almost elegant?

Structure is not only social but also epistemic. The moment one person knows, the system is already unstable, not emotionally but ontologically (very smart face emoji), knowledge is asymmetrical FYI. And asymmetry is unstable.

The one who knows becomes a structural weight by existing (even if no acts). They carry a truth that cannot circulate and truth that cannot circulate does not disappear but curdles. And the relationship no longer has a shared map of reality.

The cheated-on partner becomes something new that destabilizes systems simply by remembering. They do not need to accuse but you can say that just their knowledge changes the gravitational field for others.

Meanwhile, the cheater must now manage two realities; public continuity and the private deviation. This requires constant cognitive partitioning. A divided self is not tragic yet, but it is expensive and life becomes logistical, memory becomes selective, language bcomes strategic. and all of that over time erodes coherence aka entropy.

But actually let's suppose none of this erupts. Suppose everyone behaves impeccably. No confessions. No slips. Still, the structure has already changed.

The cheated-on partner now lives in a world where their perception is unreliable by design. They are expected to trust a narrative that excludes crucial data. Over time, this produces one of two outcomes: hypervigilance or dissociation. Either the world becomes a crime scene, or it becomes numb, both states love can not survive them.

People think tragedy requires exposure. It does not. Exposure is usually just the visible ending. The real punishment happens earlier, in structure. In the fact that once one person knows, the relationship is no longer a shared reality but a managed illusion.

This is why the fantasy of “no one gets hurt” is incoherent (I already proven that it is not possible). Hurt is not the metric, integrity is. And integrity, once breached, does not announce its departure. It simply stops doing its job.

Later, if you want structure, it looks like this:

• First, asymmetry of knowledge.
• Then, asymmetry of power.
• Then, asymmetry of reality.
• Then, slow institutional collapse of trust.
• Then, either revelation or emotional extinction.

People expect a sudden strike, instead, things slowly wear away, and when that happens, no one feels guilty.