In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great American novel The Great Gatsby, a self-made millionaire aspires to win the heart of a woman he once loved. Daisy is married and unavailable, but Gatsby has idealized her for years. He knows that she appreciates the outward signs of wealth, fame, and power—things that confer status—so he reinvents himself as a wealthy tycoon, hoping this will impress her enough to make her value him. He benefits from this quest because it focuses his energies, motivates him, and brings him the clothes and cars and cash that sometimes make life fun and exciting. Gatsby makes his money by bootlegging liquor during Prohibition, when it was illegal and therefore risky and lucrative. Alcohol has destroyed myriad lives, but in moderation it has been part of the good life in many cultures for millennia; one could argue that Gatsby’s path to success was not so antisocial as to be self-discrediting—he is no Al Capone, and no Macbeth. But such success itself poses a problem: if it all works out, and Daisy is won over by glitz and bling, how will he know she really loves him? Gatsby is a man, not a Rolls Royce or a bank account.

The book ends in tragedy, when Gatsby is killed by another character. But had he lived, one possible outcome would’ve been a temporary affair between him and Daisy, followed by some kind of disillusion. Either she would reject him and stay with her boorish husband (Tom), or Gatsby would tire of her upon realizing that she loves his status, his money, his power, more than she is capable of loving him. Such disillusion would be agonizing, but it would do him a world of good. Disillusion is the way out of illusion, and some illusions can be extremely hard to escape because their logic has a seamless continuity that conceals the exits. Of course I want to live in a giant mansion; of course more money is always better, ad infinitum; of course a higher status will enhance my success at anything I could possibly undertake in life, including finding a mate. It is because these assumptions seem so obvious that their fundamental error is so hard to detect.

Freud taught that the purpose of psychoanalysis (it applies to mental health treatment in general) was to help people to love and to work. The idea that more-is-always-better has serious drawbacks on both sides. In work, it threatens what we call “work/life balance” and risks work addiction, in pursuit of ever-more earnings, far beyond our ability to enjoy them. In love, more-is-better can mean either of two troublesome things. It can mean I am stuck in a compulsive accumulation of temporary partners, building my “body count” without checking its effect on my wellbeing. Or it can mean I am doing what Gatsby did, pursuing just one partner, but using means that are accumulation-based: if I have more status than these competitors, then I’ll win the competition for her. What gets neglected here is the way my toys and my success can upstage the merely human, unique individual I actually am. I also may fail to notice how much my attention is diverted from my “Daisy” onto the men with whom I’m busy competing, jockeying for position, comparing the size of our houses (paging Dr. Freud), etc.

If such a disillusioned Gatsby can survive the disillusioning experience, he may win the real prize, one more valuable than the solid gold toilet, or the victory over his male rivals, or even Daisy herself. The real prize is a mature freedom: freedom from the endless compulsion to accumulate ever more status and wealth, and with it, freedom from the need to woo the kind of person who remains focused on that kind of stuff. Whoever escapes from the prison-house of status-seeking gets to love and be loved by people who are also free of it.

There are plenty of good reasons for a couple to want lots of money, or for a single person to want wealth in an eventual marriage. Raising kids, running a small business, keeping a theater afloat, endowing a community’s nonprofit, all these require plenty of cash and become impossible if there isn’t enough, and the list goes on and on. What’s not so good, is chasing wealth as a substitute for self-love, and hoping that the display of this wealth will attract somebody else who has the same confusion between wealth and love.

People who are unconsciously afraid of love might not be able to tolerate getting the love they really need, but do not want. So they collude with similar people to form relatively loveless couples, held together not by deep affection, acceptance, and desire, but by the glue of status, purchasing power, and the conspicuous display of resources. Real love is associated with eventual death, because if I fall in love with one unique, mortal, individual person, I will one day lose them and it will matter to me. If I marry someone I really love who really loves me, I move forward on what Kierkegaard called “the stages on life’s way,” and this means leaving youth behind and getting closer to the end. Focusing on status and trophies can instead create the illusion that I am outside of the arc of the life cycle, that my world is one of endless youthful playdates and context-free experience, often of a dissociative, thrill-seeking kind. Diverse pleasures have their place, and there’s nothing inherently bad about thrills. But it’s worth checking: am I doing this as a defense against something else? Might I be partying quite this much because I am avoiding something?

Infidelity is always happening somewhere, and it always involves at least three people; a cheater (let’s call that person Delta), a cheated-on (call this one Epsilon), and a third person, who comes from outside. Couple’s therapy rarely includes that one, so we’ll only discuss those two genderless Greek-lettered persons. The concept of infidelity only has meaning in the context of an attempt at a monogamous commitment, so the world of polyamory and other alternative arrangements is respectfully set aside for the purposes of this discussion.

Most people have either cheated or been cheated on, at least once in their romantic lives; many have been in each position at one time or another. The pains of guilt or betrayal are extreme when we’re young and naive, full of huge feelings without the wisdom of experience. Disillusion can be embittering. But if we endure infidelity early in life, we get to enjoy plenty of future decades with those lessons already installed. Big mistakes and betrayals are always possible, but people who have learned from experience can successfully make such crises extremely unlikely. Cheating on your boo in high school can put a guilty wretch in your mirror, and getting jilted in eleventh grade hurts plenty—but it’s much worse when it happens ten years into a marriage, especially if the couple has to tell their kids about it.

Cheating is: a mistake. Like most mistakes, it does not have to define you. It might forever define you in the eyes of the one you betray, but if you stop cheating, you can reinvent yourself—with or without that injured partner, by yourself, or with someone new. You may be Delta this time around, but you need never be in that awful role again. You can use the ordeal as a schoolhouse whose central lesson is that the price of cheating is extremely high, whether you get caught or not, so that almost no circumstances make cheating a good enough option to be worth it. You may be Epsilon (cheated on) this time, but you can turn this disaster to good account by distilling from it the knowledge necessary to avoid any future repetitions and Never. Be. Cheated. On. Again. Since this lesson is a bit more subtle and complicated than Delta’s lesson, let’s discuss it further.

Most cheaters aren’t sociopaths; some are. Other personality disorders, in particular narcissistic and borderline pathologies, can resemble sociopathy in this striking capacity for deception. Persons thus afflicted can lie well, all the time, to anybody, uninhibited by conscience or principle, with a skill that makes their deceptions very hard to detect. They lack the inner psychic structure that would otherwise generate inconvenient compassion for those they deceive. The missing psychic structure leaves plenty of room for a frictionless compartmentalization that gives them remarkably little trouble. They can smoothly escalate from withholding important information to outright lying. Unlike ordinary liars, sociopaths don’t just blunder forward in hasty improvisations, hoping for the best. They actively manipulate their partners, implementing strategic webs of bad data and false signals whose exquisite architecture is their own delicious secret. Some even lead truly double lives, with whole families that don’t know about each other’s existence. But these people are quite rare, with antisocial personality disorder (the current term for sociopathy) occurring in 2% to 4% of the general population. If you find yourself with such a person, your task is to end the relationship; to discover why you chose such a person; to develop criteria for screening out similar people in the future; and to heal from any underlying masochism that might have influenced your choice. Again, it’s very rare that the problem is a genuine sociopathy, so let’s set those cases aside at this point and consider infidelity dynamics that are much more common.

Most people who cheat have, by the time they bring their sexual and/or emotional needs outside the relationship, already sulked for months or years before they become sufficiently despairing about the relationship to go ahead and ruin it. They start by sending signals that they’re unhappy, the biggest of which is emotional withdrawal. If Delta’s signals of unhappiness don’t get through, it’s generally because Epsilon is too busy idealizing the relationship to consider Delta’s new and troublesome information. Idealization isn’t always a happy state. Its main feature is avoidance of reality, either by pretending that the relationship is rosy and trouble-free (“other people have to work at marriage, but lucky us, we don’t”), or by pretending that the relationship may be troubled, but is somehow uniquely indestructible.

The error—Epsilon’s blindness to Delta’s unhappiness signals—is of course a distorted perception, a misapprehension of the other person’s state of mind. But it is also (and perhaps more profoundly) rooted in an identity issue: one says to oneself, “I am someone who has married well, would never get cheated on, will never become divorced—that bad stuff only happens to other people.” Such self-deception is only human, but it is hubristic. Your partner is not an angel, and neither are you. This fact need not, must not, ruin anything—except the idealization, which began as a valuable element of falling in love, but must sooner or later be outgrown, replaced by a deeper, more mellow form of enduring esteem.

The lesson that will protect you from being cheated on in the future is: signals of unhappiness must be taken seriously, without procrastination, even if it makes you feel less lucky, or successful, or safe, than you are used to feeling. Have the necessary conversations about how each of you is doing, what hurts, what’s boring, what’s missing—what aspects of the relationship are giving each of you trouble of various kinds. If you’re too scared to have those conversations, or if they aren’t going well, get the help you need. Couple’s therapy can do ten times more good for your relationship before infidelity than it can do after it. Idealization blocks you off from the possibility of seeking couple’s therapy. But once you get started, it can facilitate a warm, good-faith, emotionally connected critique that is more humane and wholesome than the idealization.

The sadomasochistic contract goes like this. The sadist says, I can do whatever I want to you, because I know you won’t leave me. The masochist says, You can do whatever you want to me, as long as you don’t leave me.

In the kink world, “masochism” means getting pleasure from pain. But in the mental health world, it refers to something very different: a chronic, unconscious need for punishment, and all the things a person does to indulge that need—unconsciously motivated mistakes, losses, self-defeating behaviors, regrettable remarks, anything that will trigger an authoritarian response from within, and/or a retaliation from without.

Kink is not to be pathologized, and people who enjoy it don’t have to fear that therapy will take their kinks away. But kink should be a free choice, an informed and deliberate selection among the options for a healthy sex life. Your submissiveness or sexual masochism might be an unchosen temperament that you discover inside yourself, but the erotic exercise of it ought to be a free choice.

Masochism outside the sexual sphere—an ongoing, dynamic need for punitive suffering—generally has no redeeming value. You might suppose it serves as a spur to achievement, but that’s just compulsion, not the voluntary embrace of work for work’s own intrinsic goodness. You might use it to assuage guilt, but that reinforces the guilt without addressing its irrational roots and its basic injustice. You might use punishment to stay connected to a parent whose love was autocratic and severe in a way that felt reassuringly firm and unmistakably present, but that prevents a healthier form of love from developing in its place. The need for punishment is a relic of old defenses that have come to cost more than they’re worth.

The way out involves correctly labeling the masochism as an old solution to an old problem, reinforcing its connection to the past that explains it. That was then; this is now. So there’s a new opportunity to settle things differently, in a less moralistic way, geared to the facts at hand, not to the old situation and its more primitive world of tyranny and hierarchy. Long ago, that world taught you that a cosmic balance would only be maintained if you contributed sacrifices to it, in the form of large chunks of your personal pain. This has long since turned out not to be true, but the masochism somehow got locked-in by a hidden contract that runs on misguided loyalty to the child parts-of-self that first signed onto it. It may also be enforced by an equally unconscious hope of eventual rescue-from-outside, so that breaking the contract (giving up the need for punishment) is linked to despair about rescue and guilt about disloyalty.

The present masochism gets dissolved by reaching for the past, where the explanation lies, and the future, where the possibilities are. In the future, I will one day die—and my renewed awareness of this finitude wakes me to the fact that I might-as-well let go of the old need for suffering. Also in the future, but closer to the present, are all the nights and days I still might enjoy if I can dissolve the masochistic pact in a solvent stronger than fear, which is love. I am more loyal to my child self, not less loyal, if I dissolve the contract I signed as a little kid and replace it with loving nurturance and protection, the free gift from my adult self to this terrified inner kid. The long-awaited rescue from outside is really a rescue from inside, because it’s from a part of me—but it is from outside the child part, as its source is the grown-up self I have become in the long meantime. Therapy helps to direct resources to this loving adult self, rather than let those current resources get routinely burned-up in the service of the old masochistic machinery. The well-resourced adult self is better able to bestow those resources, as loving-kindness, onto the child parts of you that need it most.

At the job interview, the people asking the questions are usually searching for a particular experience they want to have with an applicant in the interview itself. The one who can give them that experience usually gets the job. What they want is an interaction, but it’s also a display. They want to have a conversation in which their specific, actual questions really reach the new person (that’s the interaction part). The questions evoke answers presented with a calm exuberance that’s a pleasure to watch (that’s the display). In music, the Italian phrase con brio means “with spirit, with vigor.” This kind of animated, engaged demeanor arises when the applicant has both confidence and expertise—a combination that usually comes from work experience, so it tends to count as evidence of work experience. Resumes, too, are evidence of work experience, but not everyone who has done a job has also learned from it, internalized its procedures and its ethos, and achieved good feelings about their ability to do it well in the future. Those are what the people doing the hiring are looking for in the interview, and the best evidence for it are answers that match the interviewers’ questions; that are focused on the concrete content of the job’s actual entailments (rather than abstractions about what kind of job it is), but aren’t entirely limited to that; and that show some degree of enjoyment from the applicant that springs from the pleasure of being both interested in something and good at it.

Applicants for teaching jobs are often advised, wisely, to treat the interview like a lesson, and to teach the interviewers about the way the job works and how to do it well. But this advice can apply to many other kinds of work, too—not just jobs in education. The teaching frame of mind, the Teacher role, can take you out of your ego-driven worry about how you’re being perceived, because it helps you to focus on the material at hand and the communication process. Value judgments and the fear of embarrassment, imaginary comparisons of yourself to others, worry about rejection or failure—these should be crowded-out by the enjoyable business of sharing what you know. One of the best indicators of your likely success is that the interview was fun. If it wasn’t, you might not like the job itself, either, in which case you’ve “dodged a bullet” by not getting it. The capacity to enjoy the interview not only bespeaks a confidence that comes from competence, it also suggests you’ll enjoy the work itself, which is associated with better performance. A hiring is a contract between employer and employee, and the enjoyment of an interview is a good sign that both parties may well benefit. If you feel qualified, stay in touch with your desire for the job, with your knowledge of the field, and with the pleasure you take in excelling at this particular type of work. It will probably show.