My husband sends me a photo of himself to show me his new glasses. In the corner of the shot, just behind him on our bed, I see the face of a woman smiling up at him. My heart stops momentarily. I’m angry, I’m afraid, but I’m also a little bit—not excited, exactly, and definitely not thrilled—but... roused, perhaps? Yes. Flushed? Certainly. Aroused? No. But then again, it is hard to say. The moment passes when I recognise the face on the bed as my own. It’s a throw pillow with my face on it—a gag Christmas gift from me to him. And yet, through my relief, I feel my heart still pounding. I don’t know whether I want to fight him or fuck him.

The second season of HBO’s The White Lotus features two young married couples on vacation together at a Sicilian resort. One couple, Harper and Ethan, represent the good moral couple. They are scrupulously honest with each other, supportive of each other’s careers, ethical in their global concerns, and mind-numbingly unsexy, despite their good looks. The other couple are not only husband and wife, they are also parents. Cameron and Daphne are joyfully in love. They kiss, they giggle, they caress. Their flirtations as a married couple are indecent and even scandalous. They are doing what Oscar Wilde called “airing one’s clean laundry in public.” Their passion for one another is resentfully described as “a front” by Harper, but even in private, Cameron and Daphne playfully make love and sleep nestled tenderly together. It all seems too good to be true, which is why Harper feels secretly delighted when she discovers that it is. Cameron cheats on Daphne. And, it seems, Daphne cheats on Cameron. They’re fakes.