Sarah Treem, the co-creator of the new Showtime series The Affair, recently discussed the inspiration for the hit show with New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, who dedicated her Sunday column to a review of the series. A newlywed, Treem told Dowd about her perspectives on marriage, particularly the role of infidelity, which she said is basically inevitable.

Treem (34) was married in June to Jay Carson, a former Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton campaign spokesman who is a producer on House of Cards, for which Treem served as a writer. At one point in their conversation, Dowd told Treem that Carson asked her if he should be worried "given how knowingly his wife writes about infidelity" (emphasis added):

She laughed, replying, “I wrote the show when I was still single at 31, so at that point in your life you see a lot of infidelity. You have married men coming on to you. You see your friends already in affairs. From my perspective at that point, infidelity was all over the place. Now, being married, I would like my marriage to work. I love him, and I want to be faithful to him, and I want him to be faithful to me.” But, she adds matter-of-factly, “you probably have a 20 percent chance, maybe a 10 percent chance, of actually getting through an entire marriage with no infidelity.”

Treem also explained to Dowd her beliefs about the role of sex in marriage:

“I have this belief that, in all relationships, there’s this long erotic moment that happens at the beginning of the relationship,” she said. “It’s like the pole of a tetherball court, and then everything else is just basically that damn ball going around, winding and unwinding around that one erotic moment, and you’re trying to always get back to that incredible moment of connection with somebody, and it’s gone forever.”

Commenting on the centrality of sex in the show, Treem said while there’s “a lot of sex in this show,” it rarely features the characters having sex “where they’re actually unified.”​ Though the lead characters attempt to “connect,” said Treem, they “fail at it all the time.”

H/T The Slog.