Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s former chief executive, seemed like a happily married man. Forty years in marriage, after all, is an enviable record, and many marriages that have lasted this long will have weathered many storms that normally force couples to divorce or separate.

But Mr Huang’s current woes—being forced out of a job he had held for 33 years at a company he helped co-found—have been triggered, technically, by an extramarital affair. He has been romantically involved with a woman named Edith Huang who US intelligence has determined is a Chinese spy. It is hard to see how he would have lost his job had he not started this extramarital affair.

As news of the affair circled the globe, the New York Times, which broke the story of Mr Huang’s romantic relationship, reported that he had been seeing another woman, Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president for healthcare, who reported to Mr Huang. Like Mr Huang, Ms Powell is married.

This damning media expose raises pertinent questions about the institution of marriage: If a 63-year-old man with an enviable reputation to protect can cheat on his spouse of 40 years by having not one but multiple extramarital affairs, how about other men in whom the media has zero interest?

Can marriage really remain immune to infidelity given that marriages that may look stable today can, in the course of time, be hurled onto the rocks by cheating? And given that there is so much we do not know going on in marriages until there is a media expose or something, does it even make sense to assume that the stable-looking marriages are devoid of cheating?

The New York Times reported that Mr Huang is among a long list of chief executives of US companies who have had relationships with subordinates. One of them is Brian Krzanich, who resigned in 2018 from Intel, the chip maker, after acknowledging a “past consensual relationship” with an employee. It is unclear whether all the executives the Times cited are married, but Mr Krzanich had a wife.

Many high-profile married people continue to have extramarital affairs by going to great lengths to hide evidence. Maybe humans are incompatible with marriage. It requires couples to have sex only within the marriage, but people generally treat sex like food. They want variety. They want to relieve monotony. Married people sometimes find their coworkers more attractive than their spouses. That can be fertile ground for infidelity.

A weekly column about women and men. Views and commentary on everything from love, marriage, sex, money, desire, betrayal and power to all the glorious mess in between. No sides. No sacred cows. Just The Third Chair: unnamed, unaligned and sitting close enough to hear both sides.