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Heads up! It may take a few minutes to arrive. Why Do Happy People Cheat? Lauren Diethelm. Why People Cheat The desire to be unfaithful is not limited by gender, sexuality, or age. The Difference with Happy Relationships In happy relationships, someone might cheat not because they are dissatisfied with their partner, but because they are dissatisfied with themselves.
How Couples Counseling Helps with Infidelity Grappling with infidelity can lead to a lot of emotional distress—both in couples and in their counselor. More Stories. Iris Kimberg. How to Fire a Client Dr. Ben Caldwell. More content below. Robert Weiss. Lauren Vinopal. April 24, , PM. In this article:. Story continues. Latest Stories. Yahoo Life Shopping. In The Know by Yahoo. Yahoo Life Videos. Yahoo Life.
Underlying many of the reasons, however, lie a few threads. One is the role of unmet needs. One partner may be incapable of fulfilling their partner's needs, but far too often, those needs have not been expressed. Marital partners are not mind-readers. Another is the lack of addressing problems directly.
Running away from problems conflict avoidance rather than staying and addressing them is another crucial element in communication and commitment in marriage. Some of the reasons cited as the cause for cheating may include:. In addition to the primary reasons for cheating noted above, there are secondary reasons that may lead to an affair. Sometimes people have a suspicion that their spouse is cheating but don't have any solid evidence.
While often the best approach in marriage is to be direct, you may wonder if it will cause more damage to ask directly. And, of course, the answer your spouse gives could either be the truth or a lie.
The best approach will vary for different couples, but if you're concerned, it may be a good idea to look for some of the signs. In some marriages, an affair is a cry for help, a way to force the couple to finally face the problems that both parties are aware of but aren't addressing. In this case, the partner often actually tries to get caught as a way of bringing the issue to the fore. Other times a partner may simply see infidelity as an exit strategy—a way to end an unhappy marriage.
Regardless of the underlying reason a spouse cheats, it can either devastate a marriage or be the catalyst for rebuilding it, depending upon how the infidelity is dealt with. You may, however, want to explore how the dynamics between you and your spouse led you to this point. Recognizing that infidelity is a symptom of deeper issues can lead a couple to fix the underlying problems in their relationship and grow closer. If you were the one cheated on, it's critical to realize that you're not responsible for your spouse making the decision to cheat.
You are not to blame for his or her behavior. Women tend to find emotional affairs more threatening than sexual affairs, whereas men are more willing to forgive emotional affairs but for both, the most common response to learning of their partner's affair is jealousy.
Even if you were the one wronged, working with a professional may be helpful in coping and recovering yourself. Unresolved jealousy can lead to resentment, and as the old adage claims: "Resentment is like poison you drink yourself, and then wait for the other person to die.
Some couples can move past infidelity and move on to have even an even better relationship, whereas some cannot. Certainly, there are times when continuing the marriage wouldn't be recommended. Before you analyze the specifics of the affair from your spouse's perspective and look at why the affair occurred in terms of his or her needs, it's important to look at your own needs. This can be more challenging than it sounds, especially amidst the jealousy and anger.
If you were the one who had an affair, there are several steps you can take if you hope to save your marriage. Foremost you need to stop cheating and lying immediately and own your choice.
Being patient and giving your spouse space is essential. That doesn't say it will work out. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote that in modern life,. Bauman speaks to our nostalgia for unlived lives, unexplored identities, and roads not taken.
When we select a partner, we commit to a story. Yet we remain forever curious: What other stories could we have been part of? Affairs offer us a view of those other lives, a peek at the stranger within. Adultery is the revenge of the deserted possibilities. Dwayne had always cherished memories of his college sweetheart, Keisha. Over the years, he had often asked himself what would have happened had their timing been different.
Enter Facebook. The digital universe offers unprecedented opportunities to reconnect with people who exited our lives long ago. Never before have we had so much access to our exes, and so much fodder for our curiosity.
Lo and behold, they were both in the same city. She, still hot, was divorced. It seems to me that in the past decade, affairs with exes have proliferated, thanks to social media.
These retrospective encounters occur somewhere between the known and the unknown—bringing together the familiarity of someone you once knew with the freshness created by the passage of time. The flicker with an old flame offers a unique combination of built-in trust, risk taking, and vulnerability.
In addition, it is a magnet for our lingering nostalgia. The person I once was, but lost, is the person you once knew. P riya is mystified and mortified by how she is putting her marriage on the line. The constraints she is defying are also the commitments she cherishes. No conversation about relationships can avoid the thorny topic of rules and our all-too-human desire to break them. Our relationship to the forbidden sheds a light on the darker and less straightforward aspects of our humanity.
Bucking the rules is an assertion of freedom over convention, and of self over society. Acutely aware of the law of gravity, we dream of flying. Our conversations help Priya bring clarity to her confusing picture. If he knew, he would be crushed. He would never believe it. She may be right. Or perhaps it would. Some relationships collapse upon the discovery of a fleeting hookup. Others exhibit a surprisingly robust capacity to bounce back even after extensive treachery.
Priya has tried to end her affair several times. But the self-imposed cutoffs become new and electrifying rules to break. Three days later, the fake name is back in her phone. Yet her torment is mounting in proportion to the risks she is taking. Danger follows her to every movie theater and secluded parking lot.
It is not my place to tell Priya what she should do. Besides, she has already made it clear that for her, the right thing is to end the affair. This distinction between the person and the experience is crucial. You reconnected with an energy, a youthfulness. I know that it feels as if, in leaving him, you are severing a lifeline to all of that, but I want you to know that over time you will find that the otherness you crave also lives inside you.
I often say to my patients that if they could bring into their marriage even one-tenth of the boldness, the playfulness, and the verve that they bring to their affair, their home life would feel quite different.
Our creative imagination seems to be richer when it comes to our transgressions than to our commitments. I f Priya succeeds in ending the affair, and doing so with finality, a new dilemma will arise: Should she tell her husband, or should she keep her secret to herself? Could her marriage survive the pain of revelation? Could it continue with a lie undisclosed?
I have no tidy answer to offer. In many instances, however, I have helped couples work toward revelation, hopeful that it will open up new channels of communication for them.
Catastrophe has a way of propelling us into the essence of things. In the wake of devastating betrayals, so many couples tell me that they are having some of the deepest, most honest conversations of their entire relationship. Their history is laid bare—unfulfilled expectations, unspoken resentments, and unmet longings. Love is messy; infidelity, more so.
But it is also a window, like none other, into the crevices of the human heart. The revelation of an affair forces couples to grapple with unsettling questions: What does fidelity mean to us and why is it important? Is it possible to love more than one person at once?
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