Cheating is the breach of a fidelity agreement in a committed relationship. That agreement can be clear and spoken, but its totality is more often simply implied. Every committed relationship defines for themselves what constitutes cheating. Cheating is most often a symptom of a greater problem, and while it may signal the end for some relationships, it may also be an opportunity for growth in others.
What Constitutes Cheating?
“Cheating” has the colloquial definition of sex outside the relationship. This is really an antiquated definition given the emerging popularity of non-traditional committed relationships, and even traditionally, most individuals have a much broader definition of what constitutes cheating.
Depending on the relationship, examples of what may constitute cheating include:
- Pornography use
- Private masturbation
- Having dinner with an attractive friend of the opposite sex
- Going to a strip club
- Sex outside the relationship
- Cam sex online
- Fantasy internet affairs
- Having an intimate relationship with someone outside the relationship
One person might look at some of these examples and find them ludicrous, while another person may see each one as justified. What one person determines as cheating is usually a function of their values, beliefs, modeling from childhood, and social or cultural expectations. One should not assume that they have the same definition of cheating as their partner or spouse if there has never been any substantive, non-coercive discussion about the topic.
Reasons Why People Cheat
If you type the preceding heading into a search engine, you’ll find an infinite number of blogs and articles that will offer you all sorts of answers.
Common reasons people cheat on their partners include:
- Falling out of love
- Opportunity
- Not feeling committed
- Differences in sexual desire or bedroom death
- Feeling neglected
- Being unappreciated
- Getting even
- Sexual boredom and routine
- Revenge
These are excuses, not reasons. These are outcomes, not causes.
Most excuses for cheating can be better accounted for by the following reasons:
1. The Validation Stops
Couples often fall into the problem of demanding validation – essentially approval – for their relationship to be in harmony. There’s typically an unspoken but definitively expressed sentiment of: “You need to validate me no matter what, and if you don’t, we’re going to have a problem.”5
We often outsource how we feel about ourselves – our attractiveness, our desirability, our value – to someone else. It shows up as not feeling attractive unless your partner compliments you; demanding that your partner participate in a charade that they never, couldn’t possibly ever, find anyone but you attractive. Validation doesn’t have to be about desirability. It can be validation of being a good parent, a good lover, a good provider. The problem is that continually validating your partner, when how they feel about themselves is really their job to regulate, becomes exhausting.
One starts to wonder why they can’t do this for themselves. And as soon as things start to get rocky, guess what stops: the partner’s interest in validating you. If they’re feeling particularly irritated, they know you need their validation and know exactly what will happen if withheld. And if you’ve completely outsourced how you feel about yourself to someone else, you’re out of luck. That’s when cheating can start to feel like a good solution to meet the need to feel attractive and desirable again, often no matter from whom it can be acquired. And in scenarios such as this, do not assume attractiveness is a requirement for cheating.
Cheating is often about newness and validation. Cheating is rarely, “I was so overcome by the beauty before me that I decided I’ll just risk this 10-year relationship and also who cares about the kids?”
2. Letting Problems Fester & an Unwillingness to Address Them
By far what typically precedes an affair or cheating is a willingness to let minor problems fester into bigger problems. An avoidance of difficult conversations. Pretending everything is okay just to keep the peace. Blaming someone else instead of taking responsibility. Withholding and cutting off emotionally. Having sex you don’t want then getting so fed up with yourself that the preference is to stop entirely, rather than take chances and express vulnerability about your desires and displeasure, perhaps because one knows it would be invalidating to the partner. Cheating can often be about avoiding and diffusing marital tension around these issues.
3. Unclear Boundaries & Agreements
In some instances, there really is a lack of clarity of what constitutes cheating in a relationship. Or the agreement was a compromise someone couldn’t live with in the first place. I see very often people make accommodations about sexual matters (pornography, masturbation, etc.) that they never particularly had any intention of keeping anyway. There’s only so long someone can keep an agreement that was already a compromise on their own integrity. But this is a situation where the fundamentals weren’t there in the first place because no one was truly on board with the agreement.
4. Bad Match
After an affair, sometimes people just realize they were never a good match in the first place. As a species, we’re not the greatest at choosing mates. A lot of people find themselves in long-term relationships out of fear of being alone, the desire for stability, convenience, and lust rather than love. Over time, people sometimes discover the foundation of the relationship wasn’t terribly strong to begin with, and cheating might be a recognition of the issue, or even an out.
Risk Factors for Cheating
The following are examples of risk factors that may make a person more likely to cheat:
Addiction
While active addiction to substances can reduce inhibitions and foster opportunity for cheating, one shouldn’t assume that’s always the case. Even someone in recovery might not have fully worked through behavioral patterns that are associated with addiction, and behaviors such as secret-keeping (even when unnecessary) spill over into sobriety. Just as likely is a partner will use substances to tolerate bad sex or sexual boredom with their partner.
Modeling in Childhood
Children who grew up in homes where infidelity was present are at risk for replicating that behavior, just as they are for any other behavior they are presented with in childhood. As these children age, some reject that modeling and recognize it as something they fervently do not wish to reproduce. Others see it as viable and preferable. Stability may feel odd and unwanted.
Certain Mental Health Disorders
Some mental health disorders carry with them risk-taking and impulsivity that can lead to a disregard of consequences and toward instant gratification. The manic/hypomanic episodes of bipolar disorder I or II are sometimes cited; however, typically these episodes arrive with a constellation of disruptive symptoms, and it’s important to note that episodes are typically a matter of days or weeks.
This is a period when someone might engage in sexual risk-taking and sexual activities that they may otherwise find unacceptable for themselves. In cases when a mental health disorder is the culprit, it usually includes general and overall dysfunction in the relationships, not just in one domain of fidelity. I have never seen a mental health disorder, apart from some personality disorders, exclusively account for long-term and ongoing affairs. Some character traits of various personality disorders include a lack of empathy, entitlement, and ego-driven behaviors that can encourage cheating.4
Previous Patterns of Cheating
The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, as they say. If you met your current partner while they were still fully entrenched in an ongoing relationship – even if they say they will be ending that relationship soon – don’t be too surprised if you find yourself on the other end of that conundrum at some point.
People do, however, learn from their mistakes in many cases, and the entire prospect of therapy is that people can change. If someone has a history of cheating, but they have put in the considerable work required for their own personal growth, these behaviors may be well behind them.
Do Motivations for Cheating Differ by Sex?
Broadly, yes, the excuses for cheating differ by sex; however, the reasons, as previously stated, are fairly universal. There is an abundance of data that men cite sex and attention as primary motivators. Women cite emotional void and disconnection.2 Frequency by gender varies by study. Hypotheses include evolutionary factors, culutration, socialization, gender expectations and norms, etc.
Unsuccessful Strategies People Attempt to Reduce Risk of Cheating
In my practice, I often see partners implement draconian measures in their effort to reduce risk of cheating. These measures are rarely truly agreed upon, and most often one person is accommodating someone else’s insecurity or suspicious thinking. I always appreciate hearing these rules because they typically highlight the underlying issues in the relationship.
Examples of unsuccessful strategies to mitigate cheating include:
Preventing Partners From Interactions With the Opposite Sex
Translation: I don’t trust my partner and consider this relationship to be so on the brink that I don’t think he can withstand the presence of another woman at a dinner table. Solution: Only date men no one wants to have sex with. You won’t have this problem anymore, but unfortunately you won’t want to have sex with him either.
Sharing Email Passwords & Social Media Logins
Question: What do having a partner’s password and their level of trustworthiness have to do with each other? Consider: Either you’ll be inquiring about completely benign situations because you don’t have the full context, e.g., “Who is this woman?” – and no one likes to feel that they’re being watched – or you’ll be encouraging untrustworthy partners to just get sneakier.
Spending Every Possible Moment Together in Surveillance and Not Love
Implication: You believe you need to keep your partner in your sight at all times to hold this relationship together. That is frequently exhausting and only increases anxiety when you can otherwise not be together.
Insisting Your Partner Deny or Hide any Attraction to Others
Implication: You demand a charade that your partner cannot recognize attractiveness in others and wouldn’t be interested even if she could. You would prefer this fantasy of being the “one and only” to accepting reality and finding ways to have conversations about natural desire. This is absurd, because you know that you can recognize attractiveness in others. You just don’t act on it. Why do you think your partner lacks that skill? The issue is not whether your partner can identify an attractive person, it’s whether they have self-control.3
Thinking back to the discussion on validation and the demands for it, an example might be when there’s an attractive restaurant server:
- Partner A, who knows the server is attractive, because it’s obvious to anyone: “Do you think she’s cute?”
- Partner B, who spots a trap: “I didn’t notice.”
The desire to create an illusion that your partner finds you and only you attractive, if it were true, which it isn’t, shouldn’t give solace. That means you weren’t chosen. It means they didn’t see any other choice. Wouldn’t you rather your partner have chosen you from a sea of people instead of feeling like they are stuck with you because you’re the only attractive person they can see?
Prohibitions on Masturbation
Implication: This is generally a situation when someone perceives someone else’s masturbation as a reflection on them. Perhaps their attractiveness or desirability. Marty Klein has a wonderful article on this topic.1 I also am curious to know if telling the other person what they can and cannot do with their own body applies globally and where this particular agreement starts and stops. This is one of those rules that is virtually non-existent in same-gender relationships.
Prohibitions on Socializing With Single Friends
Implication: My partner will leave if she is reminded that not being in a relationship exists.
This is sometimes an effort to reduce opportunity for cheating, or a fear that their single friends’ lifestyle will be tempting. But most partners will view this as unreasonable, even if they comply. If instead you voice your concerns on a considered case-by-case basis, your partner is likely to take your concern more seriously.
Summary
These rules and strategies do very little to prevent cheating. They build resentment. A sense of being treated like a child. Once people start to feel like they are in a romantic relationship with a pseudo-parent, they look for sex and romance elsewhere. Of course, these rules might make a lot of sense in post-cheating recovery when a partner has proven they do not merit trust. But I often see these behaviors before any breach has occurred.
Very often, the partner imposing these rules is carrying with them remnants of betrayal from a past relationship, is replicating a model they saw in childhood, or subscribes to a version of love that means control and ownership. It is often not about the trustworthiness of the partner on which these rules are imposed, but the insecurity and fragility of the imposer.
Isolating partners from friends, telling them who they can see and who they can’t, what they can do with their bodies and when, forcing someone to walk on eggshells around you – these are demands people rarely accept in any other context except romantic relationships. People would not issue these prohibitions on family or friends, nor would people tolerate them imposed on themselves from those sources, but are often perfectly willing to accept them when it comes to romance. When people can’t control their own anxiety and fears, they try to control the people and situations around them. Secure couples do not seek to control each other because they have the greater expectation that each partner will control themselves.
Open Relationships & Negotiated Monogamy
Non-traditional relationships are becoming more and more common. They were largely the provenance of gay, lesbian, and bisexual relationships; however, they’re becoming more prominent across the board. These types of relationships can be fulfilling and healthy for the individuals involved, but they can also be unsuccessful attempts to manage relationship problems.
The couples that I have seen make these types of relationships work for themselves have done so through considered self-confrontation, unrelenting honesty with each other, and a willingness to compromise but not make compromises they can’t live with. They tend to be tremendously secure about their commitment to each other and are dedicated to solving not just sexual problems but relationship problems in general.
An example of a type of open agreement discussion might be when Partner A has a fetish of considerable fulfillment, but Partner B finds that particular activity outside of their moral or integrity scope. It might be agreed that Partner A can seek out that activity, and only that activity, outside the relationship in some type of “controlled” setting. Some people might be perfectly fine with this agreement. For others, it might be absolutely unacceptable, and in that case, Partner A can self-confront as to whether she can live without this activity. If she can’t, she can confront herself about whether she can be in a relationship that doesn’t fulfill her needs in this one domain. Some might decide they can live without it, others will decide it’s too integral of a component for them and need to move on. Plenty of people self-confront themselves out of unsatisfying relationships.
Another example might be the couple for whom sexual monogamy is simply of very little consequence for them. But in terms of sex, they may still have certain agreements about what is and what is not acceptable. For example, secondary relationships may be completely off limits, or repeated encounters with the same person. The thing about non-traditional fidelity agreements is that they are non-traditional. The partners figure out what works for them.
More often than not, however, open relationships, threesome arrangements, and other similar strategies tend to be the thing Partner A wants and the thing Partner B tolerates to keep Partner A. It’s sometimes an unwillingness to tackle the anxiety or problem-solving hard work required to make their primary partnership more sexually satisfying, and it’s just easier to agree to outsource the solution to new people. I more often see this strategy end up being short-lived and often leading to insecurity and resentment.
Helpful Strategies People Use to Reduce Risk of Cheating
Have you and your partner sat down and had a legitimately open-minded and curiosity-fueled conversation about what cheating is? That’s a good step in determining an equitable fidelity agreement. Note that just like in law, coercion and manipulation in contract discussions are generally frowned upon. And just like any negotiation, sometimes people decide not to go into business together when discussions have finished.
Rather than make assumptions, ask your partner under what circumstances they would even slightly begin to consider cheating. If the answer is, “I would never cheat on you,” congratulations, you have a very well-trained partner. More likely though, your partner may suspect they are walking into a validation-seeking trap with that question, but that’s not at all the intention of this question.
I explain to partners that the question is a way of getting at what is really important to someone in a relationship, and it models a willingness to have difficult conversations and strategize how to handle these issues if they occur. Once you have an understanding of what kind of breakdowns are relationship-enders, you can strategize ahead of time about how you’ll handle these situations if they arise.
For example, in a highly secure couple with unfettered intimacy, Partner A can hear Partner B say, “There’s someone at work that I find myself incredibly attracted to, and I wouldn’t normally feel the need to mention that, but it’s starting to become a problem.” Partner B knows, through the emotional work that’s already been done in the relationship, that she can say this to her partner without this disclosure being a catastrophe. Partner A will certainly have some pretty strong feelings about this disclosure, but then they can work through it.
In this example, perhaps the issue is the sex has turned into a chore. Maybe their time together has started to wane. Maybe they’ve turned their focus exclusively to their child at the suffering of the romance. These types of disclosures do not need to mean someone has fallen out of love or that they want to leave, in fact, if your partner is telling you, that’s fairly strong evidence to the contrary. It does, however, force one to self-confront the need to feel “the one and only,” “the best lover, “the best partner,” etc. This is an example of how both partners can grow from this dilemma.
In terms of fidelity agreements, when they are made to a partner, they end up being about what each person thinks they won’t be able to get away with. That doesn’t hold up under stress, spite, or sadness. In my work with couples, I suggest that partners not make fidelity agreements with each other. Instead, each partner makes an agreement to themselves and with their own integrity. When we make an agreement to ourselves about what we are willing and not willing to accept of our own behavior, we think about things a little bit differently, and we’re not victim to the common “excuses” cited earlier.
Illustrated: I’m much less likely to betray myself on commitments I’ve made to myself. I rarely am that angry at myself. I rarely am in an argument with myself. I rarely wish I could storm out of the room and never see myself again. I rarely wish revenge upon myself. When we make agreements to ourselves, those agreements are not subject to how I feel about my partner on any given day.
Coping With Cheating in a Relationship
I have seen couples completely rebuild and redefine their relationship and move forward successfully. I’ve also seen people decide to move on and thrive. This may be hard to hear, but accept that the relationship you had before is now over. That sounds grim, but something about the relationship already wasn’t working. You probably wouldn’t want to go back to how things were.
There was lack of communication, or unwillingness to address problems, or difficulty around tolerating anxiety around acknowledging one’s true needs and desires. Instead, the goal should be to take an inventory of where you’re at now, to have each partner self-confront about what they really want, and see if you can rebuild from there.
If you are the offending partner, recovery does not happen on your timeline. Your apology is not usually sufficient to repair the rupture on its own. You may be impatient about this and be ready to move on, but your partner probably isn’t and will need or want time.
Note that if you are the partner who has experienced the breach of fidelity agreement, and you chose to stay together, doing so while also holding your partner in an eternal state of punishment will not make you happy. It might even make you less happy. So careful consideration about whether you really can integrate this experience into this “new” relationship going forward, and move on to a healthier place, is really something to consider.
It is certainly the case where sometimes it is only one person who is totally in the “wrong.” But more often, it’s also important to recognize that although someone might feel betrayed, which is the legitimate side effect of betrayal, they’re not totally off the hook here when it comes to rebuilding this relationship.
The underlying reasons for cheating were relationship problems. Were you a participant in creating an environment that fostered keeping the peace rather than addressing problems? Did you signal that hinting at sexual boredom would send you into a week-long misery spiral? Did you exert so much control over your partner that it might actually have been logical for someone to try to flee?
Individual Therapy Skills That Can Help Prevent Cheating
Couples therapy is often out of reach for most people. Insurance does not typically cover these services, and out-of-pocket fees for couples therapy can be higher than individual session fees. You may also have a partner who refuses to engage in couples therapy—something you should take note of, by the way. There are, however, plenty of skills you can learn and practice in individual therapy that you can apply not just to romantic relationships, but your life in general.
Start Tackling Difficult Conversations
Some therapists will work with you to develop communication strategies that can make initiating difficult conversations more comfortable. An ability to tackle your own anxiety around having difficult conversations will prevent relationship problems from escalating. I often encourage people to manage their anxiety around difficult conversations by being less invested in the outcome, which you can’t typically control anyway, and more invested in how they handle themselves. The outcome may not be satisfying, but if they’re proud of how they asserted themselves, expressed their true thoughts, and stood up for their own integrity, that is a therapeutic success.
Self-Confrontation
Good therapists don’t let you off the hook. They recognize blame and finger pointing for what it is, often an unwillingness to look inward and take responsibility for one’s own feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. Therapy can help you get out of the habit of this. You can’t know what you want in a relationship if it’s wrapped up in everyone else’s needs and wants.
See the Bigger Picture
Be willing to tolerate short-term pain for long-term growth. A common reason people get stuck in miserable situations is because the short-term pain required to make real change is often less preferable to the familiar pain of the status quo. People get stuck in this holding pattern for years and years. A good therapist knows how to help you face this.
Soothe Your own Anxiety
I’m not talking about clinical anxiety, I’m talking about the typical anxiety around change, difficult choices, fears of confrontation, etc. Good therapy can help you manage this so that you can work toward reducing relational anxiety and start working toward your ultimate relationship goals.
Additional Resources
- Mental Health America
- National Alliance on Mental Health
- MentalHealth.gov
- Online Therapist Directory: Sort therapists by specialty, cost, availability and more. Watch intro videos and see articles written by the therapists you’re considering working with. When you’ve found a good match, book an online therapy appointment with them directly.
Are you ready to connect with a therapist but feel a little overwhelmed by all your options? Speak with one of Choosing Therapy’s Client Navigators. Client Navigators are mental health professionals who will listen to what you’re looking for in a therapist and help pair you with the best possible fit. Getting started is free, easy, and confidential.
