Relationships: Cheating
September 25, 2009 | Leave a Comment
“Why would my boyfriend cheat on me?”
“I’m pretty sure my wife is cheating on me. I want to know why.”
“I know that my husband has been cheating on me for years. I don’t get why he does this.”
Why do people cheat on their partners? Why do others have affairs that their partners know about?
Here are some of the reasons for cheating that I have encountered in my many years of counseling.
- Ed has been cheating on his wife for years. Ed is addicted to the thrill of conquest. It is not actually the sex he is after, but the sense of power he feels when he is able to get a woman in bed with him. Because Ed takes no responsibility for his own feelings and sense of worth, he uses women to fill him and define him. It has nothing to do with his wife – it is all about his lack of responsibility for his own neediness.
- Eloise cheats on her husband because she is seeking the attention from men that she refuses to give to herself. Eloise is constantly giving herself up to her husband and then blaming him for her unhappiness. Like Ed, Eloise takes no responsibility for her own feelings and needs. She seeks validation through sex and attention outside of her marriage because she refuses to learn to love herself. Eloise’s cheating has nothing to do with her husband.
- Max is terrified of intimacy. While he claims to love his girlfriend, he has a deep fear of being controlled by a woman. Instead of taking responsibility for his fears and developing a loving adult aspect of himself who is capable of setting limits against engulfment, his way of avoiding this fear is to have affairs. His cheating has nothing to do with his girlfriend.
Here are some reasons for having affairs that their partners know about, which cannot be called cheating since they are being honest about it:
- Gene and Gloria married after being long-time friends. They hoped that the passion would develop between them, but it never did. They care deeply about each other but they have no chemistry. While Gene is fine with this, Gloria isn’t and has a second relationship that meets her needs for passion and romance. Gene knows about this and accepts it.
- Roger has been with Edith for 30 years. While he loves her and doesn’t want to leave her and break up their family, they have little in common and little to say to each other. Roger has another relationship with Angie – a deeply connected emotionally and sexually intimate relationship. Edith knows about this, as Roger spends half his time with Angie. While Edith doesn’t like this, she has accepted it rather than end their marriage.
What I see is that there are basically two major reasons people have affairs, the first being far more prevalent than the second:
* They are addicted to getting filled up and getting their sense of worth through sex or conquest. They are needy people who emotionally abandon themselves and use sex or power to fill the inner black hole that comes from their self-abandonment. These people generally have multiple affairs.
* They are in a long-term marriage that they don’t want to leave, but the marriage is completely unfulfilling. These people do not have multiple affairs, but have a committed relationship with another person while staying married. Their partners generally know about it.
Most people who cheat are unwilling to do the inner work necessary to fill their own inner emptiness. Their cheating is addictive, and it is likely that they are also participating in other addictions to fill their emptiness – smoking, drinking, drugs, spending, gambling, food, work, TV, and so on. Until they decide to learn how to love themselves and take responsibility for their own feelings, it is unlikely that they will stop cheating.
Author Bio: Margaret Paul, Ph.D. is a best-selling author of 8 books and co-creator of the powerful Inner Bonding.
Save Your Marriage Infidelity Doesn’t Have To Mean The End
July 22, 2009 | Leave a Comment
Of all the things that can tear apart a marriage, infidelity is one of the biggest reasons. Extramarital affairs are a betrayal of all the things that marriage is supposed to be about. A marriage is supposed to be a union of two lives, two people bonded together for a lifetime, and breaking that bond is one of the most difficult things to over come.
In a marriage, infidelity isn’t just what happens when somebody begins a physical relationship outside of the marriage. Infidelity can also be emotional, when one of the partners in a marriage begins to share their life with someone outside the marriage.
This is known as emotional infidelity, and it has become an even more serious problem in the last few decades. One of the reasons for this is because workplaces, one of our prime social engagements in modern times, have become increasingly more mixed.
In addition to that it is even easier to communicate with people on the sly. Email and instant messaging and texting have all made it easier to bond with people that you shouldn’t be bonding with. While this isn’t the cause of emotional infidelity, it is a factor.
At the same time, physical infidelity has also become easier. We spend more time apart than we once did, and it is not at all uncommon to spend the majority of time at work, which gives us a very handy excuse when we make the decision to cheat in our marriage. Infidelity is a choice, make no mistake about that.
But the thing to remember is that all of these things are excuses and opportunities, not reasons. Changing the excuses won’t change the marriage, won’t solve anything. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t overcome cheating in marriage. Infidelity is a big problem, but it is not an insurmountable one.
The very first thing you need to do is to figure out what went wrong in your marriage. Infidelity isn’t something that happens in a vacuum; there is always a reason when things like that happen. Something has broken in your relationship and it needs to be fixed in order to get past the cheating.
You need to make sure that you don’t blame the other person. Yes, they cheated on you. No, it wasn’t your fault. But you need to move past it, because playing the blame game will only delay the kind of emotional healing that needs to take place. You need to, as best you can, put it all behind you.
Once you’ve found out why and began work on it, you need to reestablish the trust in the marriage. Infidelity destroys trust, and it’s going to be difficult to repair what was been broken. You need to work on rebuilding the trust. Don’t expect it to happen right away, and don’t expect it to be easy.
But if you can follow these steps, you can save your marriage. Infidelity is terrible, but every relationship can be repaired. You just need to be willing to find the advice and the help you need to repair your relationship.
How To Save Your Relationship After Adultery
July 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment
After adultery a relationship is the weakest it’s ever likely to be, but this can be a good thing. This sounds like it is hard to believe, but the truth is that the time after adultery is also the time that can make or break a relationship, which can be a huge opportunity.
Nobody likes to be cheated on. Nobody should be cheated on. But cheating isn’t the problem, it’s the symptom. There is always a bigger problem underlying the infidelity and if there’s anything good to come after adultery, it’s knowing that there is a problem that you need to address.
The time when a relationship is at its weakest is also the best time to do the work that will bring it to being its strongest. There’s an idea in the military that you need to tear a person down so that you can build them back up, strong than they ever were before, and this is true in relationships as well.
After adultery what your relationships needs is a complete overhaul. This isn’t optional, because if you try to just go back to the way things were, then what you’ll find is that history will just repeat itself. You need to start over and build things back up from the bottom. Tear it down to bring it back stronger than it was before.
The first thing you need to do is spend some time apart. This may seem counter intuitive since you’re dealing with an after adultery situation, when the urge might be to not let your partner out of your sight for a single second. But the time apart will allow you to see your relationship from a different angle, and this perspective will be important for the relationship repair process.
The next thing you need to do is to figure out exactly what the problem was, and the answer to this question is not ‘they were sleeping with someone else’. You need to find the deep down problem that was behind the infidelity, and you need to do something about the problem.
After you’ve done those two things, it’s time for you to start the relationship over. The key part is to do it from the beginning. Go on dates again. Start over just as if you were dating somebody else. You need to treat this as a new relationship because if you want to repair your relationship after adultery, then it has to be a new relationship.
Although you’re being building a new relationship after adultery, you do need to keep in mind the problems that made all this necessary. The idea here isn’t to have the same relationship you had before, the idea is to have a better one, and this means you need to avoid making the same mistakes.
Rebuilding a relationship after adultery will be hard, but it will also be one of the most worthwhile things you can. Remember, there is help available out there, and seeking it out one of the best things you can do for your relationship.