I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of, but I’ve never cheated on a partner. Don’t worry, I won’t be breaking out the halo polish anytime soon. There are plenty of skeletons in my sex closet, including my owning a sex closet, but infidelity isn’t one of them.
I don’t really understand why people do it. For me, the risk is just not worth the payoff. I always assumed that people cheat on their partner because they are unhappy, but now I’m not so sure.
I recently read Esther Perel’s excellent The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity, and she has an entire chapter called “Even Happy People Cheat.” It was a perspective I’d never considered before. Perel is a hugely respected psychotherapist, who specialises in modern relationships, so she knows a lot more about the ins and outs of cheating than I do. I am happy to accept I am probably wrong about this one, but I still struggle to get my head around her claims. I mean, why would happy people cheat?
Having said that, when I think back to my relationships, I didn’t stay faithful because I was deliriously happy. In fact, I was often downright miserable. Considering how badly some of them ended, I almost wish I did cheat. (I told you I wasn’t a good person!)
I suspect the reason I’ve never strayed is because I am a truly terrible liar and I find secrets very stressful. I have enjoyed crushes on other people when I’ve been in a relationship, and I’m a terrible flirt, but I’ve never acted on it because I know I couldn’t manage the cognitive load required to conduct an affair.
Secret meetups, extra phones, cover stories, and paying cash for hotels? I’d never keep my story straight. The guilt of it alone would see me crack faster than a face pack in the sun. Last week, I lied to my GP about how much I weighed over the phone and felt so bad that I called them back up to correct it. I can’t hide 5lbs. How the hell would I hide a secret lover? But people do. Good people too!
As far as I know, I haven’t been cheated on. But I have seen the damage infidelity causes in the relationships of those I’m close too. Some friends of mine from university went on to get married and have kids, and years later it turned out that not only had he been cheating for years, but he had a whole other family he had been hiding away. Everyone was stunned, not least his wife.
I cannot comprehend how someone can do that. Not just because of the ethics involved, but the sheer amount of work that requires, not to mention the mental resilience. How do you come home to have dinner with your wife and family, having just spent the day with your other family, and act like nothing has happened?
It’s no wonder we assume something like this can only be done by deeply unhappy people. That is an extreme example, but infidelity is incredibly common. In fact, research across 160 cultures showed that infidelity is the most common reason for a breakup. That’s a lot of cheating. They can’t all be miserable.
Defining what counts as cheating is also quite tricky. I like to think we can all agree that having a secret family stashed away definitely qualifies, but what about something like sexting? Would you forgive that?
How about if your partner is having what is often called an “emotional affair?” That’s when no physical contact has taken place, but serious feelings are involved. Does that count? I actually think that one is far worse than sexting. If your partner is in love with someone else, you have a much bigger problem on your hand than them sending a stranger a picture of their genitals.
A paper on infidelity, published last year in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, defined cheating as “any type of secret emotional, sexual or romantic behaviour that violates the exclusivity that romantic relationships have by definition.” Generally, if you’re doing something with a third party that you are lying to your partner about, that’s probably cheating. So why do people do it?
In psychological terms, the idea that only unhappy people cheat is called the “deficit model”. In layman’s terms it means cheating only occurs when there is either something wrong with the relationship, or something wrong with the cheater. And this is often the case, but not always. Viewing infidelity as a symptom of pre-existing problems in the relationship offers us a very comforting view of romance. Contained within it is the assumption that if you are both happy, you have inoculated your relationship from the horror of adultery. But the truth is far more complex than that.
Perel writes that the deficit model of infidelity is too simplistic. “First, because it suggests that there is such a thing as a perfect marriage that will inoculate us against wanderlust. And second, because in session after session, I meet people who assure me, “I love my wife/my husband. We are best friends and happy together. But I am having an affair.” She suggests that an affair is often the result of “a quest for a new (or a lost) identity.”
I wanted to talk to someone who had cheated on their partner for this piece to find out if that is true, but it’s a touchy subject. You can’t just text your happily married friends to ask if they had ever played away because they wanted to rediscover something about themselves, so I went a different route. Jade is a very good friend, and she has been a full-time, full-service sex worker for a number of years, and most of her clients are married men.
“It depends on their age, but I’d say a good 70 per cent are married, and that tends to be more likely the older they are,” she explained. “Sometimes, they’ll take off their wedding ring and think I haven’t noticed!”
We spoke at length about why a married man would cheat like this, and I was surprised to hear that a lot of her clients do tell her how much they love their wives. “I once had a guy show me his entire holiday photos of him and his wife who recently went on a cruise together. He did this whilst telling me how much he loved her and what a lovely time they had together. It’s a bit hard to know what to say when all you want to do is ring up their partner and encourage them to dump this man and do better.”
When it came to why her clients cheat, there was no one answer for Jade. “Sometimes, they’re simply thinking with their dicks and being opportunistic,” she explained. “Often, they have a sexual fetish that they are too scared or embarrassed to tell their partner or have poor communication regarding what they like during sex.”
Of course, women cheat too. According to the research, they are slightly less likely to than men, or maybe they are just better at hiding it. Any research on this topic is tricky because it relies on sampling the right group and entirely honest answers from those participating. And as any researcher will tell you, people do lie, even on an anonymous form. The research that is there has not found a significant difference in the reasons men and women cheat. It is not as simple as men are looking for sex and women are looking for romance. Plenty of women are looking for sex and just as many men are searching for romance. So what are we looking for?
I asked Jade what she thought about Perel’s argument that people cheat to find or rediscover something within themselves, rather than there being a failure in their relationships. She agreed that many of the men she sees “feel they have ‘lost’ something and want to meet a younger woman who they think has some genuine interest or desire to want to have sex with them or relive some sort of weird youthful lifestyle they perhaps once led.” Perhaps Perel is right after all?
Of course, it’s not a defence for cheating on your partner. Infidelity can destroy lives, which makes understanding the motivations at work even more important. It’s too easy to write such behaviour off to a bad relationship, or a bad person. The concept of a blame free affair is a difficult one to process. Accepting that happy people cheat all the time not only creates a state of cognitive dissidence, but it challenges the security we feel when we are in a happy relationship.
This all sounds quite bleak, but the good news is that couples do overcome infidelity all the time. It does not necessarily herald the end of the relationship, but that does take work from everyone involved. It takes honesty, commitment, and (quite likely) couple’s counselling. Perel’s work is full of case studies where couples not only moved past it but ended up closer to one another once those crucial conversations were had.
I have never fully understood the motivations behind infidelity. I’m not sure anyone really does, least of all the people doing it. We all feel horny and tempted from time to time, but to place marriages, families, even homes at risk to scratch that itch just seems baffling to me. Sex by itself has never felt like an adequate explanation.
The idea that happy people cheat is deeply troubling but, for me, it actually helps to understand what’s going on. Locating the “problem” within the relationship or the person actually prevents us from exploring deeper issues at work. If you are someone who has experienced the pain of a partner cheating, knowing that behaviour was never about you is surely a good thing?
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