Infidelity

Infidelity is always happening somewhere, and it always involves at least three people; a cheater (let’s call that person Delta), a cheated-on (call this one Epsilon), and a third person, who comes from outside. Couple’s therapy rarely includes that one, so we’ll only discuss those two genderless Greek-lettered persons. The concept of infidelity only has meaning in the context of an attempt at a monogamous commitment, so the world of polyamory and other alternative arrangements is respectfully set aside for the purposes of this discussion.

Most people have either cheated or been cheated on, at least once in their romantic lives; many have been in each position at one time or another. The pains of guilt or betrayal are extreme when we’re young and naive, full of huge feelings without the wisdom of experience. Disillusion can be embittering. But if we endure infidelity early in life, we get to enjoy plenty of future decades with those lessons already installed. Big mistakes and betrayals are always possible, but people who have learned from experience can successfully make such crises extremely unlikely. Cheating on your boo in high school can put a guilty wretch in your mirror, and getting jilted in eleventh grade hurts plenty—but it’s much worse when it happens ten years into a marriage, especially if the couple has to tell their kids about it.

Cheating is: a mistake. Like most mistakes, it does not have to define you. It might forever define you in the eyes of the one you betray, but if you stop cheating, you can reinvent yourself—with or without that injured partner, by yourself, or with someone new. You may be Delta this time around, but you need never be in that awful role again. You can use the ordeal as a schoolhouse whose central lesson is that the price of cheating is extremely high, whether you get caught or not, so that almost no circumstances make cheating a good enough option to be worth it. You may be Epsilon (cheated on) this time, but you can turn this disaster to good account by distilling from it the knowledge necessary to avoid any future repetitions and Never. Be. Cheated. On. Again. Since this lesson is a bit more subtle and complicated than Delta’s lesson, let’s discuss it further.

Most cheaters aren’t sociopaths; some are. Other personality disorders, in particular narcissistic and borderline pathologies, can resemble sociopathy in this striking capacity for deception. Persons thus afflicted can lie well, all the time, to anybody, uninhibited by conscience or principle, with a skill that makes their deceptions very hard to detect. They lack the inner psychic structure that would otherwise generate inconvenient compassion for those they deceive. The missing psychic structure leaves plenty of room for a frictionless compartmentalization that gives them remarkably little trouble. They can smoothly escalate from withholding important information to outright lying. Unlike ordinary liars, sociopaths don’t just blunder forward in hasty improvisations, hoping for the best. They actively manipulate their partners, implementing strategic webs of bad data and false signals whose exquisite architecture is their own delicious secret. Some even lead truly double lives, with whole families that don’t know about each other’s existence. But these people are quite rare, with antisocial personality disorder (the current term for sociopathy) occurring in 2% to 4% of the general population. If you find yourself with such a person, your task is to end the relationship; to discover why you chose such a person; to develop criteria for screening out similar people in the future; and to heal from any underlying masochism that might have influenced your choice. Again, it’s very rare that the problem is a genuine sociopathy, so let’s set those cases aside at this point and consider infidelity dynamics that are much more common.

Most people who cheat have, by the time they bring their sexual and/or emotional needs outside the relationship, already sulked for months or years before they become sufficiently despairing about the relationship to go ahead and ruin it. They start by sending signals that they’re unhappy, the biggest of which is emotional withdrawal. If Delta’s signals of unhappiness don’t get through, it’s generally because Epsilon is too busy idealizing the relationship to consider Delta’s new and troublesome information. Idealization isn’t always a happy state. Its main feature is avoidance of reality, either by pretending that the relationship is rosy and trouble-free (“other people have to work at marriage, but lucky us, we don’t”), or by pretending that the relationship may be troubled, but is somehow uniquely indestructible.

The error—Epsilon’s blindness to Delta’s unhappiness signals—is of course a distorted perception, a misapprehension of the other person’s state of mind. But it is also (and perhaps more profoundly) rooted in an identity issue: one says to oneself, “I am someone who has married well, would never get cheated on, will never become divorced—that bad stuff only happens to other people.” Such self-deception is only human, but it is hubristic. Your partner is not an angel, and neither are you. This fact need not, must not, ruin anything—except the idealization, which began as a valuable element of falling in love, but must sooner or later be outgrown, replaced by a deeper, more mellow form of enduring esteem.

The lesson that will protect you from being cheated on in the future is: signals of unhappiness must be taken seriously, without procrastination, even if it makes you feel less lucky, or successful, or safe, than you are used to feeling. Have the necessary conversations about how each of you is doing, what hurts, what’s boring, what’s missing—what aspects of the relationship are giving each of you trouble of various kinds. If you’re too scared to have those conversations, or if they aren’t going well, get the help you need. Couple’s therapy can do ten times more good for your relationship before infidelity than it can do after it. Idealization blocks you off from the possibility of seeking couple’s therapy. But once you get started, it can facilitate a warm, good-faith, emotionally connected critique that is more humane and wholesome than the idealization.