4 Fundamentally Flawed Reasons Cheaters Blame Monogamy
Stop blaming monogamy and start looking deeper.
skynesher, brcunel | Canva The million-dollar question is, "Does monogamy cause cheating?"
After having my heart badly broken in an emotional affair with a married man, I’ve researched hundreds of articles and books about cheating over the past six years. I've watched a ton of videos about it.
I’ve read what psychologists have to say. I’ve read lots of first-hand accounts: What the cheated-on have to say, what the cheaters have to say, and what the affair partners have to say. I’ve even read what the astrologers have to say, and I've noticed something.
There's only one group among all of these who blames monogamy as the reason for cheating and, you guessed it, it’s the cheaters.
If you’re reading something from cheaters, you will read this viewpoint a lot: "I’m not getting my needs met. It isn’t possible to get all one’s needs met by one person! Therefore, it must be monogamy that’s the problem."
Oy.
4 fundamentally flawed reasons cheaters blame monogamy:
1. Their focus is on sex.
Sex gets routine. Sex gets boring. There's not enough sex.
There’s no more chemical high from meeting a new person. This sounds like addiction and not well-balanced human sexuality.
2. They believe one person can't meet all our needs.
There’s a problem between the partners, but when the problem is brought up, the person who is unhappy about the relationship gets stonewalled from solving it. The stonewalling partner shuts the unhappy partner down and then leaves the upset partner to seek the comfort of another person outside the relationship.
This group tends to blame monogamy in this way: "All relationships that go on too long end up like this, so we shouldn’t be stuck with just one person."
"One person can't meet all our needs!"
There are several variations on this: "If society didn’t insist on monogamy, I could just leave! Or have two partners!" The problem is never the cheater but always the social construct of monogamy being contrary to what they perceive as human behavior.
3. They are actually serial cheaters.
There are folks who flit from affair to affair like a butterfly sampling meadow flowers.
They lie to their spouse, their lover, and everybody in between. One wonders why they bothered to get married at all.
Though there are many manifestations of and reason for a person developing into a serial cheater, it does not mean you have to put up with the behavior, nor fix the person who demonstrates the behavior. That's on them!
4. They are caregivers to their ill spouses.
This is a small subgroup but some of these folks are caregivers of a spouse who is so ill the caregiver is getting overwhelmed by staying in the marriage.
The ones I feel most sorry for are the people whose spouses have a long illness with no obvious endpoint. Some sick spouses are so limited by their illness they're end up emotionally abusing the caregiving spouse.
Alzheimer's is even worse. Either way, the sick person has no insight, or ability to change the behavior, and the caregiving spouse feels too responsible to abandon them.
The fundamental reasons that blame monogamy for cheating have holes.
1. You don't have to cheat to include others in your sex life.
Some people, no doubt about it, are highly sexed, and there is no shame in that. For them, sex with the same person doesn’t have the same zip-zing in Year 10 as it did in Year One.
You don’t have to open up your marriage in order for it to stay sexually exciting. However, as Liam MacAdam shows in his Monogamish Marriage Blog, you don’t have to cheat to enjoy amazing sex in a marriage — even if you do include other people.
What you have to do is stay honest with yourself and your partner, whether you end up including others in your sexual adventures or not.
2. Honest communication is king.
Here’s the common denominator: Honesty, or the lack thereof.
When courageous, honest talking and listening fails, so does the relationship and the sex.
Every person saying, "I resort to cheating because I can’t solve the problems in my marriage," is describing a situation when honest speech and listening have broken down.
Notice most of the Monogamish Marriage couples stay fearlessly and courageously connected to each other, even with outside sex. Who you do or don’t have sex with is irrelevant. It is the communication that matters.
3. The self-centered attracts codependency.
When one, or most likely both people in a relationship don’t have enough connection to themselves, it makes fertile ground for cheating.
The self-centered tends to attract codependents, and the two can stay together in a miserable push-me-pull-you.
While one person is busy chasing an image of themselves they define and feed with exciting sex. The other is driven by their self-doubt to stay in the relationship.
"Aren’t I good enough? He said he’d change. Oh, I feel guilty. I don’t want to hurt anyone by leaving. Maybe I can change something that will change him."
Neither person believes they are good enough, so they’re both too scared to be honest with each other or with themselves.
4. Not every caregiver wants sex elsewhere.
Not every marriage in which someone is chronically ill overwhelms the caregiving spouse so badly they need to cheat.
I didn’t feel the need to cheat while I was seeing my own husband through his terminal bout with brain cancer, and I am sure there a many others who feel the same.
To be fair, we were having sex once a week up until two months before he died. But, even if he hadn’t been capable, it wouldn’t have mattered to me.
I loved him and we were soul partners right up until the end. (There's the honesty theme once more.)
But then again, he was lucent most of that time, and I knew his life expectancy would be tragically short. Except for some transient steroid-induced paranoia, he was never abusive to me.
That said, here is perhaps the only instance where society’s insistence on monogamy could be considered unfair. Physically ill spouses can also deteriorate mentally and emotionally.
Is it reasonable to ask someone to care for a person who is not only physically incapacitated but emotionally distant or even abusive as well, for an open-ended period of perhaps decades? With none of their own physical or emotional needs met?
What will happen to that person as a result? Do we care? We should.
Again, however, the real problem is fearless, courageous, honest talking and listening are no longer able to take place.
Once you're disconnected from each other, the relationship sours.
Whether it’s because a spouse has become ill or whether they’ve simply become unwilling, when that goes, so does the relationship.
As Liam MacAdam and his wife teach us, people can have passionate sex with other people, but as long as they are passionately and honestly connected to one another, the relationship is still strong.
Conversely, people can grit their teeth, stay married their entire lives, and blame monogamy for their unhappiness, but what has really died? Their fearless, courageous emotional connection to one another, that’s what.
Passionate emotional ties in a relationship have nothing to do with who’s having what kind of sex and with whom. Or the fact you can’t swap your old partner out for a new one every other year so you can get a new-sex dopamine hit again.
What’s really at issue is each person’s willingness to speak to and hear the other. It’s a trusting connection, not monogamy, that makes or breaks a relationship.
P.D. Reader is a level one student in the NCGR School of Astrology, but her work focuses on spirituality, lifestyle, and relationship topics. She runs Unfaithful: Perspectives on the Third-Party Relationship on Medium.