7 Reasons People Have Affairs Even Though They Know It Might Destroy Their Marriage
The reasons people cheat are not as obvious as you might think.
Brock Wegner | Canva There are a few common phrases I hear from my clients when cheating has touched their lives. They may sound different but they come down to a few common emotional threads. Here are a few examples:
“I just can’t believe I am having an affair.”
“How can my husband have an affair? We were so happy.”
“I have found my soul mate, but he is married. What am I thinking?”
They just don’t understand why people cheat. Most of the time, it's because they don’t understand how affairs happen. Affairs happen not because of the tactile intimacy but something much deeper. Understanding what these things are might help you understand why infidelity has become a part of your life.
Seven reasons people have affairs, even though it might destroy their marriage
1. Their depression makes them vulnerable
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The number one psychological fact behind why people cheat is that their mental health issues make them vulnerable to having an affair. Perhaps they are depressed, perhaps they are anxious, perhaps they are dealing with something that causes them to lose control of their emotions. Whatever the mental health struggle they are dealing with, it is making them vulnerable to doing something that will make them feel OK again.
Having an affair can make people with mental health struggles feel like they are OK, at least for a little bit. For that short period when they are with their affair partner, they feel loved. They feel like they're enough. The feel-good chemical ‘dopamine’ that comes from being with their affair partner courses through their veins and makes them happy, even if for a moment.
2. They are feeling hopeless and feel like they will never be happy again
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One of my clients has been having an affair with a married man for four years. She just doesn't understand why she got into it or why she can't get out of it. After talking, we came to understand that one of the reasons she embarked on the affair was feeling hopeless. She had divorced her husband, her kids were gone, and her career was on hold. She just didn't see how she could ever be happy again.
Then a married man came into her life and made her feel alive. He made her feel important, relevant, and like she had a future where she could be happy. Unfortunately, while she was happy for a while, she eventually became miserable again. What she thought was hope for the future turned into hopelessness because she knew she would never have the happiness she sought.
3. They are unhappy in their marriage and don’t know how to fix it
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Many people who cheat feel unhappy in their marriage, and they have no idea what to do. They married their person because they loved them madly. Yet, over time, 1000 little cuts have eroded the marriage. Sure, they've been to therapy. Sure, they've made date nights and gone on mini vacations and done all the things their therapist encouraged them to do. But still, they are unhappy and not sure what to do next.
So, what they do instead of fixing their marriage is find someone who can meet their emotional needs. Someone who understands what they are going through, perhaps is even going through it themselves. Instead of having to deal with their marriage, they get their emotional needs met outside of the marriage, and it makes marriage more tolerable.
4. They feel emotionally abandoned and lonely
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One of my clients had a husband who traveled all the time. He would be away for days at a time, only to come back, distracted by work and not interested in spending any time with her. She was not only lonely while he was gone, but she was lonely when he was back. They lived in the house together, going about their daily tasks, but not connecting emotionally in any way.
When my client met a man she connected with emotionally, it changed her life. She had believed it was her fault the emotion had died in the marriage, and her loneliness was the result of desperation. When she met her guy, she realized she could still feel, and there was a man who could make her not so alone.
5. They need to numb the pain of a current trauma
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More than one of my clients has found themselves having an affair as they have gone through a period of intense trauma. One of my clients’ mothers was dying slowly of cancer. She spent a ton of time in the hospital with her mother while watching her be sick. She spent a lot of time on her own while wondering what she was going to do without her mother. She still had to go about her daily tasks because of her husband and her children, but she felt empty.
When she met a man while watching her son's hockey game, their small talk took her out of her life. She sought him out at games, and talking to him allowed her to forget she was struggling daily and lean into someone who made her feel something other than pain. Once again, dopamine was created from the connection she had with a man who was not her husband and helped her let go of the pain, if only for a few hours.
6. They feel heard and understood for the first time in a long time
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Marriages are long and hard. We always try to keep them healthy, but it can be difficult. Many people embark on affairs after spending a period of time talking to their soon-to-be affair partners.
Perhaps they have met at the office, and over time, confided in each other about things they struggle with. Perhaps they are parents of their kids' friends and spend a lot of time with each other, and have developed a deep friendship. For the first time in a long time, they feel listened to and heard. This feeling is compelling and addictive. Feeling heard and understood makes them fall in love, and, sometimes, before they know it, they slide into an affair.
7. They feel like they can’t let the affair go
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The number one reason people have a hard time letting go of an affair is that they feel like they need it. They cannot imagine how to be happy without it.
When they are put in a position where they must let go of their affair, they go into deep withdrawal. Even though they might have been miserable in the affair, which made them break up with their affair partner.
The pain they feel is intolerable when they don't get that dopamine rush, don't hear their partner's voice, or don't have the physical intimacy they love. This leads them to go back to the affair, and the cycle begins again.
Understanding why people cheat is a hard thing to do for someone who hasn't been there.
Affairs seem to be the tawdry things we read about in books and see in movies. But, they're more complicated. They are often not the result of needing tactile intimacy, but the result of trying to fill some emotional void to give themselves hope for the future and make them feel like a person again.
Unfortunately,feeling like they need the relationship in order to survive makes it impossible for them to let go, even though it was never true. The next thing they know, they are stuck in the cycle of a relationship that, eventually, makes everything that they struggle with worse.
Mitzi Bockmann is a NYC-based Certified Life Coach who works with individuals who strive to heal their toxic relationships so they can have their happily ever after. Mitzi's bylines have appeared in The Good Men Project, MSN, PopSugar, Prevention, Huffington Post, Psych Central, among many others.
