7 Insights On Cheating In Relationships

A friend of mine asked for my thoughts on cheating after experiencing a “yucky” situation. Hopefully you’ll find some of these useful if you’ve ever encountered infidelity or end up facing it in the future.

#1 When you understand what drives behavior, you can create change without having to control behavior.

Cheating is often the result of feeling limited. It occurs when someone can't seem to get what they're wanting through the channels they have available. Or perhaps because deviating from those channels gives them a sense of freedom they otherwise deny themselves.

Once you get to the essence of what's driving behavior, cheating no longer is a question of sex, it's a question of getting your emotional needs met. And that's something that happens on an internal level. Cheating is just one of the many ways we may act out when we're unable to find what we're looking for on the inside.

#2 The root of all cheating can boiled down to one question, “Why would deception feel easier than the truth?”

Lies inherently require more effort and mental resources than simply telling the truth, but they often appear to be a shortcut to what we want. Why would this be? Perhaps because the person being deceived is perceived as more of an obstacle than an avenue, so the path of least resistance is simply to go around them.

#3 Breaking the rules sometimes gives us hope when we're stuck in a rut.

Sex and emotional connection are sometimes no different than comfort food. We reach for something that we hope will make us feel better when we're unable to shift our thoughts about whatever is weighing heavy on our minds.

To cheat is really just a shortcut. It’s saying “I want less of whatever the normal route entails.” There are lots of ways to deviate from the norm that don't involve deception. But sometimes we feel held back by our partner. We know they won't approve of the changes we're craving so we choose to seek out someone else who would approve.

Lastly, cheating often has a placebo effect, because breaking the rules makes it easier to believe we’ll experience a desire that’s been eluding us. If we're doing something different than what we've been doing, we'll certainly get different results (for better or worse). A healthy alternative is to break patterns instead of rules. Rules prohibit us from specific things in obvious ways; patterns prohibit us from whole swaths of possibilities in ways we seldom even notice.

#4 Relationships die because they stop growing.

They become fixed and dependable, which gives us a breather from dealing with the uncertainty of life, but the only reason we want that breather is because we’ve lost faith in our ability to attract what we desire through the unknown.

Cheating exposes us to the unknown through a familiar channel with the specific intent of satisfying desire. It blends the unknown with some of the desires that are on our mind most often. Perhaps if we more actively integrated the unknown into our daily lives, we could cultivate the fruit that cheating yields without having to pluck from another tree.

#5 The concept of cheating is conditional love at its finest. “Do this and I’ll stop sharing my love with you.”

The concept of cheating puts the onus on the other person to behave a certain way, regardless of conditions. So instead of being unconditional with our love, we want someone else to be conditional with their actions.

What if we put the onus back on ourselves? Instead of saying “it’s your responsibility to honor my desire,” we could say “it’s my responsibility to attract the behavior I desire from you.”

List out the behaviors you most want in a lover and ask yourself, “Who would naturally attract these from someone?”

#6 Exclusivity is a common way to create the feeling of being special. It’s measuring yourself by something you have that others don’t.

It feels good to have things that others don't. You'll probably want to resist that statement because you likely care about others and think you want the best for them. But study after study on human nature has shown that people gauge how they're doing in life in comparison to how the people around them are doing. If you're an elite athlete and reach the pros and discover you're not good enough to play professionally, you'll feel like you're bad even though 99.9% of athletes never make it as high as you do.

With intimate relationships we sometimes experience something similar. We compare our relationship with our lover to their relationship with everyone else. We feel bad if we don't feel special, and so in order to feel good about our relationship we need to feel like there's something about "us" that can't be threatened by "them." The trap is when we measure that specialness in behavior, instead of connection. Then we feel like whenever our partner does something that's "our thing" with someone else, it detracts from our relationship. So we feel less free around others in order to honor relationship.

If you really want to discover what makes you special, let your lover experience similar things with someone else. (This doesn't have to be sex, just anything that feels exclusive or like "our thing.") Then you won’t be special because of your status, but because of who you actually are. And exposure to contrast will often cause your partner to find things to appreciate in you that they previously took for granted.

#7 Cheating could be drastically reduced if people were allowed to try things without long-term consequence.

This is a bold strategy, that you probably shouldn't attempt unless it excites you. But it could be useful as a thought exercise for yourself, even if you never mention it to your lover. Never agree to anything that doesn't feel good to you.

Cheating says “you can’t even try it,” which tends to turn a small desire into a hidden passion. Free trials say, “go ahead and explore what you think you want and see if you really do like it better. And if you do, let’s see if we can find a way to make it work within the confines of our relationship.”

This is different from a hall pass because it is not a temporary license to experience the forbidden. It is a regular fixture of a relationship that says, “I want you to be happy even if it’s not because of me.” Oftentimes the thing we think we want isn’t actually what makes us happy, and the easiest way to discover that is by living it.

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