Short Stuff: Infidelity

Infidelity is one of those topics that gets talked about constantly but almost never honestly. The public conversation tends to collapse into judgment or defence, and neither actually helps anyone understand what's going on.

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Happy Friday everyone. I wanna talk about something today that comes up a lot in the therapy room but doesn't get talked about honestly very often, which is infidelity, cheating, affairs, whatever you want to call it. And I know that might not sound like happy Friday listening, but bear with me, 'cause the psychology here is genuinely useful. Whether you've been through it, you're going through it, or you're just curious about how people end up there in the first place. Because the public conversation about infidelity tends to collapse into two camps pretty quickly. Either you're defending yourself or you're condemning someone else. Both of those things make sense emotionally, but neither of them actually helps anyone understand what's happening. So that's what I wanna try and do today. Just help everybody understand it. The first thing worth saying is that infidelity isn't really a specific set of behaviours. It's more about the breach of whatever agreement, spoken or unspoken, exists between two people. So for some people it is purely physical. For others, an emotional affair where nothing physical ever happens, but there is secrecy and hidden intimacy that hurts just as much or sometimes more. And the secrecy in my experience, is almost always the thing that does the most damage. More than the act itself, a lot of the time. And the honest reasons this happens is rarely as simple as they're a bad person or they don't love their partner. More often, what we see is people who do love their partner, who are horrified by what they've done and who got there through things that built up gradually rather than a single decision they made one day. Unmet needs that were never named a slow drift towards whoever was paying attention. The early dopamine rush of something new that lights up the same reward pathways as any other addictive thing. Which does not excuse, but it does help explain why people who know better still do it. And then there's what it does to the person who finds out. People sometimes talk about being cheated on as if it's primarily a practical problem. The relationship is broken. You need to fix it, you need to deal with it, you need to move on. But what actually happens in the immediate aftermath of an affair is a lot like trauma. Finding out that someone you trusted completely has been living a secret life and that the version of reality you thought you were in was wrong. That is genuinely traumatic to the brain. So it's not just a broken heart, it's a broken reality. And the replaying, the going over and over of it, the not being able to stop thinking about it, even when you desperately want to, that is the brain trying to finish processing something it was never designed to handle. Now, I did a longer episode all about this on Patreon a few weeks ago where I go into a lot more depth, including the cheaters inner world and the difference between shame and guilt and why that matters. But the thing I wanna leave you with today is this. Most affairs grow in the soil of things that aren't being said. Needs that haven't been named. Conversations that feel too scary to have. People will endure years of feeling disconnected or unseen in a relationship rather than say it out loud. And the cruel irony is that the conversation they won't have with their partner, they'll end up having with someone else. Because the words always come easily with someone new. Which means that the thing that prevents it and the thing that helps people recover from it is often the same thing. Actually being able to say what's going on. Easier said than done. I know. 'cause being vulnerable with someone you've been with for 15 years is in some ways harder than being vulnerable with a stranger because the stranger can't really hurt you. 'cause you don't care quite as much about what they think, but you do about your partner. So people protect themselves and in protecting themselves, they lose the connection. And in losing the connection, they begin to drift. If something doesn't feel right in your relationship, the conversation you are avoiding is probably the one you need to have. That's it really. Anyway, I'll leave you to your weekend. You go and enjoy yourselves, have some difficult conversations if you need to, and I'll speak to you again soon. See you.