Infidelity is the breach of trust that most often brings couples into therapy. The crises that occur from a partner's choice to be unfaithful often cause deep wounds and irresolvable conflict. In the midst of that heartbreak, the couple must decide whether their relationship should continue.

To fully understand why committed partners would choose to deceive, it's necessary to look at the unique factors that define each individual situation. There is still a great deal to learn about why people betray their sacred agreements, especially since most of them did not enter their committed relationships with that intention.



Affairs are secretive and separate relationships that take time and energy away from the primary relationship. The magnetic combination of breaking taboos and the novelty that comes with newness is a powerful magnet that is hard to resist once it has been established. The committed partnership, with its combination of known assets and liabilities, can rarely compete with the naughtiness, excitement, and lust of a clandestine tryst. The affair is more mesmerizing and captivating, at least for a while.

Because of the requirement for deceit, most people look at infidelity as a destructive choice. Though there may be classic examples of unfaithful partners in romantic literature, there is rarely societal support for those who choose to hold onto two relationships at the expense of an unsuspecting partner. Even in cultures that are more lenient, adulterous trysts are not openly advertised.

With so much at stake, it would seem perilous for people to risk their primary relationships and personal integrity by choosing to be unfaithful. Yet, close to half of both men and women do so at some point during a committed relationship. It is virtually impossible to label the people who do it or don't do it as good or bad. It is more helpful to understand why certain people, under certain conditions, at certain times, choose to secretly invalidate the commitments they've made.



Over the years, I have heard multiple reasons from my patients as to why they make such potentially perilous choices.

Some individuals have always preferred the privacy of compartmentalizing their lives. They routinely keep other information and activities separate from their partners, protecting the anonymity that allows them to operate with different sets of rules with different people in different situations. When an attraction to someone else happens, the space that makes infidelity possible has already been created.

Others find themselves entangled in a diminished, hopeless relationship they did not consciously intend, but now live within. Still others, suffering years of abuse, neglect, or conflict, experience a new relationship as a haven from failure, and use it to heal long-standing wounds in their primary relationship. Many times what begins as an innocent friendship transforms over time into sexual intimacy.

The partners who are deceived often are the last to catch on, though many people around them may have issued blatant warning signals. Most people want to believe that the partners they love and trust would never betray them. The awareness that they could do that is just too painful to accept, and self-delusional smoke screens blanket obvious clues.

Straying partners typically change their behavior in ways that should be obvious, such as becoming much kinder or much more critical, displaying unaccountable expenditures of time or money, or paying new attention to their physical packaging. But even with those clues, their partners may not recognize or allow themselves to see the evidence.



As time goes by, infidelity becomes harder to deny. The unusual behaviors escalate; unexplained absences, hidden telephone or credit card bills, intensified irritability, sudden needs to get away for a few minutes on a seemingly unnecessary errand, and phone calls that come at odd hours with no one on the other end. Initially cooperative partners who would not have asked for more at the beginning of the relationship, may develop a new agenda that puts pressure on their clandestine lover to be more available.

As the partner's suspicions increase, he or she will usually start asking questions. Radar blips have begun going off everywhere, and friends, encouraged by the growing awareness, will often provide actual confirmation.

The adulterous partner's typical responses to the growing inquiries are often irritation, excuses, and reverse blaming or invalidation. If he or she feels any guilt, it is usually expressed as outrage. "How could you possibly think I would do something like that?" Or, "Why wouldn't I be staying away more. This relationship is totally unsatisfying." Sometimes even, "You're completely off your rocker. What are you smoking? Maybe you need to get a life." Or the very occasional, "Thank God you finally know. This situation has been killing me."



The affair itself is the first betrayal. The second, and often even more injurious, is the straying partner's denial of it, usually delivered with more mistruths. The need to protect the illicit liaison takes precedence over integrity when the betrayed partner's inquiries are invalidated.

If the affair surfaces, both partners often have intense emotional reactions; guilt and sometimes righteousness on the part of the straying partner, and outrage, grief, anger, hurt, vindictiveness, or withdrawal on the part of the other. The agreement the couple had made to live by a common set of values has been shattered, and trust in the relationship has been destroyed.



Even though the opportunities and options for infidelity are now more common, many partners choose to remain faithful, irrespective of any circumstances that might support their understandable temptations. I once treated a young man in his late twenties whose memory still fills me with wonderment at his willing sacrifice. Caleb was a devout Catholic who married a young woman from his church when they were both in their early twenties. They had four daughters in six years and lived in devotion to each other, their family, and their religious beliefs.

Mary Margaret had come out the back door of a shopping mall just after closing time on Christmas Eve. She did not see the man behind her, or feel the blow on her head from his gun. Though emergency personnel were with her in just a few minutes, she never regained consciousness. There was no way she could have avoided the attack or predicted the severity of the injury. She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Every day since the accident, Caleb visited her in the hospital, fixated on the monitor that displayed the lack of any conscious brain activity, and praying for a miracle. Overwrought and exhausted from working two jobs and raising four young children, he ached for the support and warmth he had lost. After an appropriate time of grief, everyone who knew him encouraged him to find another woman to help him raise his young girls, but he was resolute in his devotion to his wife. Though he knew in his heart she would never be whole again, he gazed daily into her vacant eyes, searching for the soul he once held beloved. During the four years she survived, he never wavered from that commitment.

He came to me asking for support in three significant areas: to help him maintain his faith through the loneliness of his solitude, to help his children understand illness and prepare them for the death that would come, and to maintain his fidelity to someone he once loved deeply, but was no longer present in her body.

When Mary Margaret died in his arms, he held her for a long time. I was in the waiting room with his two older girls, standing by to help the family process their grief. He came from their mother's room and reached out for his children. They cried openly together, finally able to feel their loss completely.

Whether or not a particular couple will find their way back after an unfaithful episode depends on many things, but the most significant variable is how deeply committed to each other that couple has been in the past. How sacred that emotional altar place still is to both of them can portend the potential of reconnection or dissolution, even if has been temporarily desecrated. If they built that foundation mutually devoted to creating the trust that is the foundation of a quality friendship, they most likely agreed at the beginning of their relationship to the following basic principles:

• The partners will mutually define what constitutes infidelity for them.

• Either partner will reveal his or her desire to be unfaithful before acting it out.

• If one or the other wants to change the agreement, they will openly renegotiate.

• The partners agree that they will not defile the sacred altar place that defines their trust in each other.

• If the agreement is broken by either partner, he or she must be willing to accept full accountability for the betrayal, and not blame the other partner.

Agreements exactly like these are the foundation for every quality love relationship, but are also necessary in business, sports, politics, parent/child relationships, friendships, or spiritual devotions. If any one area of trust is irresponsibly broken in a partnership, future behavior is no longer secure in any other. Chaos ensues and all other areas of the relationship come into question, as do all future agreements. Couples who are suffering through an unfaithful episode must be able to understand how their commitment to a mutual standard disintegrated, in order to build trust again in a new way.


Whether or not a particular relationship will be able to regenerate, recover partially, or disintegrate forever, depends most heavily on the factors I've described. But there are many more that may contribute, and those that apply weave together differently for every couple.

Here are some of the questions whose answers determine the outcome:

• Is the unfaithful partner blaming the other partner for the affair?

• Did the couple have a quality relationship before the affair?

• How long has the couple been together?

• Did either of them have affairs in this or past relationships?

• Did they really love and trust each other before this happened?

• What kinds of childhood experiences are being relived because of the affair?

• Did the person who was unfaithful want out, anyway, and has picked this way of making it happen?

• Who is the other lover and what was he or she told?

• Will the other lover want retribution if he or she has been dropped?

• Is this the first time this has happened?

• Is the other lover a friend of the couple?

• Was it a one-night stand or a long-term love affair?

• Did the affair happen during a time of relationship stress?

• Is the person having the affair remorseful or self-justifying?

• Would he or she really be happier with this new person, rather than trying to fix the relationship?

• Was anything going on in the established relationship that fueled the reasons for deceit?

• If the unfaithful partner leaves the relationship, would he or she be likely to commit infidelity again in the next relationship?

• What does the betrayed partner want now?

• Is there enough energy in the relationship for healing?

• Do both partners want the relationship to survive?

• Does the guilty partner realize the severity of what he or she has done and willing to do what is necessary to gain forgiveness?

• Does the injured partner have enough love left for the partner to get past blame and punishment?

None of the answers to these questions is meant to justify betrayal or to suggest that this breach of trust is easily repaired. But they are important variables that help determine if the relationship has any chance to overcome the breach of trust that has occurred. A first-time affair will have a better chance of being healed if the straying partner really cares about his or lover, and feels badly about what has happened. A casual affair, rationalized by personal hunger and need, that invalidates the sacredness of the relationship, and has no concomitant remorse, doesn't bode well for the future of a relationship.



There are many possible outcomes once an affair has been discovered: permanent separation, a guarded promise of better behavior in the future, genuine revelation of what caused the affair and a new kind of possibility as a result of it, forgiveness and support, or a lifetime of guilt and resentment.

The responses of the partners who have been deceived play a large part in the outcome. Some are more lenient about infidelities because their culture accepts them as a way of life. In those cases, the betrayed partner may be more distressed with the public humiliation or the potential loss of status. Others can bear physical infidelity if the external relationship was not about love. I've observed some relationships that have so much else going for them that the partners aren't willing to give each other up even when someone else remains in the picture. In some more rare cases, the affair is a "wake-up call" that spurs the couple to a re-evaluation of their relationship and eventually to a renewed commitment.

Some partners actually allow occasional infidelity as an accepted part of their relationship. They believe that their relationship will remain intact if honesty is the primary value. If a parallel liaison threatens the committed relationship, it must end. They both live by the same maxim, "I don't care what you do, just let me know what's going on, don't fall in love, and don't bring home any diseases." The preservation of the emotional commitment and continued involvement is all that matters.



Unfortunately, of the literally hundreds of patients I have worked with whose lives have been disrupted by affairs, I have seen many survive but very few thrive. The primary relationship is irrevocably altered and essentially over as it was. Something too important has happened, and the scars can persist for many years even when the partners enter into an active process of healing.

An analogy that I often see is the way people feel when they have survived cancer. In that specific illness, people have been the victim of a hidden threat that has arisen from within their own bodies. It strikes without warning and leaves fear and doubt in its wake. My patients in cancer remission tell me that they often lay in wait for the disease to reoccur.

Finding out that someone you trust has been lying to you activates the same kind of fear. Every time your partner takes unexplained time or energy from the relationship, you may wonder if the infidelity is happening again.

Being the victim of unpredictable and unexpected betrayal creates symptoms that are very similar to those of post-traumatic stress syndrome:

• Every time the betrayed partner is exposed to any part of the past trauma, his or her emotions will flare as if the betrayal were happening again. That person has been classically conditioned to experience the same feelings in memory as he or she did when the actual event was discovered.

• Oscillating between strong negative emotions and a numbing deadness, the body and psyche feel as if they were in a deep, heavy depression, trying desperately not to experience the terror or grief of the event.

• In addition to the heart-breaking memories, the deceived partner may be on constant alert, watchful for any signs of its happening again.

It takes a long time, a very determined and sincerely remorseful person, and a forgiving partner, to help resolve this kind of trauma. The process is slow and often hindered by the injured partner's angry accusations and painful recollections, and the straying partner's inability to maintain caring under the barrage of rage. Getting to the other side of an affair with hope and commitment for a better relationship is often much easier with a competent professional on your side.