After working with countless couples impacted by affairs, I’d like to clear up a common misunderstanding. The notion that it’s okay to go outside of your marriage to get your emotional and sexual needs met because they’re not getting met in the marriage…is a crazy notion. Put another way, there is no excuse, justification, or rationalization to have an affair.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the state of a marriage used as an excuse for having an affair. Often both partners buy into this excuse; the person being cheated on says they knew their partner hadn’t been happy for a while and the person who cheated, says they’ve been miserable for a long time and nothing seemed to change.
It’s not uncommon for affairs to serve as a long overdue wake-up call for couples. Upon discovery of the affair, all of a sudden the two people, who were so miserable together prior to the affair, are now working their butts off to create the relationship they never had.
Too bad they deprived themselves of this opportunity prior to bringing a third person into their relationship and bed.
What each partner didn’t realize was that unhappiness wasn’t an excuse for having an affair; there is no excuse for not acting with integrity in your relationships. If you are in a committed relationship, you do not have the right to cheat on your partner because you’re not happy–and nor does your partner have that right.
You have the right to be happy. You have the right to discuss what you are unhappy about with your partner. You have the right to request that you and your partner work on your relationship. Ultimately you also have the right to leave the relationship should you choose to do so.
Your unhappiness in your relationship, however, does not give you the right or the green light to have an affair.
If you choose to have an affair, then own that choice 100 percent and don’t put any of the blame on your partner. We are all grown ups facing similar problems in this world: being attracted to others, wanting some excitement, hitting rough spots in our relationships, feeling distant, having sexless marriages, and on and on. None of these are reasons to justify an affair.
If these issues, or others like them, are wreaking havoc in your life and your relationship–do something about them. Fix them. Seek help for them. Separate if necessary. Don’t, however, make the choice to have an affair and then have the audacity to justify that affair because your partner wasn’t meeting your needs. Chances are you weren’t meeting your partner’s needs either.
If you made the mistake of cheating, take full responsibility for it and know that you have a lot of repair work to do.
For those of you who are unhappy in your marriage and are contemplating having an affair, I encourage you to take a good, long look at what that means. Once you have an affair there’s no going back. If you and your partner choose to try to work on the relationship, the affair is a huge obstacle to overcome that will not simply go away once the affair is over. Minimally it takes a year to let go of a lot of the painful feelings, mistrust, and anger the affair caused. It’s much easier to give your relationship the wake-up call now–without an affair.
Challenge: If you’ve had an affair and blamed it on the relationship, go back to your partner and make amends. Tell your partner that although you were unhappy, you should’ve talked to him/her about your unhappiness rather than cheating on him/her. Apologize from a genuine place.
If you’re thinking about or already flirting with an affair, step up and do the right thing. Go back to your partner and discuss your unhappiness in the relationship. Make a decision to either work it or end it–either way, do it with integrity. You will feel better and so will your partner and/or family.
It is simply an affair can ever be forgiven or forgotten. Once you have an affair, the trust in your relationship is permanently destroyed, and can never again be repaired. Once a cheat, always a cheat. And the majority of cheaters are always men. Why? Men don’t care about how much they hurt their wives or girlfriends when they have an affair. They don’t care about staying faithful. They only care about one thing – satisfying their own desires, regardless of the cost.
Worse, if there are children in the relationship, it gets worse because they suffer the effects of the fallout from the affair. The lying, the cheating, the deception, the fights, the tears, the trauma, the stress, etc. all can be difficult for a child to deal with when their parents are in very serious conflict caused by an affair. They are the biggest losers, and it’s never their fault.
The only way to stop the conflict, pain and anger in a relationship cause by infidelity is to get an immediate divorce, and the innocent party in the divorce should sue for full custody of the children, child support, alimony, and have absolutely no further contact with the cheater. This way life can go on for the innocent parties unfairly betrayed by the affair.
Lisa Reply:
You are absolutely right that the children suffer enormously from the impact of affairs. It’s also important that parents don’t compound that suffering by never allowing then to see thier parent again.
Like it or not, the unfaithful parent is still the parent. Refusing to allow the child to see his/her parent due to cheating is harmful to the child and is more about revenge than protection.
Children are too often used as pawns in divorces and custody battles and parents need to learn to grow up and put thier children first not thier own egos, hurt feelings, anger, etc. If the party who was cheated on wants to move on s/he needs to do that in a way that honors the child and does not rip him/her away from his/her parent.
You have a point – children shouldn’t be denied access to their noncustodial parent.
However, so many instances occur when a woman cheats on her partner, and the man coldy, stubbornly, refuses her any access to her kids just to punish her, refusing to forgive and forget the affair – which is very harsh on both the mother and the child. And yet the woman is expected to forgive and forget the affair, not be harsh at all with the cheater, and let the man who cheated on her have access to the kids. That’s not fair at all.
Somebody should tell these men who have been betrayed that they should be more forgiving and allow access to the woman who cheated, too. Men should not be the only ones forgiven of cheating and allowed access after the fact. They always forget that kids need their mother just as much as the father, even if the mother cheated.