Let’s consider this from the perspective of human needs.
When people have an affair, they are trying to meet a need that is otherwise unmet in their current relationship.
Based on the answers given by both men and women:
- the need for emotional intimacy
- the need to be appreciated, valued
- the need for more frequent sex
- the need for satisfying sex
- the need to relieve boredom
There are other reasons that are not needs-based, such as addiction, revenge sex (after a partner has an affair), the desire for control, the desire for novelty, and so on, and including, but not limited to, behavior sourced in various personality disorders.
That said, the most common reason is seeking to meet unmet needs.
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The choice of infidelity, or not, is going to be informed by a number of things, perhaps too many to count.
The difference comes down to that person’s ability to meet their own needs given their strengths and resources, as limited by their situation.
I don’t want to judge people for that
choice, even if I would make a value judgement about their
behavior.
That said, believing someone did the best they could, and would have chosen otherwise if they could have is a challenge and no comfort when you are the one who was, for a time, deceived.
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To be sure, all manner of human bondage and suffering with unmet need has occurred under the noble name of Duty.
Is it better to sacrifice the self in a fashion that demonstrates fidelity and marriage to be hollow and empty virtues, or is it better to demonstrate that life and the redemptive power of love are ever-present and available to us, even if choosing them would be willful trespass?
I’ve never cheated, and I don’t imagine I ever will. That said, I’ll make no promise to never do so. Not because I want an out, but because I am human, and I’m sure I could do all manner of things that I don’t imagine, and in certain situations, I might not act in accordance with my values. It’s happened before, and I’d be a fool to think it won’t happen again, or not in a certain way.
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(I originally wrote the following about 8 months ago, and I can tell I was still in not such a good place in terms of my emotional and mental health).
I’ve been in love twice in my life.
(Three times now.)
Both times, the relationships ended because of the shown disrespect and hurt I felt resulting from their infidelity and their lying about it.
FFS, just be honest and tell me it’s over. You don’t even have to give me a reason...just fully own your choices and be upfront about them. Please show me just a few minutes more respect in this regard in exchange for the years of fidelity I offered.
I can’t even really describe in full what the effects of those experiences are, but they are broad, deep, long-lasting, and beyond dark. In the days and months after those relationships ended, I experienced a kind of depression I had never known. Especially after the last one...there would be days where I would sink to a new low, and I learned I could go a lot lower than I ever believed I could. Low enough to scare myself but also feel ambivalent because part of me wanted the pain to stop, and if it did because I died from gross lack of self-care resulting from near-total apathy, so be it, what did it matter anyway?
Every time I thought I had hit rock bottom in terms of dysphoria and anhedonia, I would later discover that no, I was still in freefall. I thought I knew what depression was. I had no idea what it could be, its potential. I had no idea how low I could go. I have a lived experience of the word “hopeless.” It’s scary in the valley of shadow.
And in the after-effects of the last one, for the first time in my life a clinical level and type of anxiety presented itself. I had a panic attack for the first time.
And then the other times. And the times where it was just a garden-variety anxiety attack for no apparent or identifiable reason, where I felt like I was losing my mind, and that I might flee like an animal and inadvertently injure or kill myself. The kind of freak-out that would make a really bad acid trip seem like a cakewalk by comparison.
So yeah, I experienced a degree or level of mental illness that was...bad.
For me, there’s another angle. I was physically, emotionally, and sexually abused as a child. I’ll use a cliche and say I have “trust issues.”
From the same events, it would be fair to say my self-esteem is...fragmented, or somehow broken. As a thought, I know I am a person of value, I have self-worth. As the feeling, as the emotions that are part of that feeling, my sense of myself as a living creature, in the moment, I don’t know those things, not at all. Parts of me feel just the opposite, in fact.
So with that as a basis for day-to-day inner heartspace, of engaging with the world and with myself, I’ll just say that the experience of infidelity on the part of someone I loved, someone I dared to trust, someone that I did the hard and difficult (for me) work so as to be open, to be vulnerable...it stirs up all kinds of stuff from when I was small, and it is a confirmation of (my) primal fears that people cannot be trusted, people will take advantage of me, people will use me, people will wound me...
And that hurts so bad, so so bad, I can’t even describe it.
And the shame, oh the shame. I’m three years old again, defenseless and small. I return to that place inside myself.
My greatest need as the person I am is intimacy, to know and be known.
(haha! joke’s on me, withdrawn and slow to trust)
My greatest fear is that of abandonment.
(there’s a tragic story that informs why that is so, but I won’t get into that now)
And I have to process and work on all the above in the post-mortem with my god-forsaken ADHD brain?!
Given all that, infidelity for me is...a kind of suffering without peer or equal.
And the thing is, I will never stop loving those two women. Not in the same way that I did, but I hope they found what they were looking for, what they needed. I hope for their well-being even to the exclusion of my own. I would want to know they found happiness.
I haven’t, and I worry I never will.
(Aha!, joke’s on me, because I have! End of worries!)
Namaste,
Ian