Why do people have affairs? One of the primary reasons for having an affair is that cheaters actually want to ruin their marriages. Of course that's not the only reason for having an affair. It is possible to fall in love outside one's marriage by accident, especially if one is not getting his or her needs met inside the marriage. But really that goes in the category of unconsciously needing to ruin one's marriage, doesn't it? There are also many people who simply have a hard time controlling their sexual or flirtatious impulses even though they believe they are in love with their spouses. But really that person is not fully engaged within their marriage if their own impulses so easily overwhelm how their behavior will affect their spouse. There are also people, believe it or not, who know darned well that having an affair will not result in a divorce because their spouse will allow it without serious confrontation. Those individuals, it could be argued, don't really have a marriage.
You see, affairs occur in a state of unhappiness. The person who has the affair feels a need for excitement at the least, and typically they are looking for a release from the drudgery they perceive within their marriage or their life circumstances. The problem with that is, we all know the grass appears to be greener on the other side of the fence. We also know that marriage is often extremely difficult. That's a powerful combination. When it's getting difficult to pay the bills or when one of the children is having problems, couples often get bogged down in blaming each other instead of working together. In difficult circumstances it's especially likely that a spouse will seek a way out. Someone outside the marriage, someone who is not associated with the problems impacting the marriage, can be very attractive indeed.
Sometimes things really have gone bad within the marriage. The spouse who seeks an out has grown dissatisfied, or perhaps both partners are miserable. It could be that one spouse has started taking the other for granted. Maybe one spouse feels the other is "lazy," "foolish," "messy," or "mean." That person might seek someone who is "active," "smart," "organized," or "sweet." In the desperation within their minds, the person perceiving awful traits within their spouse just absolutely must escape, and when they find someone who appears to be the antithesis of their spouse, their deep unmet needs and untapped insecurities, all of which have been conjured up within their discontent, create an irresistible urge toward this perceived anti-spouse.
Unfortunately making decisions or letting yourself fall in love when you're feeling lousy makes for lousy outcomes and lousy relationships. People generally don't really know the person with whom they cheat like they do their spouse. Although they clearly see all the attributes they need within their paramour, what they see is merely a projection of the perceived answer to their needs (please see my article, "The Dating Fantasy," for a fuller discussion of this process). It is the fulfillment of those unmet needs and untapped insecurities that is sought, and it is that fulfillment that seems to be found. Typically, those very same unmet needs and insecurities led to their marriage that now appears to be defunct, even if things looked much different at the inception of the marriage. The new love is not truly a love at all. The new love is, most typically, merely grass that appears to be very green.
If the real problem is the marriage, there is no good reason that an affair would be the answer. The answer would be to either fix the marriage or seek a divorce in an appropriate fashion. In fact, sometimes an affair is merely an escape hatch for an unhappy spouse who can't confront their partner about the problems in the marriage. An affair is considered unforgivable much of the time and thus, with one big bombshell, the unhappy spouse avoids the whole uncomfortable process of working things out with one huge explosion. They have often already convinced themselves that the marriage is unworkable and they just want it to end without discussion. The discontented spouse believes the affair will make them happy and they don't want to deal with the mess of acting like their trying to save their marriage.
Unfortunately, in the process of avoiding the work it would require to confront the problems in their marriage, the discontented spouse moves so quickly that many important aspects of their situation are ignored. Most importantly, it is extremely rare that the discontented spouse has given any real thought to how their own psychology contributed to the problems they experienced in the marriage. They have assumed that their unmet needs could not be met by their spouse. Most of the time, however, because they have not attempted to work out the problem, they don't really know whether it could be worked out. Even worse, they take no responsibility for what they have done within their marriage, and tend to think their own perspective is 100% clearly correct.
What if the real problem, to oversimplify, is that the unhappy spouse has an extreme need for freedom, but they perceive their partner to be unreasonably controlling. Thus, they find someone who would seemingly give them as much freedom as they'd like? What if one spouse has an exaggerated need for togetherness - so much so that they perceive their partner as abandoning them whenever their partner needs to leave. They then have an affair because they want someone who pays them more attention and seemingly has little need for independence? There are thousands of similar examples. The point is, often the cheater actually perceives themselves as vindicated in their affair or desire for divorce, but they make no attempt to see their own part in the problem.
Another significant factor is the denial that overcomes the cheater while in the throws of their affair. This denial causes the cheater to forget how truly disastrous it can be to have an affair. People forget about the effect the affair and/or divorce might have on their children, as well as on their spouse. Even more amazing is the fact that the spouse who is having the affair fails to think forward to how a divorce might affect themselves. They forget what they once had with their spouse and why they've been together. They forget about how difficult it is to build a relationship over time. Perhaps most of all, they forget how much they love to spend time with their children within the context of an intact family home, and they give no consideration to how fragmented things will be for, and with, their children if there is a divorce.
A byproduct of the cheater's denial is that they start thinking they have nothing in common with their spouse. This is a byproduct of denial since, of course, children are the biggest thing people could possibly have in common. The spouse who cheats does not fully recognize how unimportant their differences with their spouse are when compared with having children together. How could anything be bigger? And for anyone who has enjoyed the company of their children while with their spouse, that is the completeness in the feeling of the cohesive happy family, it is impossible to see the grass as greener anywhere else. Children fully thirst for the love of their parents together, and when it's clear that their parents love each other, children drink in the abundance of that love. Clearly, if there is any chance that a spouse could be in love with their partner, that is the very best chance for happiness for all.
Beyond the huge issue of the children's happiness, it's obvious that what could be called "affair denial" also makes the cheater forget other important changes that will be necessary when divorced. Financial well-being after divorce is often shattered. Not many people can afford to maintain life as it once had been with the advent of two households. Divorcing couples also often do not seem to consider what it will be like to either have the children alone for half their time or to have much less contact with them. Most divorcees feel lonely when their children are gone and overwhelmed when their children are with them. That eventuality is typically equally difficult for both spouses, regardless of who might be perceived as responsible for the divorce.
So what is the thing to do if you're unhappy in your marriage? It may sound contradictory, but the first thing to do is to be honest with yourself about your unhappiness. If you're trying to fool yourself into being happy, or if you're managing or denying your absence of happiness, you leave yourself especially vulnerable to meeting your needs in inappropriate ways. When someone is unhappy but is using their emotional resources to feign happiness, they are most likely to find something that gives them immediate gratification. One of those things can be an affair.
Second, once you see that you're unhappy, you must express it in some way. The effort you apply to saving your marriage must be equal to the happiness you would feel if you and your spouse were in a happy marriage and your children were able to benefit from your mutual love. If there is any chance that you could be happy, even if working it out will require shameful sharing and embarrassing revelations about your true feelings, you are far better off if things work out.
Third, if your efforts to express your discontent fall on deaf ears, or if you think you need the help of a professional, of course you need to go to counseling. Everyone is uncomfortable with airing their dirty laundry with a stranger. But therapists are trained to be neutral, understanding, and to see problems in communication as well as unconscious unmet needs. Therapists tend to connect even the most bewildering and unattractive human foibles to a person's vulnerability. They generally prefer to see people as human rather than bad. If even your worst traits can be shared and understood within the marital context, and you can improve your communication with your spouse about those traits, maybe things can be good - really good. Maybe things aren't quite as bad - and people tend to think things are really bad - as you think.
Fourth, and finally, make sure you are being honest with yourself about what it would be like to be divorced. It is so easy to see only the virtues of change without seriously considering the ensuing sorrow that such a change would create. Some of the negatives have been laid out above, but more explanation regarding the effects of divorce on children should be detailed. As everyone knows, it is often said about children that they are amazingly resilient. Childhood Resiliency, however, really only means that children manage to keep on going in their lives. The impact of experience in childhood is the regular purview of everyday psychotherapy. We're all impacted by everything that happens to us, and the terrible experiences stay with us forever. You need to know that in most cases, children feel like the divorce of their parents rips them in two. You need to know that the child will likely feel abandoned by whichever parent has initiated the divorce (or by both parents). It is true that when a marriage is so bad that parents spend all their time arguing, or worse, kids can be so damaged by the marriage that a divorce brings relief. But improvement in a marriage can be so curative in demonstrating the importance of the family that it can undo much of the damage that's been previously done. The tear that rips through children of divorce leaves them unable to trust their parents, and thus, unable to trust anyone else. That lack of trust makes it nearly impossible for the children of divorce to become truly close to anyone again.
If divorce is necessary, please don't have an affair. Most of the affairs people have are merely an instrument of divorce and leave the whole family bereft of the family feeling all should enjoy. You owe it to yourself and your family to try hard to save your marriage. People seldom stay in love with the object of an affair. When people are extricated from their marriage, they typically start to see their new partner in a more accurate way, and then become disenchanted with them as well, just as they had with their spouse. It is also important to realize that, even though people rarely start to think they made a mistake in divorcing, if they never really tried to work things out, their thinking about relationships is clearly suspect. They typically fall into the same problematic patterns in their next relationship because they have never worked out the kinds of problems they themselves create within relationships. In those cases where a divorce actually is the best possible outcome, if you have really tried everything you could to save the family before divorcing, that effort to save the marriage itself can make for a healthier divorce in which everyone gets along after the divorce is final. The only possible saving grace of divorce in its aftermath is when the children see their parents work as a team motivated by their common love for their children. Only in that context can they understand that they are important enough to both their parents that their parents will share their love for their children with each other even after divorce and no matter what happens. Although divorce should be avoided when there is any hope for a good relationship, at the very least there can be love that goes into a good divorce that helps the children preserve a sense of love. If children can observe their divorced parents sharing love for them, the good divorce can help children heal and trust, and can help them maintain hope for true everlasting love in their own future families.
