The trouble with romantic betrayal – apart from the obvious pain – is that it is the salacious lifeblood of everything from tabloid headlines and box sets to true crime podcasts. Because of this, there is a tendency to view it in highly dramatic terms. That is fine when we are snuggled up on the sofa watching other people’s heartbreak at a distance, but less helpful when it arrives closer to home.
“He’s a cheater,” gossiped one friend recently about a mutual acquaintance’s partner. “She needs to throw him out and change the locks.” Well, maybe. But the man in question is a mild-mannered accountant who had, in the space of six months, lost his mother and his job. Could this have been a temporary blip?
“A lot of people believe that only ‘bad’ characters are capable of infidelity,” says Dr Kathy Nickerson, a relationship psychologist and the author of The Courage to Stay. “I know for sure that’s not true. I’ve met many, many lovely people, who you would think have wonderful characters, who have made this very complicated, nuanced, poor decision and are traumatised by what they have done.”
Often, the reason someone has an affair is that they don’t know how to talk to their partner about the state of their relationship and the problems they are experiencing, Nickerson explains. “They would typically be people who never had a healthy model for talking about feelings when they were growing up. They simply don’t know how to raise difficult conversations.” Nickerson also points to individuals who have developed an avoidant attachment style in infancy, whereby they learned that it wasn’t safe to share their feelings with others.
“Although sex addiction does affect some individuals, for the most part, people have affairs because it’s a painkiller,” she says. “They are suffering, they don’t know how to fix it and they latch on to someone – a co-worker, say – who they can talk to about their troubles in a low-stakes way. For most of us, being listened to and getting validation feels like love. You start to believe that this is your person. Eventually, you realise it’s just a fantasy. For the most part. There are exceptions, obviously.”
However, all may not be lost. “Couples can survive repeated betrayals and couples can also be broken by a thousand small paper cuts,” says the psychotherapist Charlotte Fox Weber. “In therapy, we talk about the concept of rupture and repair. Sometimes, after an affair, it can break apart a kind of impasse in a relationship that is struggling; it doesn’t necessarily spell the end. Without condoning infidelity, with the mutual desire to stay together, it can actually create space for growth, recovery and renewed connection.”
Fox Weber says the reasons for betrayal are complex and varied. “There are situations where people are unfaithful because they were tempted, or because they’re repeating a pattern, or because they are feeling ignored, overlooked or inadequate. There is rarely just one cause. Sometimes, infidelity is just a person’s way of driving the plot forward.”
So, how might a couple begin to navigate back to the way things were before? “Infidelity leaves us in a place where we feel like we’ve lost control of our life,” says Luke Shillings, a life coach and the host of the podcast After the Affair. “It can feel like you’ve had the rug pulled from under your feet.”
From my own experience, this is exactly what it feels like. You have to rewind several chapters and view life through a different lens. Nora Ephron, writing in her semi-autobiographical novel Heartburn, summed it up marvellously: “The infidelity itself is small potatoes compared to the low-level brain damage that results when a whole chunk of your life turns out to have been completely different from what you thought it was.”
Shillings says: “If this has happened to you, start by getting clear on the facts of the affair, even if they’re not details you want to hear from your partner. Then, recognise the things you can control versus those you can’t. Take responsibility for what your current situation is. By that, I mean working on building up your own resilience and self-care. Ask yourself: how can I embrace this discomfort and use it as a catalyst for growth and change? How can I move forward through this otherwise unwanted situation?”
He also strongly advises people who have decided to work things through with their partner to examine their reasons for doing so. “It’s very easy to stay for the kids, or the money, or the house, or the social life and family support. Cultural and religious expectations can also play a part. Forget about those for now and get very clear about whether you want to be in the relationship regardless. Then go back to the externals, because they do exist. It’s about knowing your motivations in your own mind.”
The biggest challenge is restoring trust. “This is very, very difficult,” says Shillings. “It’s not just that the other person’s behaviour fell short of what was anticipated; we can lose faith in our own judgment. Learn to pay attention to your intuition and notice the times you’ve ignored your gut instincts and when it has paid off.”
Counterintuitively, rather than aiming to feel 100% certain your partner will never cheat again, Shillings suggests getting comfortable with the small possibility that trust may be broken in the future. “If you can, relax into the possibility that, actually, you’re choosing to trust this person because of all of the good and wonderful things that come from being in a relationship with them. Are you prepared to throw that away because of a sliver of concern or possibility that they may betray you?”
Something that is rarely addressed in advice columns is the afterlife of the cheater who stays. “I always advise them to grieve the loss of the person they were entangled with,” says Fox Weber. “It’s not just the pain of having something end abruptly, but also the sense of self that came with it. It can be a slow, difficult process of reviving a sense of self that isn’t feeding off the intoxication of an affair.
“Even though you’ve made a healthy choice, life afterwards can feel humdrum and beige. You’ve done the right thing, but it’s not going to be as dazzling and exciting as this secret thing. You need to find fascination in ordinary living again.”
Talking about what happened – and why – is vitally important, but this should be done at arranged times. “If you don’t ringfence time for these hard discussions, then you end up talking about it every minute of the day, which overwhelms the nervous system,” says Nickerson.
“The other really important thing, if you’ve been cheated on, is to remind yourself that it had absolutely nothing to do with you,” she concludes. “It was [the psychotherapist] Esther Perel who came up with the line: ‘People have affairs to become another person, not to be with another person.’ And if you find yourself dwelling on the attributes of the other woman or the other man, remember this: supermodels and Hollywood stars are cheated on all the time.”
