When you experience something you’ve never experienced before, it can be difficult to distinguish fact from fiction, especially when the experience includes emotional pain. If you’ve been betrayed by an unfaithful partner, or if you’re the partner who had the affair, your mind is likely running through common societal beliefs about infidelity. And perhaps you’re even accepting them as facts.
Myths (or assumptions, or preconceived notions) are easy to confuse as facts because there’s usually someone who can confirm that that happened to them. You might have people around you or people in online forums who speak so persuasively that they’ve convinced you that generalizations are truths. When a couple is trying to recover from infidelity, this can be a problem.
For the necessary recovery work to begin (and stay on course), there must be some hope, however thready at first, that the relationship can be healed. What some of the myths about cheating have in common is that they don’t leave room for that crucial hope to survive.
Let’s explore some of those myths so that if you and your partner are coping with the massive fallout of infidelity, and if you both are committed to saving the marriage/relationship, you’re able to separate fact from myth during this profoundly challenging time.
“Once a cheater, always a cheater”
This myth posits that there is something inherently unfaithful in anyone who cheats, some character flaw that cannot be overcome. It likens infidelity to eye color or height. Although you may hear of many anecdotes of serial affairs, this does not mean that once someone cheats on their partner they are fated to do so again and again.
While it’s true that some individuals, for complicated reasons that often reach back into childhood, are more affair prone than others (I’ve written extensively on this subject, and will explore it further still in The Psychology of Unfaithfulness, a book that will be made available later this year), being affair prone is not at all being destined to a life of cheating.
Something to think about that turns that myth upside-down: When someone has been unfaithful, and is deeply remorseful about the infidelity, and works hard in counseling to understand why they betrayed the person they love, and works hard to repair the damage caused by their unfaithfulness, they are no longer steered by proclivities beyond their awareness. The case can be made that despite the traumas of their past that have led them to be affair prone, after the sincere hard work they’ve accomplished, after all the light they’ve shed on their patterns, they are less likely to be a repeat offender than someone whose psychological dynamics remain buried at an unconscious level of the psyche.
Most always/never statements—when it comes to something as complex and dynamic as human behavior—are usually more myth than fact.
“The relationship must be a bad one”
Rather than blaming something “unfixable” in the unfaithful partner as the previous myth does, this assumption fully lays the blame on the marriage/relationship as a whole. While it’s of course true that affairs occur under the umbrella of unhappy relationships, there are just as many that take place when the union is a happy one.
This myth is particularly insidious and destructive for the betrayed partner, who already may be searching their mind for why the affair occurred, and who may erroneously put the blame on themselves.
“My partner and I haven’t had a lot of sex since our son was born over two years ago,” Joy, aged 34, said. “I’ve had some health issues, and the pressure of full-time work and motherhood has left me exhausted in ways I never anticipated. I can’t help but think that if I’d tried harder, if I made our intimate life a bigger priority, Aaron wouldn’t have strayed.”
Not only is this assumption common within relationships impacted by infidelity, but it’s frequently echoed from the outside, by individuals and couples who have not experienced the devastating fallout of an affair. Untruths like “a sexless marriage leads to one or both spouses cheating” and “couples who fight too much should expect cheating in the relationship” are often bandied about casually. . .and as if they speak some truth. They do not.
For couples who have not seen their relationship damaged by unfaithfulness, repeating the myth of the “bad relationship” serves as a way to cope with the fear that that could happen to them. It’s a distancing mechanism that’s common not only with this situation, but with events like untimely deaths or teen children who start using drugs or alcohol. That thinking of “that could never happen to me” begins with finding a black-and-white reason for someone else’s misfortune. But of course, that does not make it true.
“The cheater lacks a moral compass”
Again, this myth leans on the false notion that human nature can be reduced to a kind of yes/no equation. Good people can do things they know are wrong, and can even regret what they’re doing at the time. Unfaithfulness is not a litmus test for the individual’s value system. There are no quick, tidy pronouncements when it comes to human behavior. It may be comforting for people who have not been impacted by infidelity to think affairs only take place when a person is immoral (and therefore they think it can never happen to them), but that is not the truth.
I have worked with many, many people who are appalled and disgusted with themselves for having betrayed their partners. People who know right from wrong, who have a solid moral scaffolding keeping their values in front of mind, who try to do good whenever possible.
These people often live up to their inner code of ethics, even though they did something that violated how they want to live, even though they did something that is not in line with their moral compass. These are the individuals that tend to work hard in affair recovery to accept responsibility and repair the relationship that they so seriously injured.
“The one who strayed must not love the partner they betrayed”
Over the course of my twenty-five years with a therapy practice, I have worked with countless individuals who have had affairs and still love their partners very much. Those people are consumed with regret, devastated by remorse. They wish they could turn back the clock and make a different decision.
It’s important to realize that the and in that statement (they have had affairs and still love their partners) is valid. Those two realities can coexist. The human instinct to try to simplify confusing situations by creating absolutes and if-then situations (if they cheated on me, they must not love me) is an attempt to grasp at some bit of clarity when things feel murky. But it’s vital not to hold onto a myth, especially a limiting one, when the goal is relationship recovery.
Whenever dealing with massive numbers of people and situations, it’s of course possible to find examples of everything and anything. So naturally there are instances of people who do not love their partners going on to cheat. But there are likely just as many instances of individuals who do not feel love for their partners who remain faithful to them. And, as I mentioned, what I have discovered in my own work is that a foundation of mutual love is often present, simultaneously, in a relationship that has been ruptured by an affair.
Betrayal does not mean an absence of love, which is why I’ve seen firsthand so many people in individual counseling who are in deep emotional pain and who are aghast at their bewildering actions that led them to hurt the person they love. An important part of the therapy work for the unfaithful partner is developing the insights that led them to cheat despite the love they feel for the partner they betrayed.
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By their very nature, myths—and assumptions and generalizations—are easy. They’re easy to grab, easy to hold onto, oversimplified, brief, and easy to remember. Society passes them around and keeps them in circulation so they’re solidly in our consciousness (and often we don’t even remember how and when they got there), and therefore it’s easy to see them as truisms, as nuggets of wisdom.
It’s crucial to separate myth from reality when you’re on the affair recovery journey. Repairing a relationship shattered by infidelity is hard work in and of itself; letting false assumptions limit your capacity to heal will only make it harder and can unnecessarily hold you back. This is why looking closely at these common generalizations and asking whether they’re really true is a pivotal first step.
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Rich Nicastro, PhD is a clinical psychologist based in Austin, Texas. He has over twenty-five years of experience working with individuals and couples. He offers teletherapy to clients throughout the United States.
