5 reasons why partners cheat
Key Takeaways
- It's important to understand that cheating is not justified, but understanding the causes can help you avoid it in the future.
- The causes of cheating can be physical and/or emotional neglect in the relationship.
- Unfulfilled sexual desires can also lead to infidelity.
- The allure of the forbidden and adventure can be a factor.
- Revenge of injured vanity or disappointment may be a reason.
- Opportunity can also play a role, if they suddenly find themselves in a seductive situation.
It’s the biggest concern of every monogamous relationship and a horror scenario that no one wants to live out. Your partner comes home smelling of a strange woman's perfume or suddenly spends hours getting ready for the planned “girls' nights out” that’s a cover story.
Cheating is a sensitive topic that numerous researchers are dealing with as we speak. eHarmony Group released a study on this, showing interesting results. 30 percent of the women surveyed said they had cheated at least once. The men were close behind with 27 percent.
This study also asked about temptation, with 18 percent of men confessing to having considered the thought. For women, the number was 12 percent. Monogamy is considered rather unusual behavior for humans, even by anthropologists.
As much as people like to sweep this topic under the rug, it seems not uncommon for missteps to occur within a relationship. For most, this breach of trust means the immediate end of a partnership. Others question the reasons and try to understand how it came to pass.
To learn that a partner has cheated not only injures one's own ego at the time, but can also lead to major trust problems in the future. People who have been cheated on once find it difficult to open up in new relationships and take a long time to trust again.
But how does this situation come about? Does infidelity mean the feelings are gone? These are questions we would like to address in this article. We’ve honed it down to five reasons why your partner might cheat on you.
- Physical and/or emotional neglect
- Sexual desires that fall by the wayside
- The attraction of the forbidden
- Revenge
- Opportunity makes cheaters
We don't want to trivialize the reasons for cheating. But addressing these factors might help you prevent an infidelity.
1. Physical and/or emotional neglect
Stress at work, the calcification of the daily routine or the weakening of one's own feelings. Few relationships are purely self-sustaining over the years, and in most cases require work. Small attentions, compliments or romantic moments full of togetherness diminish over time. While one person is fully focused on their career, the other feels neglected or even offended by the lack of attention.
If you focus only on yourself within a partnership, you could be paving the way for your partner to fall into the infidelity lane. While you are working overtime to shine at work, you are giving your partner enough time to plan a rendezvous. Often, you're not even aware that you're putting the health of your relationship at risk – after all, you want to be successful so you can better finance your life together. But if you don’t spend time with your partner, they’ll feel lower self-worth and the best medicine against that is to feel desirable again – maybe with someone else.
2. Sexual desires that fall by the wayside
Cross our hearts, we know that sex is an important part of a relationship. However, people differ in how often they need it and also in what they like best. That means there are two reasons hiding right here why your partner might be looking for an erotic out.
The feeling of desire is very individual and to some more pronounced than for others. Now if one person in the partnership has an insatiable libido and their counterpart has almost none, this can quickly lead to difficulties. If the partner has no desire, do they always take matters into their own hands, so to speak? All well and good, but still far from being the same as satisfying sex. And after repeated rejection within the relationship, a fling is promptly sought outside the home bedroom.
Even specific unfulfilled desires can lead to your partner cheating on you in the long run. Let's take BDSM as an example and the situation that your counterpart is a fan of openly dominant or submissive eroticism. You, on the other hand, like sex exclusively under the covers and with dimmed lights. Since your partner can't live out his or her kinks within the relationship, he or she looks for someone where the preference doesn't cause discussions and skeptical looks.
3. The attraction of the forbidden
Even as children, we have always been attracted to things that are forbidden. This might mean that in our youth we crossed property lines or carried out other flippant trespasses.
The attraction of the forbidden accompanies us throughout our lives and is more pronounced in some. The American sex therapist Jack Morin has even created the equation attraction + obstacle = excitement for this phenomenon. Your partner is someone who likes to take risks and for whom boundaries are there to be crossed? Then that alone might be reason enough to indulge in the moment of thrill.
4. Revenge
This is motive as old as mankind itself. Even in a relationship, the desire for revenge doesn't stop there - especially when your partner finds out about a breach of trust. You were at a party, drank too much and then it happened. When you tadmit it remorsefully to your partner shortly afterwards, they have a moment of shock, but there might be much more. "Tit for tat" popularly defines the cheating vendetta.
It may be that your counterpart is cheating to catch up. Another reason could be the dent in self-esteem people experience when their partner cheats. Whatever the intention behind it, the relationship has a huge roadblock afterwards and should definitely be ended.
5. Opportunity makes cheaters
"Opportunity makes thieves" is a saying reflecting the idea that as soon as the right moment arises, everyone can become a thief. This is not only true for theft, but also for cheating. And this reason differs from the others in a certain point: While the other cheating maneuvers are partly planned from a long way off, this one is an impulse reaction.
Let's take the scenario of a company party where a lot of alcohol is flowing. Conversations become more and more stimulating and the inhibition threshold drops as the alcohol level rises. What started as teasing banter turns into lively flirting and one thing leads to another. The fling is born out of the situation and is absolutely meaningless. That doesn't make it any less bad and is by no means a justification - but it can actually happen.
In conclusion
These five reasons are by far not all motivations that could tempt your partner to cheat. However, they are some of the most common grounds why the person you love suddenly starts seeking fun in someone else’s sheets. Whether it's neglect or a perfidious vendetta, most cheating situations are planned and not an impulse decision. But be careful, because as our last reason shows, the right opportunity with the right conditions can also lead to a fling.
Instead of going straight for the kill, you should rather question the motives. Whether you give it another chance afterwards is up to you. But if you know why the fling came about, you might also know how to prevent it in the next relationship.