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Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Sophie Miura is an editor, journalist, and digital strategist with more than 10 years of editorial experience. The emotional aftermath of infidelity is a lot like the stages of grief. First, there's the shock that the person closest to you has committed such a betrayal and perhaps even denial as you grapple with their act. A ffairs are not what they used to be because marriage is not what it used to be.
For much of history, and in many parts of the world today, marriage was a pragmatic alliance that ensured economic stability and social cohesion. A child of immigrants, Priya surely has relatives whose marital options were limited at best.
For her and Colin, however, as for most modern Western couples, marriage is no longer an economic enterprise but rather a companionate one—a free-choice engagement between two individuals, based not on duty and obligation but on love and affection.
Never before have our expectations of marriage taken on such epic proportions. We still want everything the traditional family was meant to provide—security, respectability, property, and children—but now we also want our partner to love us, to desire us, to be interested in us. We should be best friends and trusted confidants, and passionate lovers to boot. Contained within the small circle of the wedding band are vastly contradictory ideals. We want our chosen one to offer stability, safety, predictability, and dependability.
And we want that very same person to supply awe, mystery, adventure, and risk. We expect comfort and edge, familiarity and novelty, continuity and surprise.
We have conjured up a new Olympus, where love will remain unconditional, intimacy enthralling, and sex oh so exciting, with one person, for the long haul. And the long haul keeps getting longer. We also live in an age of entitlement; personal fulfillment, we believe, is our due. In the West, sex is a right linked to our individuality, our self-actualization, and our freedom.
Thus, most of us now arrive at the altar after years of sexual nomadism. We used to get married and have sex for the first time. Now we get married and stop having sex with others. The conscious choice we make to rein in our sexual freedom is a testament to the seriousness of our commitment. I can stop looking. At so many weddings, starry-eyed dreamers recite a list of vows, swearing to be everything to each other, from soul mate to lover to teacher to therapist.
I will not only celebrate your triumphs, I will love you all the more for your failures. In such a blissful partnership, why would we ever stray? And yet, it does. Infidelity happens in bad marriages and in good marriages. It happens even in open relationships where extramarital sex is carefully negotiated beforehand. The freedom to leave or divorce has not made cheating obsolete.
So why do people cheat? And why do happy people cheat? She vaunts the merits of her conjugal life, and assures me that Colin is everything she always dreamed of in a husband. Clearly she subscribes to the conventional wisdom when it comes to affairs—that diversions happen only when something is missing in the marriage.
If you have everything you need at home—as modern marriage promises—you should have no reason to go elsewhere. Hence, infidelity must be a symptom of a relationship gone awry.
The symptom theory has several problems. First, it reinforces the idea that there is such a thing as a perfect marriage that will inoculate us against wanderlust. But our new marital ideal has not curbed the number of men and women who wander. In fact, in a cruel twist of fate, it is precisely the expectation of domestic bliss that may set us up for infidelity.
Once, we strayed because marriage was not supposed to deliver love and passion. Today, we stray because marriage fails to deliver the love and passion it promised. Second, infidelity does not always correlate neatly with marital dysfunction. Yes, in plenty of cases an affair compensates for a lack or sets up an exit. Insecure attachment, conflict avoidance, prolonged lack of sex, loneliness, or just years of rehashing the same old arguments—many adulterers are motivated by domestic discord.
And then there are the repeat offenders, the narcissists who cheat with impunity simply because they can. However, therapists are confronted on a daily basis with situations that defy these well-documented reasons. Many of these individuals were faithful for years, sometimes decades.
They seem to be well balanced, mature, caring, and deeply invested in their relationship. Yet one day, they crossed a line they never imagined they would cross. For a glimmer of what? I want to understand what the affair means for them. Why did you do it? Why him? Why her? Why now? Was this the first time? Did you initiate? Infidelity is one of the most distressing things you can experience in a romantic relationship, so it's very important to understand why lovers are motivated to be unfaithful, he added.
The study, based on responses from people who had cheated on a partner, found eight basic motivations for infidelity. The participants were young, 20 years old on average, but their reasons for straying are common themes that could apply across other ages, Selterman said. No longer feeling passionate love or even falling out of love. Perceiving the relationship to be boring, dull or stagnant.
Feeling that your partner is not paying enough attention to you or not spending enough time with you. This is where someone habitually engages in sexual activity as a way of satisfying desires and relieving negative feelings they find hard to control. These desires can be compulsive in the way that a drug or alcohol addiction might be. For some people, this can mean they end up engaging in affairs repeatedly or in multiple relationships. For more information on sex addiction, visit the NHS choices page.
Of course, many couples come to the conclusion that their relationship has run its course—with the affair being a symptom of what was wrong, rather than the cause. Whatever the case, trying to examine the issues together is your best chance to make sense of things.
The person who has cheated will need to take responsibility for their own their behaviour as wrong and not make excuses and—although it can be very difficult for the person who has been cheated on—both partners will need to acknowledge their responsibility for what was wrong with the relationship prior to this happening.
In terms of next steps, our article on what to do if your partner has had an affair also has lots of useful information. Relationship Counselling can help you talk about the affair and what caused it in a safe and confidential environment.
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