Cheating is arguably the worst offense anyone can commit in a relationship (bar murder). The General Social Survey found that a vast majority of men and women said that infidelity in a marriage is unforgivable. At least 78 percent of men think cheating is never okay in a marriage while 84 percent of women feel the same way.
If our attitudes seem to be so staunchly anti-infidelity, then why does it run so rampant? Esther Perel, couples’ therapist and author of “Mating in Captivity,” says, “For most of history, monogamy had zero to do with love,” says Perel. “It was basically an imposition of men, mostly of men, patriarchy, on women in order to know about patrimony and lineage. Today, monogamy is exclusiveness.”
With all the technology available to us today, it’s easier than ever to satisfy your needs. “You can pretty much cheat on your partner while lying next to them in bed,” Perel says. However, cheating does not necessarily have to be sexual infidelity. In fact, while conducting research for his book “The Truth About Cheating,” marriage counselor M. Gary Neuman found that 92 percent of men said that their infidelity wasn’t sexual. “They may have never touched the person, but the kiss they imagine giving is more powerful than hours of actual lovemaking,” Perel adds.
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But even if our culture has become more digital and people can cheat in more ways than one, cheating can’t simply be dismissed as a technology issue. Sometimes, it’s a personality problem.
Kelly Campbell, Ph.D., professor of psychology at California State University San Bernardino, explains that people cheat for individual reasons. “The phrase ‘once a cheater, always a cheater’ [refers to] qualities about the person that make him or her more prone to commit infidelity,” she says. You can’t just make a sweeping generalization to explain such an emotionally-complex act.
For starters, as Huffington Post explains, men are more likely than women to commit infidelity. But this isn’t necessarily because they have looser morals. The scientific explanation, according to Campbell, would be that they have more testosterone, which is responsible for the strong desire to have sex.
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Psychologically speaking, however, the penchant for cheating has to do with someone’s personality. “Those who have less conscientious and less agreeable personalities are more likely than people high on these traits to commit infidelity,” Campbell says.
Other times, though, the motivation to cheat comes from the problems within the relationship itself. Typically, something about a cheater’s relationship – whether it’s unfulfilling sex, high conflict or overall dissatisfaction – becomes unsatisfying, says Campbell. “For these people, becoming involved in a well-matched partnership diminishes or eliminates their desire to cheat,” she adds.
However, these personality traits do not always apply to a cheater. “A person might not have a personality prone to cheating, and might be in a perfectly happy relationship, but something about their environment puts them at risk for infidelity,” Campbell says.
So really, there is no right answer to “What makes a cheater?” To explain some of these complicated scenarios, Glamour shares quotes from people who have admitted to cheating. They range from what some would label as morally despicable to answers that, though unjustified, made sense.
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One man, 28, says, “I cheated on my girlfriend because I could. I never had a lot of sexual options through high school and college, but after school, I really hit my stride. For the first time, women were hitting on me and I was drunk on the feeling.”
Other men, however, were either seeking something they weren’t getting in their marriage (sex, love, affection) or were seeking solace from a bad relationship.
One woman, 34, explains that she cheated because she “needed a way to end it.” She says, “I fell out of love and was too scared to tell him and too embarrassed to admit to myself that the relationship was done … Cowardice, really.”
So as terrible (and cliché) as it may sound, people cheat because they’re human. And although this behavior cannot be justified, it can open a discussion of how the traditional depiction of a lying, cheating “bastard” is too simple.
