No one likes a cheater. That
A few years ago, someone posed this question on the internet: “Cheaters of
Here
Your emotional needs aren’t being met.
There’s this scene in the Netflix series GLOW (which you should totally watch if you haven’t already) where one of the wrestlers asks her husband how he was able to cheat on her. He tells her he counted the number of days she could go without asking him anything about his day or how he was, and the number was something outrageous that amounted to over a month.
Feeling neglected can be a powerful motivator to look elsewhere for emotional validation. As one mother of a 9-month-old confessed on Reddit, she cheated because her partner “got lazy.” She said that she would come home from work and he’d be “watching some show or playing damned clash of clans.”
“I tried to stay so far away from the guy
Your libido is mismatched with your SO’s.
While it’s true that finding your bedroom stride with a new partner can take some time, and that libido can change throughout your life, there is something to be said for irreconcilable differences in this arena.
“Differences in … drives are a huge, huge issue. And I found that out the hard way,” writes another user. “My husband ended up having an affair because we weren’t [doing it] enough … It ruined the marriage and we divorced. There were other problems, sure. But we were not … compatible and I was young and didn’t realize how important that is.”
You know the adage about the physical aspects being only a small percentage of the relationship until there’s a problem with it, at which point it becomes a huge percentage of the relationship? Yeah, what that says.
You feel trapped.
Aversion develops for a number of reasons, and it can be generalized or directed toward a particular person. Sometimes, when one person has a higher drive than their partner, the partner with the lower drive can begin to feel repulsion at the idea of being intimate, especially when the higher-drive partner resorts to emotional abuse:
“Jo Ann developed … [an] aversion because her husband had pressured her since before marriage … coercing her by making her feel ashamed,” writes licensed psychologist and therapist Dr. Stephanie Buehler of one couple she treated in her practice. “Over time, giving in to her husband [led] Jo Ann to feel repulsed when he touched her … Thus, she avoided [him] and they were active only once or twice a month, which led to escalating passive aggressive behavior by the husband, such as complaining and wheedling Jo Ann … which was a further turn-off.”
One Redditor describes a similar sense of disgust, spawned by feeling trapped in a relationship with an emotionally manipulative significant other, as the motive for cheating. “I was 17 when our relationship started. I stopped wanting to be with him one year into the relationship, but he said he’d [end his life] if I ever left him and I was naive,” the user writes. “He’d badger me … multiple times a day, every day, and kept insisting until I just laid there motionless while he did his thing just so he’d stop the emotional blackmail (‘If you don’t want to … you don’t love me and I don’t have a reason to live anymore’). He literally drooled on me while [we did it].”
You’re deeply devoted to pessimism (and probably have an insecure attachment style).
Another Redditor’s response is short and simple, and reflects a deep devotion to the darker side of life: “Because I know I’ll probably end up
Right, then! Pretty grim, but also makes an uncomfortable amount of sense—at least to me, someone who has a “fearful-avoidant” romantic attachment style, according to this test.
As it turns out, attachment style may have a huge impact on our relationships, and whether we consistently sabotage them—and it all has to do, surprise, with our earliest relationships. As the theory goes, whether our primary caregiver was distracted, attentive, overbearing, aggressive, or any other number of adjectives can have a profound effect on how we move through the world as adults, specifically in romantic relationships, where many of us feel most vulnerable.
(Some say that our attachment styles may also be affected by early friendships and romantic relationships.) There are four attachment styles—secure, anxious-preoccupied, dismissive-avoidant, and fearful-avoidant—and you can read more about them literally all over the internet.
“If you’re securely attached, that’s great, because you have the expectation that if you are distressed you will be able to turn to someone for help and feel you can be there for others,” Miriam Steele, the co-director of the Center for Attachment Research at the New School for Social Research in New York, tells The New York Times.
Otherwise, she says, “you have to earn your security” by doing the hard work of rerouting your natural tendencies. Cognitive behavioral therapy, anyone?
You’re really just in the wrong relationship.
Though they go against the popular knowledge of “once a cheater, always a cheater” and “you’ll lose them how you got them,” there are stories suggesting that some people cheat as a way of escaping relationships that are just plain wrong for them, and that infidelity isn’t always indicative of someone who’s incapable of loving or being loved.
One Redditor, for example, shares
“Was married to a woman with a rapidly degrading mental condition (schizophrenia and Bipolar with bouts of psychosis/fugue states) and met a woman who was married to someone who turned out to be a deeply closeted gay guy. Long story made short, we tumbled into bed late one night at a work conference, had an amazing time, woke up the next morning and I told her, ‘I really don’t want to ever wake up next to anyone who isn’t you.'”
“She replied, ‘I’m all in’. 4 weeks later she moved from Kentucky to Florida, she had filed for divorce and so had I. I proposed the day my divorce finalized.”
“11 years, two kids later, we are happy as clams and our …
Kind of romantic, when you put it like that. (Though, we have to wonder, what happened to his first wife?)
