Why People Cheat

Need, Deception, and Silence

When infidelity is reduced to impulse or entitlement, we miss what is actually happening. People rarely betray simply because opportunity appears. More often, betrayal emerges where something vital has become unlivable or inexpressible inside the primary bond . . . and even more unbearable to name to one's self.

Affairs are not usually about wanting more.

They are about wanting to have needs without consequence.

Beyond the Gendered Myths

Culturally we have a shared shorthand that offers us familiar explanations: men cheat for sex, women cheat for connection. These narratives are persistent but they obscure more than they reveal.

In my practice . . .

Men often report cheating, not for sex alone, but for:

• A sense of aliveness without responsibility

• Validation unburdened by expectation

• A self that is not evaluated, relied upon, or needed

Women often report cheating not for romance alone, but for:

• Being seen as a subject rather than a function

• Desire without caretaking

• Permission to need without guilt

  
  

Yet gender is not destiny. These patterns are cultural overlays on something deeper: how each person learned to manage need, longing, and dependency.

The Role of Early Adaptation

Long before an affair begins, most people have already learned something crucial about intimacy:

• What is safe to need or want

• What must be hidden

• What risks abandonment

• What overwhelms others

In childhood environments where emotional need was ignored, punished, sexualized, or made burdensome, many people adapted by splitting experience. One part or aspect of self becomes responsible, reliable, and contained. Another, or other parts of the self, hold longing, desire, anger, curiosity, or hunger.

Infidelity often occurs at the moment these inner aspects of self can no longer be held together within a coherent or integrated psyche. The consciousness literally splits.

The lack of inner coherence is mostly unconscious, creating a low hum of instability or insecurity that can be disregulating, but familiar. As Gabor Maté has consistently emphasized, compulsive or self-defeating behaviors are not expressions of excess; they are attempts at regulation. Through this lens, affairs function less as moral failures and more as immature coping strategies that have outgrown their usefulness.

Deception as Attachment Protection

This does not absolve harm. But it does clarify intent.

Many people who cheat are not trying to destroy their primary relationship. They are trying to preserve it while meeting a need they believe would threaten it. Deception becomes a misguided form of attachment protection: If I don’t tell you, I don’t lose you.

This is why so many affairs coexist with genuine love, care, and investment at home. The betrayal is not born of indifference; it is born of fear . . . often fear of needing and experiencing the need, unmet.

As Terry Real has noted in his work on relational accountability, many betrayals are fueled by entitlement layered on top of disempowerment. The person feels unseen or constrained, yet also justified in taking what they believe they cannot ask for.

The Affair as a Regressive Solution

Affairs often offer a temporary regression to an earlier psychological state:

• No history

• No shared obligations

• No accumulated disappointment

• No need to negotiate change

  
  

In this way, the affair partner is less a person than a mirror for a disowned or lost sense of self. The intensity comes not from the other, but from the sudden return of vitality, agency, or desirability.

As Esther Perel has observed, many people do not leave their partners to find someone else . . . they leave themselves and find a way back through another.

But this return is unstable. Because it is built on secrecy, it cannot be integrated. The very conditions that make the affair intoxicating ensure its eventual destructiveness.

The Cost of Splitting

The deeper damage of infidelity begins before discovery. It begins with psychic fragmentation.

The betrayer must:

• Track multiple realities

• Monitor speech and memory

• Regulate anxiety through concealment

The betrayed . . . often long before knowing . . . may sense incoherence:

• A partner who is present but absent

• Intuition dismissed as insecurity

• Emotional dissonance without explanation

  
  

This sets the stage for what follows disclosure: not just heartbreak, but epistemic collapse: reality itself becomes suspect.

Which brings us to the next and final blog entry of this series. Infidelity does not only break trust in the other. It evokes the original break in self-trust from earliest childhood . . . the young one who loved, sensed, questioned, and often doubted their own knowing. In the final part of this series, we will examine why the injury cuts so deeply, and why repair . . . when it is possible . . . demands far more than forgiveness.

Reflection

These questions are not about blame. They are about personal history and honesty.

• What were you taught . . . explicitly or implicitly . . . about needing, wanting, or asking for more?

• Which desires feel easiest to express in relationship, and which feel dangerous or shame-laden?

• Where have you learned to split parts of yourself or dismiss parts in order to remain attached?

• Have there been moments when secrecy felt safer than truth? What made honesty feel risky?

• If you imagine telling the full truth of your inner life to a partner, what fears arise first?

  
  

Notice what emerges without correcting it. The aim here is not confession, but self-reflection.