Why Do People Cheat?
For thousands of years
cheating or infidelity,
has been so closely linked to immorality,
that it's difficult to even have a conscious conversation about it.
I mean, bring it up,
and you can even see the hair standing up on people's arms.
If you've been cheated on,
it leaves emotional wounds that may leave you bitter and distrusting.
If you're the one who cheats,
you end up feeling ashamed and condemned.
Hardly anything creates more relationship insecurity, than cheating.
But part of that insecurity
is that we don't understand
what exactly causes people to cheat.
And so we make their cheating mean something
that it doesn't mean.
In this episode,
I'm going to expose to you
the real reason that people cheat.
I'm going to progress through the rest of this video
with the assumption that what cheating or an affair is,
essentially, is when two people have both agreed to having
an exclusive romantic relationship,
and then one person
basically, breaches that contract.
Most of us get into relationships
because we desire to feel the security and consistency
of connection.
We often call this love.
Also, many of our emotional needs
are satisfied by having this consistent secure connection.
In order to feel loved,
we have to see that these emotional needs are being considered
and consistently met by our partner.
Sorry to break it to you,
but you are not a one-person show.
Regardless of what you have heard other spiritual teachers tell you
about the fact that you can be a universe unto yourself
and meet all of your needs on your own,
there are a great many needs,
emotional needs,
which can't actually be satisfied just through yourself.
They require the relationship
to something other than the self.
Now of course we know that at the highest level
there is nothing other than the self,
because we are in a state of oneness.
But here in your physical body
you experience a separate self.
So to experience oneness,
you have to experience a fusion with other.
This gets a bit tricky,
because some of our emotional needs
seem totally contradictory.
For example,
we need connection with other people
and we also have a need for a sense of autonomy.
To understand more about this,
you can watch my youtube video titled:
I Can Have Me and I Can Have You Too.
We have been telling the lie
that cheating is all about poor self-control or about lust.
Well guess what?
Cheating is not about those things at all.
We've been telling the lie that if a person loves you,
they'll never cheat on you,
and so if they cheat, it's because they don't love you enough.
Again, this is not true at all.
To understand more about this concept,
watch my video on YouTube titled:
Endurism
We've been telling the story
that the person who cheats is the "bad guy"
and the person who is cheated on is the victim.
Again, this is not the full picture.
So knowing that everything we've been telling ourselves about cheating is a lie,
What is the truth about cheating?
We cheat because our emotional needs
are not being met,
in our current relationship.
It is as simple as that.
For example,
let's say that somebody gets into a relationship
and they start to feel like they're losing themselves in the relationship.
They're dissolving into it.
They have no sense of autonomy.
Sometimes if they go cheat,
that experience enables them to feel:
"Oh guess what? I am a separate self."
"I have freedom."
Or let's say a person starts to feel lonely
and completely worthless in their relationship.
Maybe they're married to somebody who's gone on business all the time.
This kind of a person may go cheat
and by cheating,
feel as if they're actually an attractive person.
It may increase their self-esteem.
Also by cheating,
they get to have that emotional connection they're being starved of
by their partner.
Knowing that cheating is a way of getting one's emotional needs met,
also shows us how quickly
cheating could turn into an addictive behavior.
It could turn into what we are using to escape the emotional vacuum,
essentially, within ourselves.
That feeling of desperate isolation.
Cheating happens often in conjunction
with our inability to actually maintain
or to feel connection in the first place.
So we're trying desperately to get that,
to fill this hole inside of ourselves,
because of the fact that we have
developmental trauma there.
Essentially, cheating could turn into an addiction
such as sex or love addiction, or porn addiction
to help someone escape their feeling of inner emptiness and isolation.
For more information about this,
you can watch my video on YouTube titled:
How To Overcome Porn Addiction
Look back at the situation's you've been involved in
relative to cheating,
and try to see what emotional need was not being met
and that you were attempting,
or the other person was attempting,
to fulfill through that experience.
I'll tell you a personal story.
When I was a teenager,
I ended up cheating on someone I loved a lot.
Essentially what happened is
that I started to feel misunderstood by them.
This guy was a golden child, everything in his life went well,
he had a positive attitude
and he didn't understand why I felt
so crappy and negative all the time.
According to him, life was perfect.
According to me, life was always painful.
So I started to not feel seen,
not understood.
It's hard to connect with somebody when you don't feel that way.
So what happened is, I was attending an anger management class
and I met a guy who was an orphan.
Essentially, because of his wounding,
he felt the exact same way about life that I did.
And I thought: "Aha!
This guy can actually get me."
I ended up cheating on the guy that I was really in love with,
By virtue of cheating,
I essentially got to feel for the first time like:
"Oh somebody gets me. They see me
They see me, feel me, understand me
there's a kind of resonance here,
because the pain in me needed to be
seen, felt, heard, connected with
and essentially given company.
I also, remember being cheated on in my 20s.
I had this habit at the time,
when I started to feel unsafe in relationships,
of starting to criticize the guy I was with.
In my mind, criticism essentially would motivate them
to change something about themselves
that I felt desperate to change because it was causing me pain.
However, when I criticized this person in my life,
he started to feel worthless about himself.
His self-esteem dipped too low
and so he cheated on me with a girl he didn't love,
but who absolutely adored him.
And by virtue of connecting with her,
he was actually able to feel
that feeling of Self-esteem,
which was an unmet need.
I was not meeting that need of his.
I know that at this point your skin is probably crawling,
because what you've just heard me say is,
you have the responsibility
for meeting your partner's needs or else it's justifiable,
why they're cheating on you.
That's not what I'm saying.
What I'm saying is that when you enter into a relationship
part of that relationship
is essentially the idea that you include the other person as the self.
Which means that you will capitalize on their best interests.
It means that you should actually care about meeting those emotional needs.
or finding ways that you can basically strategize
meeting those needs,
so a person isn't left starving in the relationship with you.
And so it's really important
if we're trying to prevent cheating,
to make sure that we've had that kind of conversation.
And that's precisely where we go wrong.
Where we go wrong is that when our needs aren't being met,
we don't say anything about it.
That's why cheating happens in an atmosphere of secrecy.
I will say it again,
cheating rarely has anything at all to do with
loving or not loving a person.
It has to do with emotional needs not being met.
Does this mean cheating is good?
Again, that's a debate over the right and wrong
or good and bad, which is absolutely futile.
I'd rather say that cheating is best avoided in relationships
because it hurts both people.
It causes suffering to the cheater and the person who's cheated on.
But so does just putting up with your needs not being met consistently.
This is endurism.
And there is something you can do to prevent both cheating
and relationship endurism.
And that thing is communicating.
Cheating does not happen in an atmosphere of communication.
So what we have to be able to do
is to see what need is not being met,
to communicate that need to our partner
and then together to strategize ways
that we can reasonably meet those needs.
A relationship really is about two people
figuring out what each need and what each want
and then figuring out a way
to make those needs and wants compatible
if that's possible.
But here's something you've got to understand:
Sometimes when you express your needs
it becomes obvious
that those needs in fact,
conflict with the other person's needs and desires.
And when that's the case,
what we're really dealing with, is incompatibility.
And so what we have to face
is the fact that cheating is just the precursor
to the fact that we don't actually belong together as a couple.
One thing we need to develop in our relationships
is attunement.
It's really easy to be completely engaged in our partner
when all of those chemicals, those bonding chemicals are flowing.
But after a while in the relationship,
our attention drifts away from them,
and then we just assume things about our partner.
We don't tune into them enough to see the initial warning signs
that potentially our partner could stray towards cheating
because their emotional needs aren't being met.
Now communication verbally,
is of course preferable,
but there's a lot of communication that happens non-verbally.
One thing you have to understand
in order to maintain a healthy relationship,
is the idea of bids for affection.
All day every day,
we basically give bids to people in our life
for connection with them.
These bids can look like a great many things.
For example, we may inch up closer to our partner,
crack a joke or do their laundry for them.
We do any number of things that essentially say:
"Hey, I really want to connect with you right now."
Now what we do as people is,
we don't usually
acknowledge those bids.
We don't even recognize them.
But when we do recognize them,
we have a choice between three ways of dealing with it.
The first is,
we completely and intentionally
ignore that bid for affection.
The second is,
we turn against that bid for affection.
Meaning, we push it away in some way.
We become the antagonist to that bid.
And we say:
"I don't care whether you have that need,
I'm going to basically oppose that need."
Or we turn towards the need
and allow the connection to occur.
Obviously, the relationships that are the most successful long-term,
are the ones where two people turn
towards each other's bids for connection.
Now this applies to every relationship in your life,
whether it's a friendship, a relationship with your daughter,
your mother or your significant other.
So let's say that your partner walks through the door
and buys you flowers.
at that point you can either completely ignore the gesture,
you can turn against that gesture
by making him guilty for the money he spent on the flowers,
or you can turn towards it
by acknowledging that you're really happy that he did that
and by admiring the flowers.
I have to say here
that if we are in a relationship with a partner
who doesn't really care
about the fact that our needs aren't getting met
and isn't willing to work
with a way to get those emotional needs met,
you're actually in an abusive relationship
or a one-sided relationship.
And that's not workable.
It's especially not workable long term.
So if you're with that kind of a partner,
it's not actually a relationship,
it's a facade.
And you have to consider breaking up.
Now I realize that's a lot easier said than done,
once we've formed an attachment with somebody
breaking up is essentially losing a part of yourself,
and so, you know, hell on earth, right?
But what I want you to do is to realize
that you can't actually unneeded something you need
and you can't unwant something you want.
So you have one option,
and that is to go towards what you want.
And to actually meet your needs.
To understand more about this,
you can watch my video on YouTube titled:
Meet Your Needs!
All that being said,
the vast majority of the time we will find that our needs and values
are in fact compatible.
And there are ways to meet both partners needs
within the relationship, so both partners feel fulfilled and secure.
And we need to have this conversation
and keep on having it,
way before cheating presents itself as an option.
Cheating is a last resort in relationships.
It usually means the emotional tension has been high
and people have been dissatisfied
in the relationship for a really long time.
Keep in mind that fidelity itself
is a big issue in relationships.
And we often walk into relationships
assuming we have the same definition of infidelity, when we do not.
So this is also a conversation we need to have with our partner
before entering into relationships.
To understand more about this, watch my youtube video titled:
Fidelity and infidelity in relationships.
When our needs aren't being met within a relationship
our tendency is to close off,
shut down and become less communicative,
instead of more communicative.
This is the death warrant to a relationship.
Now here's something
that I want you to realize;
If I asked you to have a really intelligent conversation with me
about slime mold right now,
chances are, you wouldn't be able to do it.
Why? Because you don't know the slightest thing about slime mold.
This is exactly how it works with yourself.
You can't have a conversation with your partner
about something you don't know about.
For that reason,
it's so critical for you to gain self-awareness.
It's critical for you to look at yourself objectively
and to see what you need,
what you want, what your values are,
your likes and dislikes.
You've got to be able to communicate those things to your partner.
Obviously if you don't know what those things even are,
you can't have that conversation.
So when you feel yourself getting super triggered within a relationship
and getting unhappy,
that is the perfect opportunity
to actually, take a look at what you need.
In that circumstance you can ask yourself:
"What am I not getting right now in this particular situation
that I value and therefore need?"
Here's the thing,
your partner actually wants this information.
Chances are what's driving them absolutely bonkers
is the confusion about what the hell it is
that they're doing wrong,
and what the hell your needs and desires actually are.
So by providing that to your partner
you're actually providing the grounds
for you to be able to have a relationship in the first place,
where both of you aren't confused about eachother.
Now, it may be important for you to involve a third party
in this particular conversation.
You want to choose somebody who's unbiased
and is also not identified with a particular outcome
or with one of you or the other of you,
so that they can provide a kind of non biased potition,
where they can help you communicate to each other
your needs and also help strategize ways
to meet those needs that are satisfiable
to both people involved in the relationship.
The betrayal of cheating, may not be justified.
It's still the person's choice
to essentially Betray their partner,
instead of to have a conversation
about their needs
and to either figure out how to meet those needs collectively
or decide to break up.
However, knowing that unmet neads
are in fact the core root below cheating,
gives us a wonderful view
into what we need to be constantly focused on
and attune to in our relationship,
so as to make it so that this situation
does not occur.
Meeting your partner's needs
and enabling your partner to know
how to meet your needs,
and creating ways where those needs can be met,
that is satisfiable to both parties in the relationship,
is going to create an atmosphere
of relationship security,
as opposed to relationship insecurity.
Have a good week.
Subtitles by: Tanya Duarte www.tanyaduarte.com