To begin with, love and cheating have nothing to do with each other. Foolish men who don’t feel good enough and angry women do it.
Dr. Frank Pittman, in his book, Private Lies says, “infidelity is between a man and his father, not between a man and his wife.”
Men who don’t feel good enough may cheat. They use women to feel better. It doesn’t work but they keep doing it. The are serial cheaters or philanderers. They may well cheat when the marriage is good. They can’t tolerate intimacy so the better the marriage the more they cheat.
Women who are angry cheat. They may be angry with a father, prior other men in their lives, and/or a husband. This still has nothing to do with loving. in fact, love coupled with perceived disrespect or the sense of being ignored would fuel it.
Love has been defined by Don Jackson, Paul Watlewick, et al in their book, The Mirage of Marriage,, as the act of putting the object of the love first. Further, love is a feeling therefore it comes and goes. It is not safe to base a relationship on a feeling.
I tell my clients that it takes four things to make a marriage work: people must tell the truth, be prepared to go through the full range of emotion in any given day— skip the anger sounds as no one can hear past the anger- fight to find out what you are doing wrong, and hear the message. These four behaviors make the connection. We sexualize the relationship to bring it closer.
People engaged in that kind of intimacy are less likely to cheat as cheating is impossible when you keep your partner in mind and are aware of the impact that infidelity would have.
Infidelity occurs outside of philandering. It happens at work when people stray off work subjects and share personal information. It may happen when boundaries get blurred due to drugs and alcohol. However, regardless, it has NOTHING to do with the partner or loving them.
Emotional infidelity involves a switch of intimacy. It occurs when we lie to our significant other and tell the truth to the partner in crime. This causes confusion and delusion. It can be straightened out by telling the truth to the marriage partner and lying to the infidelity partner. We. Tend to feel close to those we tell the truth to and distant from those we lie to. Thus, lying to the infidelity partner about closeness with one’s marital partner works quite well. Again, love and cheating have nothing to do with each other.
