Q. you Found Out Your partner cheated. Do you leave or stay? Can This Relationship Be Saved?

A. We get this question a lot! I’d love to say that it depends on your circumstances, as in are you married or just dating, do you have kids or not, is the perpetrator sorry, or just sorry they got caught? But the truth is, this isn’t the beginning of the end. This is the end. You just didn’t know it yet. This is the epilogue.

What was the beginning and the middle? The plotting and planning, the secrecy and the sneaking around. Think of all the tiny steps that led up to the indiscretion. The first flirtation, the outreach, the lies about where he/she was during the time spent with the other person. Think about all the little ways he/she didn’t communicate with you but rather about you (I feel misunderstood… sex isn’t what it should be… life at home is boring… etc etc etc. Let your imagination wander. It all happened.)

Here is the biggest problem with cheating and cheaters. It’s not the sex, intimacy or even the fact that your partner has found excitement, satisfaction, attraction and validation elsewhere, though the very idea of these images played out in your head may make you want to throw up. No that’s not the worst thing. The worst thing? It’s the lying.

What your partner did with someone else is not as relevant to your relationship as what the status of what they did with you, which is this: They disrespected you by lying, covering their tracks, hatching a plan to meet clandestinely, and then covering up again as to where they were, what they were doing and with whom.

Lying Is the Original Sin

The cheater has to lie about his whereabouts (let’s use the masculine pronoun here for ease of conversation, though statistically the cheating gap between men and women is closing).

Men cheat more, but not by much. Whereas it used to be thought that women cheated 13 percent of the time and men 20 percent of the time (according to self-reported numbers), a Kinsey Institute report found that among younger couples with an average age of 31, “there were no significant gender differences in reports of infidelity.”

The survey found that 23 percent of men cheat vs. 19 percent of women. Of course, self-reported numbers are generally low. So if we want to be real about it, these numbers are likely to be much higher, but either way, men cheat more often than women, and older men (70 and above) cheat more often than younger men. First we need to ask ourselves: Why did the person cheat? Blame them, not yourself.

First, let’s keep in mind that 40 percent of all marriages are impacted by someone being unfaithful. We know that nearly half of marriages end in divorce, so we can assume that the infidelities are a symptom, not a cause, of what is wrong in a relationship. The relationship is in trouble long before the cheating begins. Unless the person walks into the relationship with childhood baggage that motivated them to believe cheating is normal and fidelity is overrated. Then things were doomed from the start.

Why Men Cheat

A 2021 study of nearly 500 people revealed eight key reasons for why they cheated, and surprisingly these reasons are not that different than the ones women cite. For men, the reasons are: Anger (perhaps at the fact that the other person cheated), low self-esteem (they need validation they aren’t getting at home), feeling neglected or unloved (women and men both need to feel safe, loved and appreciated), low commitment (often due to childhood experiences, growing up witnessing relationship norms that are deep-seeded and often patterned after one’s own parent of the same sex), the need for variety, unsatisfied sexual desire, and circumstances such as mental health issues.

According to Very Well Health, which quotes the Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, it’s important to understand that these reasons arise within the cheater and are not the responsibility of the betrayed partner. At times, the behavior is baked in from the start and the spouse who strays is damaged from a childhood where a father cheated, or perpetrated neglect on the wife, and this can create scars that run deep, and express themselves in a lack of empathy, not valuing monogamy, or a general lack of concern about the consequences of their actions.

Why Women Cheat

The reasons women cheat, Brides reports, starts with a general dissatisfaction in the marriage. Other reasons, according to the expert Angela Skurtu, a licensed marriage and family therapist (LMFT) and certified sex therapist, include low self-esteem (the new attraction bolsters their self-worth), emotional starvation, anger or retribution (if the other person cheated), lack of excitement and sexual deprivation in the marriage, loneliness, remote attachment style, midlife crisis or mental health condition such as depression, since physical attraction can act on the dopamine system of the brain as a euphoria-enhancer.

Affairs Take Different Forms

No matter what form the cheating takes, at its core, an affair is a betrayal of trust. It may be crushing, but you need to know that this isn’t your fault. When confronted, your partner may try to blame you for not paying enough attention to him or initiating sex, but unless you have been communicating all along, the person who strays is the one responsible for their actions.

Can this Marriage Be Saved?

Here is the bottom line: You can forgive sex, intimacy and someone trying out a new flavor as it were. But you can’t forgive lying and not communicating honestly. If the partner is so disillusioned, bored, uninterested in working through the problems, or feels un-seen, un-loved or neglected, and isn’t talking through their frustrations with you, then either this has to change, through getting outside therapy, or it will be difficult if not impossible to rebuild the bonds that drew you together in the first place.

You may as well be standing outside your relationship, taking an objective look at at the situation. It is like looking at a house in ashes. You can rebuild, if you both want to put in the work, but otherwise, someone needs to pack up and go. It could be you.

Our Take: By the time you find out about the affair, your relationship is over. In order to save it you need to build a whole new relationship, if you both want to.