Everyone needs to have love and intimacy in their lives. It is at the core of humanity. The lack of love and caring have been known to bring sadness, emptiness, and despair. Similarly, it can be extremely difficult mentally and emotionally to find out that the person who you are married to is having an affair with someone else. Infidelity is a worldwide occurrence that happens across various cultures. We might all condemn it, but it has been going around for ages.
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How Does Infidelity Happen?
Are you wondering as to why men cheat, or why women stray? Various causes can be attributed to people straying from their long-term committed relationships and getting involved with other people. Many times, an affair is the manifestation of something broken from the inside for a while. Many times it has nothing to do with the marriage. According to some studies, some people who have gotten involved in affairs have termed their committed relationships to be happy.
Infidelity is entirely a choice you make. If you got hurt by your spouse as a result of their infidelity, you need to remember that you or how satisfied your partner is in the relationship did not cause it.
You need to view your relationship with an open mind and heart. You need to ascertain if your partner felt pushed away or alienated by you, causing him to be adulterous. You don’t deserve that kind of pain, but neither do they.
You will need to be able to forgive if you want to remain in the relationship. It does not indicate that you have to accept what happened. But you need to decipher it well enough to stop the hurt and anger from overpowering all your emotions.
Some people do make really bad mistakes, enough to break you apart in little pieces. But if you both want to remain in the relationship and make it survive, it is very much possible to move past the hurt and betrayal and start anew.
The Reasons Infidelity Occur In a Marriage
Here are a few reasons that we have come up with as to why infidelity occurs.
The Architecture of The Brain
There are three brain systems that are tasked with seeking out and maintaining intimate connections. The first of them is the sex drive, which gets us out there to seek out a potential partner. This is related and is crucial to the survival of our species from an evolutionary point of view.
The second is romantic love or attraction, this is related to the longing or need we have for a particular person. Neurochemicals such as norepinephrine, dopamine, and serotonin ignite the feelings associated with falling in love with someone and focusing your energy on that special person. So falling in love brings an addictive high with it.
The third system is attachment. By this time the body learns to tolerate the euphoria that attraction brings. Feelings of security, well-being, and calmness are brought on by hormones that surge through the body at this stage.
When all these neurochemicals work at different phases of the individual’s life, they will allow a person to fall out of love with their partner and fall in love with someone else from whom they are getting the attention they probably are not getting in their marriages.
The Relationship
All affairs are not the results of a dissatisfied relationship though some might be. Below are listed some of the reasons that drive people to have affairs.
- Being dissatisfied and having general unhappiness toward the long-term relationship.
- Some personal desires are not getting fulfilled.
- Feelings of love for the partner are absent or significantly reduced.
- The quality of sex.
- Absence of sufficient emotional support.
- No real connection between the couple.
- The amount of negative interactions keeps increasing.
Biological Considerations
Many people have affairs due to being depressed. It does not justify it, though. Many people try to self-medicate by having an affair. Women married to men with similar genes are more likely to commit adultery. Studies have shown that women with more genes in common with their spouses have committed many more affairs. If you look at it from an evolutionary perspective, women do this to lessen complications related to fertility and pregnancy.
Tips For Dealing With the Infidelity After The Affair
Relationships will obviously heal from infidelity, but this largely depends on the fact that there is any remaining love in the relationship. If there is any honesty and ownership of the faults, then recovery is very easily achieved. Here are a few tips for dealing with infidelity after the affair.
End The Affair Correctly
If you want to give your relationship a real chance, then you must ensure that the affair is ended for good by cutting all communication with the other person. This is especially important due to the role of neurochemicals in getting the desire and attraction reinforced.
Try To Put The Affair In Context
In order to rekindle your relationship, you need to comprehend the affair by putting it in the context of the relationship, not as the personal failure of one person. It’s much easier to put all the blame on one person who had the affair, but this way, you end the possibility of addressing any other causes that might have contributed to the affair in the first place.
There are many ways a couple can let each other down, an affair being one of them. Other ways may include withholding sex, neglect, not being able to connect emotionally, indifference towards each other, and constantly overlooking each other’s wants and needs.
You need to be able to identify which of these causes were occurring in your relationship and address them. Treating these issues will allow you to not only move ahead but also ensure that the infidelity does not happen again in the future.
Summing Up
Having to deal with a cheating spouse is painful. You will feel baffled, blame yourself, be mad at your spouse, and have a general feeling of helplessness. Hopefully, the points we mentioned in this article have helped you to understand why it happens and how to deal with an affair after the infidelity is over. Best of luck with your emotional well-being and getting over any emotional distress.
