Few events in life are as inherently destabilising as discovering our partner has cheated. For those of us in committed monogamous relationships, the revelation has the emotional force of an atomic bomb, leaving us feeling betrayed, lost, and alone. What’s more, the experience threatens to upend our whole view of reality, recasting much of what we thought we knew. Among the things we question:
Our partner: Were they the person I thought they were? In the aftermath of cheating, we may feel our partner has been replaced with an impostor. The security and comfort they once evoked have gone, so it’s natural to doubt how we thought of them.
Ourselves: What does this say about me? We might see ourselves as a blameless victim of our partner’s transgression, or instead be plunged into self-doubt, asking ourselves if we are less worthy or loveable.
The past: Is the past as I remember it? Finding out we’ve been cheated on threatens to rob us of our cherished memories, as we look back on the same events through a grey-tinted lens. The nostalgia we once felt is replaced with foreboding.
The future: What will happen now? An affair may not mean the end of the relationship, but it does mean the end of the relationship we once knew. The revelation of cheating takes away any ‘happily ever after’ complacency we might have had, casting a pall over our hopes and dreams. We are now so much more uncertain of what the future holds.
Relationships: Is it possible to love someone and cheat on them? After the dust has started to settle, we may find ourselves questioning romantic relationships in general. Is monogamy unrealistic, an affront to our biology? Cheating prompts reflection on the expectations we have for our relationships, what they are for, and what we want and need.
Reflecting on the questions we ask ourselves, we can see that cheating can have a much greater impact on us than we often suppose. It is a profoundly disorientating experience, with the potential to shake the very foundations of our outlook on life.
Many will judge that the right thing to do is to end the relationship. For those who may want to stay, however, it isn’t easy to trace a path back. To begin with, a couple might try and rebuild trust in the relationship by communicating openly, expressing and hearing remorse, and staying patient.
Yet any discovery of cheating prompts not just a crisis of trust, but a crisis of meaning. To truly reconcile ourselves to what happened, we need to focus more closely on the story we tell ourselves about why our partner cheated. Stories are the primary tools we use to make sense of our lives, and in the initial aftermath of cheating we struggle to construct stories that are coherent and consoling.
I saw this up close recently with a friend of mine. After finding out his partner of four years had cheated on him, he was understandably deeply hurt. He also expressed that he felt lost and confused. He found himself turning the events in his mind over and over, questioning what she had done and what it meant. But no explanation he arrived at offered a way to rebuild what they once had together.
A good story has the potential to put our minds to rest. When we have been cheated on, it’s natural to be plagued with intrusive thoughts. How could they have done this? What does this say about our relationship? Why didn’t they stop when they had the chance? To overcome this negative spiral of overthinking, we need to answer why it happened and what it means. To say of the cheating, ‘it just happened’ or ‘they couldn’t help themselves’ won’t work. It does little to satisfy our hunger for meaning, as it leaves so much unexpressed or unexamined.
Stories, by contrast, offer a way to place events in a wider context that gives them meaning. We see this clearly in films and novels. Since we have a bird’s eye view of the characters’ lives, of the connections between their interests, desires, and fears, their actions seem entirely fitting of who they are and where they’ve come from.
We can learn from this. Much of what makes a discovery of cheating so disturbing is its unpredictability. We thought we knew this person, and now they seem a stranger to us. This ought to prompt our curiosity as we wonder what we have missed, but while we suffer, we are more likely to accuse and blame than ask questions. Is there something about our partner that we haven’t fully understood? Some fear, expectation, or desire that went unattended (perhaps even by themselves) and which we ought to be more curious about?
Stories also give us an invaluable tool to treat others with greater compassion and perspective. Cheating in a sexually exclusive relationship is clearly a breach of trust. However, this doesn’t mean that the cheater is uniquely or especially evil, nor that we should see ourselves as a failure because our partner strayed. To practise compassion with ourselves and others, we ought to stress our common humanity instead of thinking of ourselves as isolated and unique individuals. The human experience is remarkably similar, and this explains the enduring appeal of shared stories. When we draw on these archetypal stories, we are more forgiving of others. We see them in their shared humanity.
However, everyday stories of cheating are often kept secret, covered up out of shame. As a result, we have a shallower well of experience to draw on for this all-too-common life event. Where we do have stories to connect with, they tend to fit a common pattern. The ‘midlife crisis affair’ story is one example, an attempt to recapture fading youth. While thinking of cheating in the context of such a story doesn’t excuse the act, it does help to minimise loneliness and self-accusation. Studies show that people who lose their job in a recession cope better and experience less depression than those who lose their job in a favourable economic climate. It is much easier to bear your suffering when you don’t think you are doing it alone.
Another way that stories can help someone us to repair our relationships is by correcting narrow and uncharitable interpretations of one another. After hearing about an affair, it’s natural to feel judgmental and distant. Your stories- once tightly bound- appear to have diverged. This means there needs to be a concerted effort to bind your stories together, to construct a shared and mutually understood meaning to what happened.
So, how do you do this? First, by recognising that we are all unreliable and selective narrators of our own lives. When we tell the story of our own life, we tend to leave some things out, exaggerate others, and generally frame ourselves in a positive light. When we’ve been cheated on, we make instinctive moral judgements that frame the event as a simple matter of perpetrator and victim. This is a failure of empathy, a way to preclude deeper investigation. To combat it, we need to listen to the other ‘side of the story’. Through listening, we can stitch back what has been torn. We can find ourselves a shared story that we can both believe in, that allows us to move forward in the relationship free of our blinkered stances and individual prejudice.
Finally, stories are crucial for rebuilding trust as they help us to build more holistic and accurate models for what went wrong and how we might identify possible warning signs in the future. Organising our past into a coherent narrative isn’t just a way to make sense of what happened but also an attempt to predict or anticipate the future. The offended party wants to ensure the cheating won’t happen again, and so will look to understand the precise events that precipitated it.
A key problem is misdiagnosing why the cheating happened. We may land on a reductive story which focuses too much on external circumstances. For instance, if the cheating happened at a bar, or when you were away on work, we might associate these environments too closely with the cheating. Instead, we ought to pay closer attention to the emotional reasons that precipitated it, and stories are one of the chief ways that we can do that. Once we really understand why the cheating happened we can see how, when faced with a similar situation in the future, a different choice could be made. This builds a more secure foundation to continue with the relationship.
Recently, psychologists have rediscovered the importance of stories in overcoming personal trauma. The new field of ‘narrative psychology’ focuses on the important role of personal storytelling in making sense of these events and moving forward with our lives. Narrative psychologists claim that by organising our past into a coherent and redeeming story, we can understand ourselves better, build empathy, and restore our footing in the world. In short, stories help us to heal.
So take a moment to consider, what stories are you telling yourself about it? The extent to which we can move on is deeply bound up with the stories we tell of why it happened.
