When you get married you make covenants and vows with your spouse to honor them, support them, and commit to total fidelity with them. Your marriage represents the greatest potential for complete and total commitment to another human being — your spouse. Marriage isn’t easy but it is as strong and binding as you both make it.

Being faithful to a spouse and commitments can be hard for many. There are temptations and opportunities all around you for flirting with infidelity and adultery. But, let’s be honest, if you want to be unfaithful you don’t have to go far in today’s society. Being unfaithful is easy. Infidelity is easy. Adultery is easy. The consequences of being unfaithful, infidelity, and adultery aren’t though.

For those of us who have survived the betrayal of a spouse, we know all too well the pain their infidelity has caused us and our children. We know the pain, grief, sorrow, and sadness that follow in the wake of the news of our spouse’s betrayal. We feel the cold hand of ‘marital death’ tugging at us. We feel the pains of hell all around us. Eventually, time brings enough solace and peace that we recover from the betrayal of our spouse.

Infidelity is Easy, Anyone Can Cheat.

Marriage was once revered and respected as an institution where a couple expressed complete fidelity to each other and their children — through the good and bad of life and love. Marriage fidelity was an outward expression of an inward commitment. Unfortunately, it’s no longer the case now as it was then. Marriage represented the ultimate commitment of fidelity to one’s self, spouse, and children.

Infidelity, the act or fact of having a romantic or sexual relationship with someone other than one’s husband, wife, or partner, is easy. Anyone can choose to cheat. Even those who might at first glance seem limited in their options to cheat on their spouse can find someone to cheat with. As an example:

Chadwick, a married with children, middle-aged, bald, short, overweight, and religious man, sought out a way to act on his pornography and lucid fantasies outside of his marriage. He was insecure about his looks and lackluster personality. His wife was not supportive of his continued addictions and had tried to help him get clean through professional intervention measures but Chadwick wasn’t willing to work through his addictions or related marital problems. He was desperate and willing to do anything and pretend to be anyone to fulfill his sexual desires and escape his married life and responsibilities. He sought sexual excitement outside of his marriage and was willing to risk the sanctity of his marriage and family to achieve the excitement he craved. He eventually found what he was looking for in an equally desperate and insecure woman, Kate. Kate, married with children, middle-aged, religious, and struggling with mom-body insecurities, was willing to live out Chadwick’s sexual fantasies with him through an adulterous affair. In a matter of just a few months, they had betrayed their spouses, denied core principles of their lives and beliefs, committed adultery, irreparably scarred their children with their infidelity, and risked transmission of STDs and STIs to their spouses.

Chadwick and Kate’s infidelity is one simple example of how easy it is to pursue an affair or infidelity. To do so, all you have to be willing to do is to betray your spouse, marriage, and children. Infidelity doesn’t require any honor, honesty, commitment, or integrity. All infidelity requires is selfishness and suspending a commitment of fidelity to spouse, children, and family.

One of the many obvious deficiencies in infidelity and affairs is that they do not last. They run their course quickly and irreparably destroy lives and legacies along the way. The consensus is that most run their course in six months to two years. Why? Here are some of the psychological fundamentals of infidelity and affairs that sabotage their sustainability:

1. Misery and excitement — The cheating couple is united around shared misery and excitement in their infidelity and affair. More often than not, what often brings a couple together in an affair and infidelity is their shared unhappiness with themselves or their spouses. The beginning of the relationship brings excitement but eventually, all this fades.

2. Behaviors are hidden — An affair is different from living with someone. The combining of lives, routines, stress, boredom, etc. is not experienced during the affair. The results are they aren’t getting to know each other, and normal problems, and resentments, are not resolved.

3. Oxytocin of love declines — This is built into evolution. Oxytocin, the “love” hormone that bonds people together, ramps up the sex, which creates that falling-in-love feeling naturally begins to wane after about nine to 18 months. When this happens, sex drops off, and the passion and glow begin to fade.

4. Complication and misery eventually follow — While some couples and cultures tolerate extra-marital affairs, turning an affair into a more permanent relationship eventually turns into a mess for most. Whether there are children involved or just money and things, the process can be filled with stress, guilt, and depression.

5. Ill-equipped for relationships — In many ways, an affair is about running away from life and responsibility. The cheating spouse’s coping style doesn’t change in the affair. When the going gets tough in the affair, they cut and run again.

Marital Fidelity Requires Integrity, Honor, and Commitment

Fidelity requires integrity, honor, and commitment. Integrity is the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness. Honor is adherence to what is right or to a conventional standard of conduct. Commitment is the state or quality of being dedicated to a cause, activity, etc. All of these are needed in a marriage built on fidelity.

Research and studies suggest the probability of an affair ending in marriage is very, very low — between three and five percent, and many join the 75 percent of second marriages that fail, a rate half again as high as first marriages. While fewer than 25 percent of adulterers (i.e. cheaters) leave a marriage for an affair partner, according to one source, most of those relationships are statistically extremely unlikely to endure. This research suggests that only 1% achieve stability and happiness. This is a grim statistic, to say the least especially when many negatively impact children and close family members. No matter which stat you use, that’s a grim statistic for couples hoping their affairs will last forever. Essentially, about 1% of affairs will end up intact and happily married.

As Dr. Jordan Peterson so appropriately puts it in his book, The 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos, “You do not have a life with someone when you have an affair with them. You have an endless array of desserts… You see each other under the best possible conditions… An affair is not helpful, and people end up hurt. Particularly children — and it is to them that we owe primary allegiance.”

Relationships that last are based on mature love, which values responsibility. If a spouse can’t own up to their mistakes, they’ll always be blaming someone or something else when things go wrong. If they do marry, time will tell if they will be the 1% that transition from an affair to a happy, long-term marriage.

Recovering from Infidelity

If you have experienced infidelity-induced trauma caused by the emotional and sexual betrayal of your spouse, there is hope! If you are a child affected by parental infidelity, there is hope! If you are a spouse who has betrayed the trust, love, and fidelity of your marriage, there is hope! We recommend that you seek support through professional counseling and therapy as well as through groups dedicated to supporting you through this traumatic journey to recovery. You are not alone and recovery and healing are possible!

Share Your Story

The CHADIE Foundation shares personal stories of spouses and children impacted by infidelity and affairs. If you have a story you would like to share and have published, please use the contact information below to share your story with The CHADIE Foundation. Our mission is to help educate everyone about the damage infidelity, affairs, and adultery cause families and how to minimize the impact.

About the CHADIE Foundation

The CHADIE Foundation (Children are Harmed by Adultery, Divorce, Infidelity, and related Emotional trauma), helps spouses, partners, and children who adultery, affairs, and infidelity have negatively impacted. To learn more about CHADIE and how you can help, please email us at support@chadie.org or visit us at CHADIE.org.