Richard Hogan: Why do people have affairs?

We even shared partners. There was no concept of ownership of property or children. 

However, with the arrival of the agrarian way of life things changed, changed utterly. 

Property ownership and paternity became very important. Once we started to own land, the modern family was born. 

We have been getting married for about 4,350 years. Marriage for most of those years was about keeping land or gaining more land and knowing your children would work it after you died. 

Romantic notions of love and marriage didn’t really start until the Middle Ages and only took off in the West a couple of hundred years ago. 

So, this idea of marrying someone because you love them, is a relatively new concept for Homo Sapiens. 

But, once we started marrying for love and forbidding all others, the affair was born. 

We have been having affairs since we started getting married. We have been having so many affairs that the Bible dedicates two Commandments to them. 

You put Homo Sapiens together, and you are going to get scandal and sexual transgressions. Nothing quite gets our tongues wagging like the bad behaviours of others.

QUESTIONS OF IDENTITY

While we love to gossip about affairs, no other single act of transgression can annihilate a couple's past, present and/or future joy like an affair. 

It can bring incredible devastation into the life of the person deceived by their partner's behaviour. 

In my experience, it can leave them questioning their very identity. 

I often sit with the injured party in the affair and listen as they ask: 

• "Did he/she ever love me?’"
• "Was it all a lie?"
• "Why wasn’t I enough?"
• "Why did they marry me?"
• "Did they settle for me?"
• "I don’t know who they are anymore!"

The collapse of concrete norms that an affair can cause, illuminates the power an affair has to destroy everything that was once good and wholesome about the relationship. 

Marriage is the great romantic notion that one person can satisfy all of the other person's needs and wants. 

An affair shatters that notion into pieces and often leaves the injured party in an existential crisis.

But why do people have affairs? Surely, happy marriages are inoculated against the affair. Not so in my experience. 

What I have noticed is that people launch into affairs not because they are rejecting their partner but because they are tapping into something they have lost about themselves along the sinuous journey of married life. 

I know there will be plenty of people reading this who have been very hurt by their partner's behaviour. 

But an affair can often be about reconnecting with a lost self. 

The person who has come into their orbit has allowed them to feel vitality, freedom, intensity and autonomy again. We all start off in a love affair. 

We can’t get enough of the person we have started to date. Separated by distance and living arrangements, we desire them all the time. 

But as we join together and life becomes busy, we can start to take each other for granted. 

Our relationship can transmute into an almost sibling-type relationship, as we divide up chores among us and get caught up in the banal routine of life. 

Familiarity, as the old cliché goes, breeds contempt. And nothing kills intimacy quite like contempt and indifference. 

So that early romantic self, the one that was excitedly full of life and full of hope for the romantic future, can be lost. 

In my experience, the years between 45 and 52 are when we are most susceptible to an affair. 

I think this is because we become lonely, and disconnected from our partner. 

We also may have the belief that our sexual life is coming to an end, so an affair can be a stand against that uncomfortable reality. 

In some ways, sex is death's antidote and can make us feel alive in the face of ageing. 

Of course, some people cheat because that’s what they want to do, it’s not about reconnecting with a lost self but a hedonistic, selfish act. 

We are living in an age of extreme individualism, where we are told we should do whatever makes us happy. 

Also, for some people, the idea of living outside social norms and social mores can be very exciting. The rules are for the other schmucks! 

So, there is no one single reason why people cheat.

QUESTIONS OF MOVING FORWARD

The question I get asked a lot in my clinic is; can a relationship survive an affair? Of course, it can. 

Some relationships do not survive, others just about survive, but for some, they can learn to thrive again. 

In the relationships that learn to thrive again, I have noticed a few commonalities. 

The guilty party allows their partner the space to grieve and doesn’t rush forgiveness. 

They hold their partner as they try to understand what has happened. 

Rather than asking for the sordid details of the affair, the injured party asks important questions like: 

• "What did this affair mean to you?"
• "What did you find in that relationship that you couldn’t find with me?"
• "What do you value about us?" 
• “Do you want to go forward in this relationship?"
• "What does the future look like for us?" 

Questions like these can open up an intense, honest conversation that the relationship might have been missing. 

None of our relationships are immune from an affair. 

But staying connected to each other, not losing ourselves in the dance of parenting and routine, will be the best antidote to anyone new turning your head.