When someone’s cheated on by their partner, they’re often left asking: why?

How could someone they trusted and loved – and who they thought loved them back – betray them in such a shocking and hurtful way? There’s usually not only a sense of anger and upset, but also total disbelief.

The reasons people cheat are varied, but there are a number that crop up time and again in the counselling room. If you’re currently struggling to understand why this has happened to you, you may find it useful to think about some of the following.

Disconnection

One of the most common reasons for infidelity is the feeling that you and your partner have drifted apart. In this case, cheating can feel like a way of finding something new and exciting when your relationship has become predictable and familiar. A sense of disconnection from one’s partner can happen for a variety of reasons. There may be a lack of proper communication in the relationship (talking about specific issues or just generally keeping in touch about how you feel). Or life may have become dominated by work or looking after kids, so time together has become more functional than loving.

Feeling unloved

In counselling, we often use the term ‘love languages’ to describe how people express affection to one another. Some partners communicate more verbally by saying nice things, whereas others might prefer to express affection physically by cuddling or kissing. If your love language is different to your partners, that can leave you feeling unloved – and potentially more open to the affections of someone who seems to understand you better.

Imbalance

If there’s a lack of balance in a relationship, one partner can begin to feel a bit like a parent and the other like a child. For example, one partner may feel like they have to be the responsible one, making all the decisions, organising the home, managing the finances and so on, while their partner doesn’t pull their weight. An affair might then be tempting in order to feel appreciated and equal. Equally, the partner in the ‘child’ position may feel criticised and as if nothing they do seems to be enough, meaning an affair might feel like a way of reclaiming some sense of independence and authority.

Fear of commitment

Sometimes, affairs occur at times when you might assume people would be the most secure in their relationship, such as after getting engaged or when someone is pregnant. But worries over commitment can be very destabilising. Sometimes, people can sabotage what they have, consciously or unconsciously, as a way of rejecting feelings of responsibility.

Issues related to self-esteem

Affairs can also arise from personal insecurities. Low self-esteem can cause people to be very dependent on the attentions of others—and in some cases, the attention of just one person isn’t enough. It may also cause someone to feel insecure in their own relationship, so much so that they might cheat as a way of rejecting rather than being rejected.

Sexually addictive behaviour

Affairs can commonly be linked to problems with sexually addictive behaviours. This is where someone habitually engages in sexual activity as a way of satisfying desires and relieving negative feelings they find hard to control. These desires can be compulsive in the way that a drug or alcohol addiction might be. For some people, this can mean they end up engaging in affairs repeatedly or in multiple relationships. For more information on sex addiction, visit the NHS choices page.

So what now?

As hard as it might be to believe, an affair doesn’t have to mean the end of your relationship. If your partner truly regrets what has happened, is willing to end the affair and you’re both prepared to put the work into finding your way back, there’s no reason why you can’t save your relationship. Of course, many couples come to the conclusion that their relationship has run its course—with the affair being a symptom of what was wrong, rather than the cause.

Whatever the case, trying to examine the issues together is your best chance to make sense of things. The person who has cheated will need to take responsibility for their own their behaviour as wrong and not make excuses and—although it can be very difficult for the person who has been cheated on—both partners will need to acknowledge their responsibility for what was wrong with the relationship prior to this happening.

In terms of next steps, our article on what to do if your partner has had an affair also has lots of useful information. Beyond this, it’s likely you’ll need some form of help to process what’s happened. Relationship Counselling can help you talk about the affair and what caused it in a safe and confidential environment.

Your counsellor won’t take sides – they’ll just listen and help you to make sense of what made your relationship vulnerable to an affair and fully explore your feelings and the impact of the affair.

Feeling insecure in your relationship can be really painful and upsetting. It can manifest itself in all kinds of ways. You might feel like your partner is about to break up with you all the time. You might have trouble trusting them to not cheat on you. Or you may feel like your connection has been getting weaker and weaker for a while, and that the foundations are beginning to fall away.

Feeling like this can make it really difficult to have much faith in your future together – and can sometimes leave you wondering whether the easiest solution would be to break up. It can also begin to have really negative effects in other areas of your life. Your self-esteem and confidence can become undermined and this can make it difficult to feel able to address any problems.

Where does insecurity come from?

A sense of insecurity in your relationship can stem from a number of different places.

If you and your partner haven’t been communicating effectively about issues or making an effort to maintain your connection, you might start to feel like you’re drifting apart.

Insecurity can also stem from changes in your relationship. For instance, if you’ve moved in together or recently married, you may be feeling all kinds of new strains and pressures. If you aren’t able to discuss these together, you can start to feel less confident in your ability to work as a team.

It can also come from issues surrounding self-image or self-esteem. For example, if you’re feeling particularly low after a series of disappointments in your work life or less happy with your physical appearance after putting on weight, this could make you worry about your relationship.

We can sometimes carry feelings from past relationships into our current one – including ones with family members. If we didn’t have very secure or loving relationships with our parents or primary caregivers when we were younger, we might carry this feeling with us as adults. Past romantic relationships where your trust was broken can make it difficult to trust someone else. You may find yourself looking for ‘patterns’ or assuming that history is going to repeat.

What can you do to address insecurity?

The first port of call is talking things over together. This, of course, can be tricky – particularly if you haven’t been talking properly for a while or you feel hurt or angry with your partner.

However, if you do feel able, you may find the following tips useful:

• Keep things relaxed. Hearing the words ‘we need to talk’ can make even the most laid back person feel defensive! Framing things more positively can get things off to a better start. You might like to try something like ‘I’d really like to talk about our relationship together when you have a chance’.
• Pick the right moment. Try to talk when things are going well, not badly. Bringing things up in the middle of an argument is only likely to create more conflict. If you introduce the topic when you’re both feeling good about the relationship, you’re more likely to move in a positive direction.
• Say how you feel, not how you think they make you feel. If you’re both simply trading blows and blaming each other for everything, you’re not likely to get anywhere. To keep things under control, it can useful to use ‘I’ phrases (‘I sometimes feel worried that…’) rather than ‘you’ phrases (‘you always make me feel worried because…’).
• Listen. Even if what your partner has to say is difficult to hear, try to stick with it. A conversation has to go both ways for it to work. Try to start by acknowledging their perspective may be different to yours.
• You could even plan. It might sound a little clinical, but it can be useful to think beforehand about what you want to say. That doesn’t mean preparing a shopping list of grievances, but just gathering your thoughts on what you want to talk about.
• Come back to it. These things are rarely solved in one chat. It takes time and effort to work on relationship issues, so you may need to revisit things in a month to see how you’re each getting on. After a while, this kind of conversation will seem much less scary!

How we can help

• If you feel like trying any of the above would do more harm than good, you might like to consider Relationship Counselling. A counsellor would take an objective view and help you both talk about things that you might find it difficult to express.

When you start a new relationship, everything can be exciting. Those early flickers of attraction, feeling butterflies, your first kiss… it can be a rollercoaster of emotion.

But after you’ve been together for a while, things tend to level off a bit. The fizz and pop are replaced by a sense of partnership and familiarity. As the routines of life, work and living together begin to settle, your relationship might start to feel a bit more predictable.

And while there’s nothing wrong with not always feeling like you did at the start – after all, falling in love is only the beginning of building a long-term committed relationship – if being settled also means starting to feel bored, you might soon start to wonder whether there’s anything more interesting out there. You may even start to question if you and your partner were ever that compatible in the first place.

But looking for solutions elsewhere is rarely the best place to start. It’s much better to begin by thinking about what’s happening in the here and now.

Keep talking

Boredom can be linked to bad habits when it comes to communication and maintaining your connection as a couple.

If you aren’t regularly talking openly and honestly about the things you like and don’t like about your relationship, or one or both of you are preoccupied with your own concerns and perhaps aren’t as emotionally or physically available as you could be, it’s easy to start to feel a little disconnected from your partner.

Try to express gratitude for the things your partner does that you like. Let them know you’ve noticed if they’ve made an effort and pay them compliments from time to time. These frequent positive interactions are important when it comes to feeling like you’re on the same team.

Likewise, don’t allow negative feelings to fester. If there’s something that’s bothering you, try to talk about it at an early opportunity – before resentment start to build up. If you’re feeling tense about your relationship, it can make you forget what it is you like about being with your partner.

Build in the positive beats

As counsellors, we often think of a relationship where one or both partners are bored as like a heart monitor that’s almost flatlining. You might get the occasional blip of activity, but for the most part there’s not a lot going on. For a relationship to be vital and interesting, you need to put in the effort to build in those positive beats.

This could be something as simple as a day or evening out together. You could try an activity together that you haven’t done before or just spend a few hours of quality time in each other’s company. It doesn’t have to involve spending money: you could just stay in bed on a Sunday reading the papers together. It’s about giving yourselves something to look forward to and taking the time to bond without interruptions (and that includes TV and phones!).

Likewise, boredom can be related to problems when it comes to sex. If you find you’re always doing the same things, you might like to try something new together.

Dealing with change

Sometimes, boredom can also be linked to difficulties or changes outside of your relationship. If you’re struggling financially, you might find that the only conversations you’re having with your partner are ones about money – and fraught ones at that. If you’re working all the time, you may be feeling tired and frustrated.

Or if your role in the family has changed – you’re at home all day looking after the kids, for instance – you might feel like you’re losing your sense of place in the relationship. Think about any external factors that could be causing tensions – and whether these could be at the root of how you’re feeling.

How we can help

If you’re finding it hard to talk about any tricky issues, Relationship Counselling offers a safe and confidential space where you can be open and honest.