Whatever the reason, loneliness or feelings of isolation and disengagement can "provide the perfect ingredients for an affair," says Skurtu. Attachment theory suggests that early childhood relationships influence how we perceive and behave in our intimate relationships as adults. Depending on the care and nurturing or lack thereof that one receives as a child, they'll fall into one of three attachment styles as adults: secure having well-adjusted expectations and approaches to relationships , anxious exhibiting fear of abandonment , or avoidant preferring to retain their independence from others.
People who identify with anxious and avoidant attachment styles are more likely to display characteristics that interfere with a healthy romantic relationship think clinginess and dismissiveness.
Moreover, they're more likely to cheat, as they seek out reassurance from a third-party partner or attempt to avoid the intimacy of the primary relationship. While midlife crises generally affect people between the ages of 35 and 60, the event has less to do with age than extenuating circumstances.
Major life events, such as the death of a parent or a milestone birthday, may trigger a midlife crisis in a woman, causing them to wrestle with the burden of greatness; that is, the sociocultural expectation that women can and should "have it all"—a successful career, a loving partner, adoring children, and so on. What am I doing with my life?
A woman may act out of character as she attempts to realize her potential and make up for lost time. According to Block, depression and infidelity go hand in hand. In other words, a woman who cheats could be self-medicating through their infidelity, even if they don't realize the true reason behind their pleasure.
Few acts of infidelity are premeditated, asserts Skurtu, but rather a result of an unexpected opportunity. They start commiserating and then it moves on from there," she adds. People in this situation usually can't explain the reason behind their infidelity. Similar opportunities exist in the digital realm, too. Social media , dating apps, and texting have revolutionized the ease at which we can connect with others, sometimes serving as a springboard for affairs —even if the interactions start innocently.
People can develop a wide variety of coping mechanisms to deal with difficult emotions , sometimes choosing strategies that have emotionally numbing effects as an easier option than facing them.
Sex, drugs, alcohol, and other addictions or compulsive behaviors are just a few examples. Infidelity in heterosexual couples: demographic, interpersonal, and personality-related predictors of extradyadic sex. Arch Sex Behav. Institute for Family Studies. Who Cheats More? The Demographics of Infidelity in America.
Updated Jan. Updated July 1, Temas Psicol. Middle-aged women missing passion and sex seek affairs, not divorce. Updated Aug. Psychology Today. Updated Nov. Attachment insecurity and infidelity in marriage: Do studies of dating relationships really inform us about marriage? Journal of Family Psychology. Updated May 14, The Well by Northwell. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for Brides. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page.
These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data. None of the women made the decision to cheat lightly. After years and sometimes decades of trying to improve things in their marriages, they decided to look elsewhere. That doesn't mean that women who cheat are always looking to save their primary partnership.
Sometimes, it's the opposite: "One of the main reasons women cheat is to blow up a relationship that makes them feel trapped in some way," says Charlynn Ruan, Ph. The woman tries to make changes, to get their partner to do couples therapy, or push their partner to grow or meet them more emotionally, but when the woman doesn't succeed in these attempts, cheating gives a reason for their partner to leave them.
This often comes with a lot of guilt, Dr. Ruan adds. There is something wrong with me,'" she says. In heterosexual couples, research shows that women are much more likely than men to initiate divorce, and are happier after divorce than men.
But, for women who struggle with guilt over leaving a partner, feel like he needs her, and don't feel their own happiness is enough justification to reach escape velocity in their relationship, cheating gives them a way out. Or, even if she's not ready to leave, she might act out because she has what psychologists call an "insecure attachment" style. The good news is these issues are fix-able. We work really hard with people who have an insecure attachment style to find other ways of responding and ways of regulating strong emotions.
If you feel your relationship is off track and your partner may be contemplating or starting an affair, there are certain clues you can keep an eye out for. These questions first occurred to me a few years ago when I began to wonder how many of my friends were actually faithful to their husbands. From a distance, they seemed happy enough, or at least content. Like me, they were doing the family thing. They had cute kids, mortgages, busy social lives, matching sets of dishes.
On the surface, their husbands were reasonable, the marriages modern and equitable. What surprised me most about these conversations was not that my friends were cheating, but that many of them were so nonchalant in the way they described their extramarital adventures. There was deception but little secrecy or shame. Often, they loved their husbands, but felt in some fundamental way that their needs sexual, emotional, psychological were not being met inside the marriage.
Some even wondered if their husbands knew about their infidelity, choosing to look away. They were also unwilling to bear the stigma of a publicly open marriage or to go through the effort of negotiating such a complex arrangement.
These women were turning to infidelity not as a way to explode a marriage, but as a way to stay in it. Whereas conventional narratives of female infidelity so often posit the unfaithful woman as a passive party, the women I talked to seemed in control of their own transgressions. There seemed to be something new about this approach. To do so, she interviews 40 women who sought or participated in extramarital relationships through the Ashley Madison dating site.
Surely, one might think, a woman who would do such a thing must be acting out of a desire to escape a miserable marriage. Like the women I knew who cheated, many of the interviewees said they liked their husbands well enough.
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