3 Strategies to “Infidelity Proof” Your Relationship
Infidelity.
By far, one of the most common issues that we help couples successfully navigate in our coaching practice. In 2019, the BBC reported on an infidelity that estimated that up to 75% of modern couples deal with some form of infidelity at some point in their love story. What this means is that, strictly statistically speaking, there is a 75% chance that either you, or your partner will cheat in some form or another at some point of your relationship. That’s a scary statistic and personally, we believe that 75% is actually a somewhat conservative number given the fact that most people lie about infidelity in the first place. Today, we are going to share 3 strategies to make your relationship as “infidelity proof” as possible so that you and your partner don’t have to end up being a statistic.
Strategy One: Relate to infidelity the same way that you would relate to heart disease, cancer, type II diabetes or any other health condition that long term preventative lifestyle changes can help prevent. The medical world has pinpointed a number of factors, separate from genes and certainly separate from luck, that help prevent degenerative diseases. Infidelity is no different. What this means is that couples need to take infidelity out of the closet and start to shine a light on it by talking about it openly the same way we talk about increasing the likelihood of longevity and decreasing the likelihood of disease. Couples need to understand the underlying causes of infidelity, talk openly about them and then take the proper preventative measures to prevent it from happening in the first place. This brings us to tip number two.
Strategy Two: Understand the underlying causes of infidelity. While the cultural narrative of infidelity reduces this profoundly complicated issue to a matter of “morals” and “if you really love somebody, you won’t cheat,” there are far more complicated root causes of infidelity that need to be understood and properly addressed inside of a relationship. While there are many reasons that people stray, far too many to discuss in a short column, we want to focus on the most common reasons that we see with the couples that we work with, specifically as they relate to long term relationships of at least one year or more. The first reason is a lack of awareness or understanding of both you and your partner's natural needs for both safety and security and for novelty and adventure. Every single one of us needs a balance of both in our lives. Some of us need way more safety and security than others and some of us need way more novelty, risk and adventure. Are you aware of where you fall on that spectrum? What about your partner? Being aware of this, and being able to talk openly about it with your partner is paramount. Especially if there is a mismatch between the two of you, which there usually is in most relationships. This problem can be addressed preventatively through understanding and then creating ways for both of those needs to be met for each person in a way that works for both members of the relationship.
The second and more common reason why people cheat is a desire on the part of the person who strays to rediscover a part of themselves that they feel they have lost within the confines of a long term intimacy. A feeling of being autonomous, of being freshly desired by new eyes and hearts, a feeling of validation, the thrill of the unknown and a taste of the forbidden. These are feelings that many individuals struggle to experience inside the familiarity, safety and security of a long term relationship and can have a tremendous amount of seductive power over us if we are not self aware enough to catch them for what they are, or if we don’t have the safe space to talk about them with our partners or means of expressing them in a healthy and mutually agreed upon way. Which brings us to tip number 3.
Strategy Three: Infidelity-proof your relationship by adhering to the rule that there is nothing off limits to talk about, or subjects to broach, no matter how challenging it may be to discuss them. Preventative medicine is all about lifestyle choices, day in and day out. Being able to address complicated issues like a desire for more novelty, a feeling of things getting mundane, an individual's autonomous needs and desires that may involve others, even if never acted upon, can be very difficult to talk about. However, these are real and prevalent issues that surface in virtually all modern love stories and so the alternative of not talking openly about them is to lie about them and cheat. Permission to speak freely and honestly, no matter how hard it may be is a key foundational way of being in intimacy with each other that will help strengthen your relationship from the temptations of infidelity.
Bonus tip: Come up with creative solutions. We must get creative with ourselves and our partners and come up with potential solutions and/or structures that address each other's needs for novelty vs. safety and security and to nurture those more autonomous parts of ourselves that can easily get lost in long term relationships. For each couple this will be different, but each couple needs to address this head on, hand in hand, as a team working to take proper preventative care of the long term health of their intimacy, day in and day out.
