10 Lessons The Most Secure Partners Learn That Keep Them Faithful For Life
End the affair before it even begins.
Gregory Hayes | Unsplash Most people believe they'll never cheat, but it's easy to let feelings become a little too strong. Once that happens. it's easy to find yourself swept up in an affair — physical or emotional. Fortunately, there are a few lessons you can learn that help people stay faithful to their partners.
As someone who has cheated and done a lot of work to figure out how and why I had an affair, I have some advice on how to resist temptation. Not just for now, but for the future, regardless of who you spend your life with. After all, fidelity comes from within you — not from anyone else.
11 lessons secure people learn early that keeps them faithful to partners
1. They recognize that cheating is a choice.
F01 PHOTO | Shutterstock
No matter what happens in movies and fairy tales or how much people get swept away by romance, you have a choice. Always.
Even if you can't choose how you feel, you can choose how you behave.
Learning not to give in to that passion, to those oh-so-tempting interactions with the other person, will take practice. It's like a muscle you have to grow. Imagine that you get stronger every time you choose not to engage, more powerful. Like a bicep lifting a weight, over and over again, every single day, you will grow stronger, and it will get easier.
Your focus will shift back to your partner and away from that other person, making it easier to fix your relationship in the ways necessary to save your marriage.
2. They focus on nourishing their marriage.
You don't have to be into woo-woo spiritual "law of attraction" stuff to believe that the things you put your attention, efforts, and energy into are the things that become bigger and more powerful.
Your temptation and passion for that other person are no exception. If you feed them, they will grow. Instead, feed your marriage. Feed your interest in your partner, your desire for them, and your connection.
3. They treat temptation like a compulsive urge.
There are a lot of debates over whether love addiction is real, and I'm not going to get into that here. But we certainly can treat our relationship with the temptation like it's a compulsion, and that can help us to do better.
Researchers Dr. Lucy Brown and Dr. Helen Fisher even found in their research that falling in love induces a reaction in the brain similar to that caused by a high from illicit substances.
We can understand that every time we interact with the object of our temptation, we get a blast of all those happy brain chemicals — and that there will be a biological drive to experience more of that happy brain feeling. Over time, with less interaction and fewer of those happiness "hits," we will crave it less. But it will hurt at first.
4. They establish firm boundaries.
If you can't just be friends, you can't be anything.
If you have to see each other, keep it as casual as possible and interact as little as possible. Even if you think it's rude, remember that cheating on your partner is significantly more rude. You can't fix that broken relationship if you're still DMing the person who tempts you.
5. They do the inner work to uncover personal vulnerabilities.
Most people immediately turn to problems in their home relationship to figure out why they cheated, but most of the time, that's total crap. Every marriage or long-term relationship has issues, but not everyone cheats.
Sure, you may need to fix some issues in your marriage. You should see a couples counselor for help with that.
But remember, you cheated because you chose to, not because your relationship was lacking.
You will also need to go deeper inside yourself. What inside of you needed the "high" the other person delivered? Was it affirmation, physical release, companionship, or selfishness?
Do the deep work on yourself to figure it out. Once you have done your part, you can do the deep work needed in your relationship if you discover that's part of it. But the problem most likely starts with you.
That doesn't make you a bad person (necessarily). We're all messed up. But you start to become a bad person when you refuse to do the hard work of doing better when you know you should.
6. They practice radical honesty with their partner.
ShotPrime Studio | Shutterstock
I know, this is the worst.
You risk hurting them, making them mad, feeling bad about themselves, or wanting to leave you. I don't know.
But you must be honest if nothing else is working to manage your temptation.
And, hey, your partner might surprise you and say, "Temptation is normal. How can I help?" You never know.
You may also need to tell your partner that you cheated or that you're having an affair. If you're intimate with your partner and the other person, you have an ethical and possibly even a legal responsibility to share that information.
I have a friend whose husband cheated, and they broke up. He was the only man she'd been intimate with; they had been married for twenty years and had three kids. But they both knew their marriage was over. The divorce would've been simple, except she discovered that he had given her an STI that caused her to need surgery and left her unable to get pregnant.
The divorce and affair made him feel bad, but they were both able to heal from it. But physically harming his ex, whom he cared for deeply and who is the mother of his kids, was the worst.
7. They lean on trusted support networks.
Choose someone you trust who will hold you to high standards. You are going to need support.
Separate yourself from the people who enable the temptation by saying things like, "You're only human!" or "Your husband is always working. Who can blame you for having feelings for someone else?"
We do, naturally, start to assimilate some of the beliefs of the people around us, and you need to be around people who will call you out and help you live up to your own standards and ethics. Some researchers even believe that divorce can be "contagious."
If you feel like you can't trust friends or a family member, seek out a therapist or religious leader, who, as mental health professionals, are bound to confidentiality by law.
Also, maybe find new friends.
8. They distinguish between love and lust.
Jelena Zelen | Shutterstock
Remember, lust is not the same thing as love. Even when it feels deep and emotional, lust is something distinct from love.
You can't immediately fall in love with someone you don't know well or with whom you haven't had an intimate relationship. I just don't buy it.
Your lust may be powerful, and your connection with the other person may be profound, but it's not love.
What you have with your partner is probably love. It's probably deep, rooted in something that grew over the years, over experiences you could never duplicate with this other person.
Stop thinking your home relationship isn't love if it isn't as passionate as your lustful temptation. As I noted above, you can grow the lusty part of your marriage or relationship, but you have to pour your attention there instead of into your affair or potential affair.
9. They demystify the magic of romance.
No matter what fairy tales and movies tell you, love isn't magical — and neither is lust.
Brain scientist and researcher Dr. Helen Fisher, in her world-famous viral TED talk about the reasons why people love, put people in different stages of love into fMRI machines to study how their brains behaved when the feelings and emotions associated with their love were evoked.
The whole talk is fascinating and profound, and you might find a lot of comfort in understanding how biological your drive is.
I know it feels that way, but the truth is that your feelings have no power over you. They are not stronger than you. Our feelings don't always have to mean something or develop into something.
The universe isn't conspiring to send you this temptation to give you the love you deserve finally. That would mean the universe was conspiring to end your marriage, hurt your spouse, and possibly break up a family.
Does that make sense? Does that sound magical and mystical? Is that romance written in the stars? No.
Learning how to save your marriage and fix what's broken in your relationship is magical. Staying with the person you're committed to is magical — and it's magic you control.
If you believe everything happens for a reason, then be smart about it. Maybe this temptation has happened to you because you need to get your act together, do some soul-searching, strengthen your marriage or long-term relationship, and stop looking for affirmation and ego boosts from outside yourself and the relationship you once valued so much that you committed to it.
10. They don't believe common myths about love
Throughout our lives, we're told that romance is so powerful that it can overtake our sense of reason and change who we are from the inside out. Love can make a weak man strong and an anxious woman brave, inspiring us to do things we never believed possible.
We eat these myths about love up — as if love that hurts, that feels like it's against all odds, is the most essential kind of love.
Of course, that's BS, and it's the kind of BS that leads to unrealistic expectations and a lifetime of trying to fix a broken relationship — which may never have been broken to begin with.
These two myths — that love is so powerful it can drive you to become someone you're not and the obsession with "impossible" love stories — contribute to a society in which even the best people find themselves cheating, wondering how they got there, and trying to figure out why they can't stop cheating.
11. They challenge their own biases.
This one is a little tricky, but it was meaningful as I recovered from my life as a cheater.
We all experience confirmation bias to varying degrees. It is " the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one's preexisting beliefs or hypotheses."
In laypeople's terms, it just means that we see what we expect to see — not because we're evil or stupid or anything. It's human nature, but that doesn't make it accurate.
We may look around and think everyone cheats, but that's untrue. Statistics on how many people cheat vary widely, so it's hard to get a real handle on how common infidelity is.
Dr. Justin Lehmiller reports that in any given year, only 2-4 percent of married people have affairs, and only 20-25 percent of marriages will experience infidelity over a lifetime. And remember, some marriages last 60 years.
It's way less cheating than we may expect — especially when we unconsciously seek confirmation that most people cheat and we aren't alone.
Also, if you connect emotionally with this other person, you may start to notice more things you have in common, which might become more meaningful.
When I fell for someone who wasn't my partner, we kept thinking we had the number "3" in common. We both had three brothers, had lived with three partners, and wanted three kids. The number three became a big deal, and I kept seeing "3" everywhere.
After the sparks faded, I realized that many people want three kids and have three brothers. The number three is everywhere, but it always has been. We got confirmation of what we were looking for, but it was meaningless. With someone else, it would've been something else.
Your feelings are key to staying faithful even when tempted
The eleven points above have one thing in common: They require you to examine your feelings and be objective to save your marriage or relationship.
But if you want to know how to stop an affair and you want to fix your broken relationship, you're going to need to turn on all the lights and look at all your feelings in the daylight. See all their sharp corners, call out all their faults.
It hurts, and it's not as much fun as hearing that other person's voice or getting a text from them. But if you don't want to cheat, you must do it. Be brave, ask for help, but get it done. You're better than this.
Elizabeth Ayers-Callahan is a freelance writer whose mission is to help other women succeed. Her work focuses on relationship issues and personal fulfillment.