Was It Something I Did?
The belief that a good marriage prevents affairs is nearly universal. The research does not support it.
Three weeks ago I found the messages. Since then I have been keeping a list on my phone of everything I did wrong. I stopped dressing up. I was always tired. I only talked about the children. My sister says men do not wander when they are happy at home. The list has nineteen things on it now. Is she right?
Farah, put the phone down for a moment. Your list is an answer to a question nobody had the right to ask you.
Your sister loves you. She is repeating something nearly all of us believe. It deserves a closer look, because the research does not support it.
The story we inherited
It goes like this. A loving partner and a good relationship will keep an affair from happening. So if there was an affair, somebody at home must have failed.
The psychologist Shirley Glass called this the Prevention Myth.1 She believed it once herself. Then she learned that an elderly acquaintance, known for his unusually loving marriage, had been unfaithful for decades. His wife never knew.
That discovery sent her into twenty-five years of research. Her conclusion was that devotion alone does not protect a relationship. Sometimes an affair grows out of trouble in the marriage. Often it does not. Sometimes the explanation is as plain as attraction, opportunity and loose boundaries.
Later research agrees. In one large US study of married people, unhappiness in the marriage did predict infidelity. So did things that had nothing to do with the partner at home, such as personality and religious practice.2
Happy homes are not immune
A 1998 US survey compared people by how happy they said their marriage was. Those in “pretty happy” marriages were twice as likely to have had an affair as those in “very happy” ones. Those in “not too happy” marriages were three times as likely.3
Read that both ways. Unhappiness raises the risk. And “very happy” marriages still had affairs. A good home lowers the odds. It cannot guarantee anything.
It is often the one who gives less
We assume the person who strays was not getting enough at home. Glass found they are often the one who was not giving enough. The less you put into something, the less it costs you to walk away.
She describes a doctor whose wife ran their whole household while he worked long shifts. His explanation was disarming. She had made it too easy for him. He never had to work at the marriage.
Read your list again with that in mind. How many of its nineteen items are things you were doing for everyone else?
Good parents, absent partners
Glass names the child-centred marriage as one of the most powerful weak spots of all. Two people pour everything into homework, birthdays and school runs. They become excellent co-managers. They forget to be a couple.
If that happened in your home, it happened to both of you. It is a shared drift. It is not a private failing of yours.
Two things are true at once
This is the hard part, so take it slowly.
A relationship can have real weak spots: too little time, too little attention, a long season of living like flatmates. You both hold responsibility for those.
The decision to open a secret door to someone else belongs to one person only. A marriage can make someone lonely. It cannot make someone lie.
Can you hold both? If you carry all of the blame, you will collapse. If you carry no curiosity about what was happening between you, nothing will change.
Why the list hurts you
A study of 232 young adults who had recently been cheated on looked at how they explained it. Those who blamed themselves were more likely to cope in risky ways, such as not eating or drinking more.4 The study was small and the people were students, not married couples. Still, it points the same way as Glass. A list of your faults is not a way to heal.
And if you feel safe
Perhaps you are reading this from a contented relationship and feeling relieved. Glass has a second myth for you: the low-maintenance marriage. Nobody expects to succeed at a job just by turning up. Why do we expect it of love?
When this is not enough. If you have stopped eating, sleeping or functioning, or the list has turned into thoughts of not wanting to be here, please see a doctor or a clinical psychologist this week. Need to talk to someone now? Tele MANAS is free, day and night, on 14416.