I cheated, should I come clean? The questions therapists are asked after an affair

According to Susie Masterson, a BACP-registered relationship coach: “Forgiveness is really tricky because it requires us to go back to the point of the pain. You have to accept that it’s a process and that it doesn’t have to happen overnight, it doesn’t have to be black and white, and you can learn to forgive in a way that separates the behaviour, once you understand it, from the person.”

If that sounds like a big ask to you then you are not alone. Jess*, 48, says: “We were already on the path to splitting up when my then husband decided to confess that he had a year-long affair 10 years earlier, only two years into our relationship. I was devastated and have never felt so angry in my life. I behaved completely out of character and threw a glass of wine in his face. I refused to ask for any details. At that point I just didn’t want to know. I think mainly I was angry about all the lies I’d been told both at the time and then because he had been keeping it to himself over all those years. We split up soon afterwards.”

When it comes to anger, Campbell says it’s important to understand that sometimes anger stands in for grief – people feel anger instead because they feel so vulnerable.”Anger is easier. But the problem is, if you are in a relationship where you’re trying to stick together, anger tends to end it because there’s no way around it. Some people cannot let go of it.”

She adds: “You must not think, I’m never going to let you forget you did this. I mean, you might not be able to forgive, but if you’re going to just keep going on and on and on about what’s been done to you, you’ll kill the relationship.”

Why did they cheat?

“The most common thing that people say in therapy sessions is ‘I don’t know why I did it. I don’t know what came over me,’” says Campbell. Rather than asking “why”, she explains that as the therapist she would ask the guilty party “what did you get out of it?” in order to determine what was missing from the marriage.

Masterson adds another demand to this already uncomfortable issue. “Whether we felt at the time that we were aggrieved or not, what we need to accept is that this relationship wasn’t working right,” she insists. “If we don’t accept that there was a rupture or it was broken, how can we possibly repair it?”

Accepting this is possibly easier said than done. But the consensus is that after all the apologies, if you do want to try and stay together there definitely needs to be an understanding of what caused the affair in the first place.

First, of course, it can be because of the inevitable demise of the honeymoon period. Campbell explains that when we are in the early stages of relationships we are full of hormones, some of which are so strong they can disguise any negative feelings, adding, “we don’t talk to people about the disappointment when the honeymoon period wears off”.

Surprisingly, she says, this isn’t the sole preserve of newish relationships but can be deferred for many years.

“What people do is distract themselves with planning the wedding, having babies, throwing themselves into work, and then when the children leave, another crisis point, they think, ‘Oh, I still feel disappointed’, and that’s when they start looking around for someone else.”

Another extremely common trigger for affairs is being unsettled by an increased commitment. Campbell says: “When you talk to partners, whether they’re having problems with their sex life, or whether it’s an affair, there was very often some kind of increased commitment just before it happened – getting pregnant, moving in together, getting married, even increasing their mortgage or moving to a bigger house.”

And for others, the spur is fear of intimacy. “Some people get to a point in their relationship where they feel really close and intimate,” says Campbell. “It scares them that they’ll lose that person, so they distract themselves with another relationship.”

One thing that is “incredibly common” for a one-off affair, says Campbell, is a man who is highly stressed but cannot talk to his wife about it. “Men have this feeling that they should be able to manage things and not have to confide in partners – they need to protect their partner.” Instead what can happen is that he confides in someone else, often at work, and that this leads to an affair they weren’t originally looking for. “It’s very clear what’s wrong with that relationship: they need to be able to confide in their partner, and their partner needs to be able to welcome those confidences and be supportive.”

Finally, Campbell says that sometimes infidelity is simply an “exit affair”. She explains: “People think that the relationship is over, and so if I do this thing, it will upset my partner enough that they’ll throw me out.”

Did my partner have an affair because our sex life was dwindling?

There is much discussion about how an affair isn’t just about sex, although this seems to be pretty much the defining factor. But Campbell says it’s complicated. “Important research has shown that, to men, the emotional connection is more important than the sexual connection. What can sometimes happen, if the emotional connection isn’t there, is that [a man] will go out and meet someone, and [he’ll] suddenly be surprised by the strength of [his] feelings, because [he’s] been pushing those feelings down for years and years.”

And of course, there’s an imbalance between new sex and old sex. Campbell explains: “I think it’s important for couples to know that in long relationships, it’s more common for ‘responsive desire’ [as opposed to ‘spontaneous desire’] to kick in. At about 10 years into a relationship, many men and most women don’t feel desire until they’re actually aroused [either physically or, for example, by erotic content]. That can seem like lots of loss of libido. Also, when women hit the menopause, they don’t have that spike in desire at the middle of the month when they ovulate, and so they think they’ve lost their desire, but they haven’t.”

How do I know my partner won’t keep doing this?

Short answer: You can’t ever be sure. But there is a personality type for someone who has serial liaisons as opposed to a one-off affair. Campbell says it can be about power. “It’s often quite narcissistic – people who don’t feel that they’ll get their needs met unless they manoeuvre for them. Maybe their needs weren’t met in childhood, and so they think you have to trick people to get your needs met.”

It comes back to self-esteem. “They don’t feel good enough. I mean, they may not know they don’t feel good enough. They may think they’re great. But they need to keep having that reconfirmed, and that’s usually why they keep having the affairs.”

So can there ever be any hope for a serial adulterer? Campbell says: “Well, there is hope if they don’t want to be serial adulterers – but most of them do.”

I had an affair, should I tell my partner everything?

Campbell says: “I would never, ever advise somebody to [blurt it out] because you have responsibility for what you’ve done. I mean, the idea that you should confess everything is a bit daft, because how does it help if you maybe snogged somebody at the office party? You were drunk, you wouldn’t do it again. It was a moment. And why do you need to tell your partner? It could induce a crisis that isn’t necessary.”

But if it is serious enough to come out, avoid raking over it endlessly. Masterson says: “I call it doing a forensic accounting of an affair, to understand every minute detail, which is just our defence mechanisms going into overdrive because we are out of control, because we’ve had this bombshell, and we’re seeking to make sense of it by controlling every aspect of it.” However tempting, this is not a good idea. Instead, you guessed it, it’s time to light up the halo and try to understand the other person and why they did what they did.

How do we move on?

“Quite often what happens after an affair, there is a lot of sex and a lot of talking, and people do feel very close,” observes Campbell, “and then suddenly, after a few weeks of that, the wronged partner thinks they’re exposing themselves to the possibility of this happening again, panics and doesn’t want any sex or any closeness, in case they’re putting themselves at risk.”

This is natural but unhelpful. “You cannot future-proof your relationship. It’s impossible because you don’t know what’s going to happen. You have to accept uncertainty and accept that you have to stay on the ball.”

That doesn’t mean spying on the person to make sure they don’t do it again, but making an effort (time for that halo again). “Relationships are very, very hard, and most of us don’t make the effort that relationships need. This is because we’re sold the lie that relationships are romantic and if you love somebody it will be fine, and you don’t need to make any effort. That is rubbish.”

Masterson advises: “I think date nights and time together is really important. Scheduling intimacy is really important as well. And I think actually opening up a whole conversation about intimacy can be really important because there are a lot of assumptions about sex and intimacy and how we show love in relationships that get brought into sharp focus when someone has been unfaithful. But actually it’s a real opportunity for you to have a conversation about what turns you on and what doesn’t turn you on.”

Can we go back to how it was before?

“If infidelity has happened but you want to stay together you have to see it as an opportunity for growth. It can really change your relationship. It could be a wonderful thing – or it could be a disaster. You know, you don’t know until you check it out,” says Campbell. She says relationship guru Esther Perel puts it like this: “Would you like a second marriage? Because your first marriage is over. The way that was has ended.”

Masterson adds: “The bedrock of every relationship is rupture and repair, because every relationship goes through a rupture, and what I’m really invested in is how to help people repair, whatever the transgression is.”

And Campbell reveals: “People say things to therapists, like we just want to go back to the way it was before. Absolutely not. No, you don’t, because the way it was before was what led to this. What do you want? What needs to be different? So I try to engender in my clients a sense of excitement about the future.”

Should we make new rules in the relationship?

Yes. Masterson advises setting parameters and conditions, which people often don’t do right at the beginning of a relationship. “So it could be really important to say, ‘If this happens I need to tell you what my position is going to be.’ That’s having agency, and that can be really strengthening.”

Another strategy she recommends is regular relationship audits, with couples scheduling time to check in on the relationship, to have a conversation about what’s going on for each other, and to make space to do that. That is different to and as well as scheduled intimacy (meaning sex or physical closeness) which also key.

Overall, says Masterson: “We have to start to be a lot more contrived to rebuild a relationship, and it will be weird at first, but often, when I set homework for my couples, they tell me that weeks into it, they forgot about the origin of it. They just know that that thing has improved their relationship”

She concludes: “There’s always blame on both sides. There’s fault on both sides. There’s agency on both sides. There’s things that could be improved on both sides. It doesn’t really matter about the language. It’s about how do we make it work for both of us?”

*Name has been changed