One reader left a message saying that she felt incredible, married for 8 years, rarely quarreled after marriage, and her husband also gave her some small surprises from time to time, until one day she found out that her husband had cheated.
"We obviously had a good life, so why did he cheat?"
In derailment, one party is often in a very "ignorant" state.
In the common sense of many people, if a person cheats, it is not a problem with the feelings of the two people, it must be that there is a problem with this person.
For example, the existing life is only satisfactory, the sex life is not harmonious, feel lonely, etc., so as to want to escape from this unhappy relationship;
Or maybe the other party is a scumbag, emotionally immature, with unresolved trauma, psychological disorders, and so on.
Then today's article may break your previous understanding.
"About 34% of women and 52% of men who cheated had nothing to complain about their original marriage/relationship."
These data reveal a "truth": happy people can also cheat.
Psychother and orator Esther has traveled the world interviewing hundreds of couples who have been mired in infidelity, and she has found that a significant number of them are in happy intimate relationships and even deeply in love with their partners.
"We need to re-recognize cheating behavior", are all cheating "scumbags/scumbags"? Derailment is so common, is there a problem with all people?
Of course not.
We tend to have the assumption that if everything you want is available in your existing intimate relationship, there's no need to look elsewhere for fulfillment.
But maybe there are some things that even a good relationship can't give.
The male protagonist of "Extramarital Affair", Noah, fell in love with his wife Helen in college, Noah was gentle and elegant, talented, and liked to read and write novels; Helen was gentle and considerate, had a good family, and lived in high society from an early age.
Their married life is not only smooth and comfortable, but also gained 4 healthy and lovely children. In addition to teaching, Noah continued his beloved creations, while his wife took care of the housework and children.
In his childhood, Noah and his mother did not receive good care from their father, and he was determined to become a good father and a good husband from an early age. It wasn't until he met Alison, the waiter at the restaurant, that he betrayed his promise and cheated on him.
Like Noah, among the cheating crowds surveyed by Esther Perel, they are not scumbags who are hard to change, but they love their families deeply and have been loyal for decades.
But one day they risked losing everything and crossed the red line that they didn't even dare to think about.
Behind the conflict between their values and behaviors:
It is a long-standing absence and longing
Back to Noah in the play, his original family is not rich, four children expensive private expenses, several bedroom houses, all of which are given by wealthy parents-in-law.
Poor teachers with writer's dreams are scorned by their parents-in-law from the bottom of their hearts, and their independent and rich wives are "unaware", plus the road to fame is far away.
He slowly fell into the trough of frustration, inferiority, and loss of self-identity.
When the nameless novelist meets the mother who lost his son, he finally finds someone who can blend with each other's feelings.
His talent was appreciated by Alison, and in Alison he saw another sad and "weak" self.
Alison, who "I see pity", not only arouses Noah's desire to protect, but also helps him regain the "strength" and "self-esteem" of men, and he has unspeakable emotions to be released in her, and even found creative inspiration.
He seemed to be "alive".
Esther also tells us another core reason for the infidelity:
Regain vitality in your new relationship and become a new version of yourself
I once read the trouble of a reader:
She is 35 years old, has a good husband, not only good looks, but also a good hand at work, and is more attentive and considerate to her, and she also loves her husband.
However, she cheated on a man she would never have liked before, a few years younger than her, a taxi driver, and had tattoos on him.
"I also feel pain, I never wanted to hurt my husband." But when she meets a third person, her sanity is blinded by a feeling of "déjà vu" and beauty.
The feeling is strongest when she's dating a third person, "and we used to hide in his cab or chat in my car, watch movies and eat popcorn together, and have desserts on a park bench." ”
This series of "encounters" made her feel as if she had lived as a teenage girl, bathed in the brilliant bubbles of dating her boyfriend.
The duration of the relationship, including a few sexual encounters, allowed her to regain her long-lost vitality.
This sentence may speak to the most common feelings of cheaters. They aspire to a new (or lost) identity, to explore and grow through this "unusual" experience.
At the end of the day, her infidelity has nothing to do with marriage or a third party, but with herself. She is not seeking another lover, but another version of herself.
Watching her teenage daughter enjoy her long-depleted freedom, she is calm on the surface and has already wavered inside, so at the age of nearly 40, she experienced her late adolescent rebellion in the way of cheating.
At this stage, people's lives are often like a pool of stagnant water, but the world is full of all kinds of unknowns and possibilities, so they want to have a poetic interlude in a boring life.
The Polish sociologist Siegmun Baumann said:
"In modern life, there is always a misgiving — the belief that people live in lies or mistakes;
Think that something vital has been ignored, missed, missed, untried, unexplored;
Think that you have the opportunity to experience happiness that is very different from everyday life, but if you don't seize the opportunity in time, you are doomed to never come again. ”
This passage is a good interpretation of our yearning for the unknown, another possibility. In childhood, we always imagine the future of the person we aspire to be.
But when I grew up, "I never thought I would be the way I am now" and felt lost and disappointed;
Not only that, but our lives are always limited to specific scenes, and our personalities are limited to a certain role and choice.
After marriage, the fixed pattern of life, our curiosity and desire are limited, and one day we suddenly think of our own plain as water for decades:
"Is that it? Am I going to continue to live like this until I die? Are there more possibilities? ”
And derailment offers us a glimpse into a different kind of life.
In Moonwalk, the adolescent daughter asks the cheating mom Diane Lane, "Do you love him more than all of us?" ”
She replied, "No, but sometimes being with different people makes you a different person." ”
In the past, we ran away from an intimate relationship because we were unhappy; now, it is because we can be happier.
"I have the right to pursue happiness", but now many people's unreasonable and excessive expectations often make each other in a marriage relationship suffer each other.
In any case, infidelity can cause: it will shatter our beautiful visions and definitions of love; it will threaten our self-perception, and it will cause the destruction of trust and the crisis of identity.
For the injured party, the pain and "sequelae" it brings are difficult to make up, and even some people will continue to work with:
"Why did you cheat", "Who are you cheating on", "Did you kiss, did you go to bed" and a series of details were stalked and suffered.
Condemning the cheating party, or dwelling on the details of the derailment, is futile for them to get out of the hurt;
The same stubborn search for flaws in marriage to understand and explain cheating is futile.
The "street lamp effect" tells us that a drunk man loses his key, but he does not look for it in the place where he lost it, but looks for it under the street lamp.
In the search for the truth, people are often like this drunkard, starting from the easiest place, not from the truth.
It's easy to blame a failed marriage for cheating on an unreliable other person, but figuring out the deeper problem —the meaning and motivation behind the cheating behavior—and understanding the cheating may help us to get salvation from it.
The meaning and motivation behind this tells us:
Marriage is not only about responsibility and obligation, but also about pursuit and self-actualization, and about love and desire as a separate individual.
◎ Some of the above content is quoted from the TED Talk: "Re-understanding Derailment Behavior"