According to the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, national surveys indicate that 15 percent of married women and 25 percent of married men have had extramarital affairs. While affairs are common, they also come with different forms such as accidental (one night stand), physical (expression of physical attraction or sexual desire), romantic (comes with attachment), emotional (“special friendship”), and sexual (intercourse involved). Cheating can occur through phone or email (sexting) and even social media. Here are the top 10 most common relationship dynamics/issues that make relationships vulnerable to affairs:
1. Turning Away or Turning Against
The Gottman Institute suggests that turning towards instead of away or against starts with bids. Bids can be the verbal and nonverbal gestures between you and your partner that signal a need for connection. These bids can be big or small, spoken or unspoken, and obvious or indistinct. When your partner makes a bid, there are three ways to respond:
1.You can turn towards your partner by acknowledging the bid.
2.You can turn away from your partner by ignoring or missing the bid.
3.You can turn against your partner by rejecting or criticizing the bid in an argumentative or belligerent way.
Healthy couples constantly make and turn towards bids to connect. When bids are ignored or rejected, partners are more inclined to criticize each other and become frustrated.
Here is an example that explains all these three bids of connection: You tell your partner the weather is so nice outside. You are making a bid to connect with this statement. If your partner turns towards, they’ll pause what they are doing, check out the weather and ask you if you’d like to go outside and take a walk together. If your partner turns away, they’ll either won’t say anything and continue to do what they are doing or they’ll say something like “Yeah, I guess” without really paying attention to your need to connect. If they turn against, they’ll say something like “Don’t you see I’m busy?” or “Last weekend, the weather was nice too and I wanted to do something with you, but you didn’t want to. Now, you tell me it’s nice outside. Sorry, you missed your chance”.
Responding more bids with turning away or against, makes your relationship more vulnerable for having affairs.
2. Avoiding Self-Disclosure
You or your partner may be more of a private person by nature and that is okay. However, intentionally keeping secrets from your partner and avoiding self-disclosure will not build trust. Couples who can openly share their inner experiences with each other on a regular basis are less likely to have affairs. These inner experiences include and not limited to emotions, thoughts, fantasies, hopes and dreams about the future, and memories.
3. Negative Comparisons
The moment you start entertaining that there is another car out there which is faster, safer, and better, you’ll think about selling your current car and buying a new one. The same thought process is valid for relationships. When you think of there is someone else is more beautiful/handsome, more understanding, funnier, richer, smarter than your current partner, you are entertaining the alternatives. If your partner is telling you: “My coworker is very patient, why can’t you be like this? I wish you’d be more like him” or “Look at this woman! She is so courageous, such a risk taker! Sometimes I wonder why you aren’t like her”, they are entertaining real or imagined alternatives. These negative comparisons do not have any benefits rather than making your partner to feel more insecure about themselves and your relationship.
4. Maximizing of Partner’s Negative Traits
Every partner has positive traits, and negative traits – there are no perfect people. When you only start to focus on the negative traits of your partner, your relationship is more at risk. Focusing on your partner’s negative traits are often followed by contemptuous marks, name calling and labeling. Common examples are:
When your partner is feeling unproductive or tired, labeling them as “lazy”,
When they struggle with managing their emotions, calling them out with “You are bipolar.”
5. Minimizing of Partner’s Positive Traits
When you start to view your partner’s positive traits (especially things you used to view as positive in the past) as negative, the relationship is more vulnerable to an affair. Think about your very first impressions about your partner. Maybe you thought that they are organized, planned, structured and these qualities initially attracted you to your partner. As time goes by, you may start minimizing these positive traits and even find them “annoying”. It is common to criticize your partner with something like “You are never spontaneous”, even though you were attracted to your partner at the first place because they were planned and organized, and everything but spontaneous.
6. Unbalance Between Resentment and Gratitude
When you feel resentful towards your partner, it may be extremely challenging to tap into your gratitude. When you focus on what is going wrong in your relationship, focusing on what is going right will take the backseat. This situation may cause an unbalance between having resentment vs feeling grateful and makes your relationship more vulnerable for having affairs.
Practice more on engaging in daily gratitude: “Thank you for doing the dishes”.
Acknowledge your needs when your sense of fairness is being triggered to avoid feeling resentful: “I feel it’s unfair for me to do most of the kitchen chores. I’m afraid to have resentment towards you if we can’t change anything about our current household responsibilities.”
7. Loneliness in Relationship
Relationships, especially long-term committed relationships, go through some stages where occasionally you may find yourself feeling lonelier than usual. External stressors such as financial difficulties, parenting challenges, work-related stress, sickness, grief, and loss may make you feel lonelier and more isolated in your relationship – especially if your partner doesn’t reciprocate how you feel, or they seem to be unable to understand what you’re going through. When you start feeling lonely in your experiences in relationship, it is crucial to address this powerful emotion to seek ways to reconnect with your partner, rather than turning to a potential new partner.
8. Lack of Communication Around Low Sexual Desire
If having sex important to you and if you feel like your sexual needs are not being met, you’ll seek alternative solutions. These solutions should include having an open and honest communication with your partner on how you feel to come up with a mutual solution and seeking couples and sex therapy. It is common for partners to have different meanings associated with sex and intimacy, romance, passion, fun, and adventure. Low sexual desire does not immediately make your relationship more vulnerable to have affairs, not communicating about it with your partner, and feeling hopeless and stuck in your sexual intimacy is the risk factor.
9. Having Fewer Pro-Relationship Cognitions
If you can’t remember when the last time was you had fun with your partner, the times that you felt loved and cared, moments that you felt appreciated and understood by your partner, you may have more con-relationship cognitions. Having fewer pro-relationship cognitions can make relationships vulnerable to a betrayal like an affair. Make a habit of walking down the memory lane together to reminisce about the “good old times”.
10. Conflict as an Absorbing State
Disagreements and occasional conflict occur in many healthy and loving relationships. The difference between healthy and unhealthy relationships is more about the conflict resolution. In healthy relationships, there is usually a “repair attempt” when a conflict occurs. Often, both partners accept responsibility for their own part of why their communication went wrong and focus on understanding and problem solving. When having conflicts turns into an absorbing state, either no one engages in a repair attempt or repair attempts no longer work. Criticism, contempt and avoidance/shotting down become the new normal where couples start to invest less and less in their relationship such as spending less time together.
Your relationship may have some of these dynamics. Please keep in mind, these are not the signs that your partner may be cheating on you. These are the cascade of events that make relationships more vulnerable of having affairs. If you relate to some of them, contact me today. Affairs can be avoided.
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