For them, it can be a nightmare and a crisis of identity and security. They feel totally broad-sided and taken by surprise. They definitely believe that their partner has crossed a moral line and put their relationship and lives in peril. Hurt partners feel it pierce their gut and heart.
Often, they believe that they have been stripped of their personal security and trust in life itself. To them, the entire world may feel as if it has lost its predictability and reliability.
They become volatile and feel devalued and unimportant. And they hate being deceived and lied to. The exposure of an affair can be emotionally, mentally and physically overwhelming and it can overtake them for months or years. They may exhibit symptoms associated to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder PTSD including: flashbacks, altered worldview, nightmares, panic attacks, cycles of re-living the experience, recurrent and intrusive memories and dreams, prolonged distress and avoidance, irritability and hyper-vigilance.
The discovery of infidelity can generate intense negative emotions. A broad spectrum of painful emotions can be unleashed, such as: anger, rage, fear, anguish, abandonment, dejection, anxiety, shame, despair, loneliness, misery, outrage, rejection, repulsion, resentment, sadness, grief and torment.
Extreme emotional flooding and stress can cause fatigue and illness or exacerbate chronic illness. Mentally, hurt men and women may become obsessed to find out what happened and incessantly demand facts and detailed information about the affair.
Others might confront the affair person by phone, email, text or in-person. People who are seriously in love show strong reactions in their caudate nucleus, which releases huge amounts of feel-good chemicals and motivates behaviors that attempt to get another "fix. The interesting thing about infidelity is that it often hijacks these reward pathways for its own purposes.
After years with a partner, we may no longer get that intense dopamine rush that we got from being around them in the early days. If we experience it with another person, it can kick our brains into addictive substance-seeking mode , urging us on to disregard everything else in search of our next "fix. Women in particular, it seems, are likely to respond to affairs with a psychological practice called "rumination. The same word is used for the practice of cows bringing up digested material from their rumen, or stomach, to chew over again, which feels pretty appropriate.
Part of the reason we tend to ruminate is the addictive nature of love and our response to its betrayal or removal. A study of the brains of 15 adults conducted at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine found that people who were conflicted about a partner they loved them, but had just broken up with them exhibited activity in brain areas related to dopamine and addiction.
The result showed "cravings," or an obsessive return to the same thoughts over and over; in the case of infidelity, obsessing over the betrayal isn't unusual in the slightest. Unfortunately, a study found that a lot of rumination after infidelity significantly reduced the likelihood that the relationship would be salvaged. Women are, according to psychological studies, also more likely to ruminate than men ; this may be because, as one study found, women in general are likely to feel more responsibility for the "emotional tone" of relationships and for any negative events that occur in them than men.
In other words, we're culturally conditioned to believe it's at least partially our fault. There are very few bright sides to infidelity and betrayal in a relationship, but one emerged in a study released this April: it helps us learn about how we make our choices. The study asked 5, women in 96 countries about the consequences of a relationship dissolution in which a partner cheated and then left them for the "other woman. And it turns out that the hard, hard lesson of living through a partner's infidelity actually improved the mate choice selection criteria of women, as they were now more capable of detecting signals in future mates of traits that might make them undesirable i.
The researchers called this detecting "low mate value," and found that the women in the survey thought they'd refined this ability. So there you have it: being cheated on is miserable, but it's also educational. By JR Thorpe. Can you really love someone and cheat on them? What hurts the most about being cheated on? What are the signs of infidelity? What is worse: physical infidelity or emotional infidelity?
Do cheaters feel guilt? Should you forgive a cheater? Some can last for long periods of time, others can be a brief event. There are also sexual affairs, emotional affairs, and affairs that involve both sex and emotions. Research published in the journal Current Psychology argues that Infidelity is hard to define precisely. And what we define as infidelity is and on top of that it is culturally influenced according to the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy.
People cheat in long term committed relationships as well as in casual and brief relationships. Due to the lack of clarity, it is important that both people are aware of what infidelity looks like in your relationship. Being clear and having those conversations up front may help prevent possible issues down the road.
Knowing the causes of infidelity is reassuring. Unfortunately, we do not have a complete picture of what causes it. Research in the Journal of Sex Research shows a variety of factors such as lower relationship satisfaction, aggression, lower dedication, lower commitment, and suspicion or knowledge of partner own infidelity were associated with engaging in infidelity.
The good news is that yes, couples survive infidelity. The previously mentioned Journal of Marital and Family Therapy points out that Some couples even report an increase in relationship satisfaction afterwards. Some of the unintended positive outcomes included closer marital relationships, increased assertiveness, placing higher value on family, and taking better care of oneself.
This is not to say that an affair is good for a relationship. Rather, that an affair does not have to mean the end of a relationship. The two most frequently cited types of infidelity are emotional and physical.
Data published in the journal Current Psychology outlines why that is. There is a lot of grey area regarding the definition of emotional infidelity. It is often thought of as a deep emotional connection, where someone is investing time, emotion, or love in someone other than their partner, and it is often secret.
Yet, it is important to consider that almost any behavior that is kept secret could lead to feelings of betrayal. There is greater agreement on the definition of physical infidelity.
Physical infidelity is often considered to be sexual intercourse outside of the relationship. However, this fails to include other sexual activities. A broader definition of physical infidelity includes, but is not limited to, masturbation in the presence of another, oral sex, sexual play, kissing, flirting, and visiting strip clubs.
Some may also consider certain online behavior to be cheating. Online infidelity can include cybersex, exchanging sexual self-images, online dating, online flirting, and using online pornography. As stated at the beginning of this post, it is important that both you and your partner are on the same page about what you each consider to be infidelity.
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