The Truth About Cheating And Emotional Regulation

In the dynamics of a healthy relationship, cheating is the external threat that doesn’t come to play unless one of the partners is not able to manage his own emotions.

Emotional regulation is the number 1 indicator of emotional intelligence in today’s skill-based economy. The more we can contain and manage our emotions in different interactions in our daily lives, the more we obtain from life and relationships with people. However, emotional regulation in romantic relationships is a “game” 2 can play. In the work of Sue Johnson, John Gottman and Esther Perel who are all relationship therapists, the common nominator for keeping the balance of the emotions of partners is “the love tank”. When one of the partners has an empty love tank, the chances that they will cheat increase exponentially. But the fact can only be measured throughout prolonged exposure to the fallacies of an empty love tank.

Cheating is usually a dynamic that doesn’t happen in a short period. It takes time for the body to process the emotional unbalance of triggers from the environment and cause chain reaction materialized through different degrees of cheating.

The stages of cheating:

1. Cheating starts with thoughts

The moment you start plotting to get over the negative emotions that come through your mind when your partner does something that disturbs you, you are already losing the trust you have in one another. In relationships, we usually expect that the partner knows when they push our buttons and such expectations can sometimes turn against us if we don’t work on a communication routine to discuss these past wounds and to enable healing through the relationship.

However, the biggest factor in this stage is the trust element. The more corrosion around trust, the less likely to be able to manage not stepping into the next phases. Brene Brown describes trust through a metaphor from her daughter’s school. She said that the first day in school, the teacher placed a bowl in the classroom with tiny marbles that would go into the bowl every time the kids would do something good. This instant reward system made kids more likely to stay on the right path and continue their good deeds throughout the day such that by the end of the day the jar was already full of marbles. The kids were excited that they gained the trust of the teacher. However, in the coming days, as kids would lose the excitement of the marble jar game they would easily slip into bad behavior patterns and the teacher would start removing marbles from the jar one by one. The moral of the story if that trust is gained bit by bit every day and also maintained through the consistent recurrence of both acts and rewards keeping the balance on both ends of a partnership. I wrote an article about women losing the grip on how they value their partner by not paying attention to the emotional cues and needs of validation of their partners.

2. The activation phase

The subtle result of losing trust is transitioning to the part where you innocently drift the attention from your partner to other things in life and that becomes more of who you are than before. One example is when people justify the drift of attention with “outgrowing” the other person and developing themselves independently. Of course, we learn independently even when we are in relationships, but the bigger the gap becomes, the harder it is for the other to catch up and usually the best way to get back on the same page is to have a conversation about growth vs growing apart. The way Gottman explains this in his book about The 7 principles for making a marriage work is that people tend to drift apart by not solving the solvable problems they have. Usually, it takes a few months or over a year to get to know someone to the extent that you can say you understand when their attention is drifting and they are not present anymore in conversations.

Not being fully present is just a symptom of the lack of trust becoming more evident.

There’s also the tension that builds up whenever they are caught off guard by not paying attention. That usually is the bigger indicator that something is going on.

All these little alarm signals are natural and are supposed to help partners notice there’s something that needs to be worked out!

The most important part of this stage is that if you feel your partner is in this phase, don’t overthink and put pressure to elaborate on the problems you are noticing until you can do it from a position of empathy. The real empathetic thing to do here is to practice a mindful approach towards your partner and try to be there for the micro-moments when you can have a glimpse into how they feel to allow them the space to get back the trust they lost in you.

I will elaborate more about handling the entanglements of these phases after the 3rd one which is one that would cause a lot more problems.

3. The triggering phase

By the time you reached this point, the little activities you had separately for a while now have transformed into habits and that is already irritating for you so you might become passive and lead up to a fisty reaction, and intense outburst, a gaslighting moment and even fights resulting in your partner having a lack of empathy towards your emotions. This is the moment when your relationship is in the “Demons den” or “Protest Polka” as Sue Johnson calls them in her book “Hold me tight”. What this means is that by this point you are no longer able to fight the intense emotions of repulsion or disappointment you feel towards your partner for the things they did to emotionally hurt you and you start arguments from almost anything. Be wary that the reasons for your fights in this stage are not the real cause of your disagreements but just symptomatic effects of unmet needs over extended periods which became chronic and are now projected on everyday life aspects. By not being open to having conversations about these problems and not showing the interest to solve them, you get to the next phase of cheating which is actually what most divorce lawyers have to handle.

I will stop here for a little while to make a few remarks about the nature of these first 3 stages. These stages are strictly internal conflicts of the couple and have nothing to do with cheating in the sense that we’ve been educated on in society, but I felt the need to outline them in order for you, the reader, to notice that cheating is not necessarily the result of an incidental moment in the life of a couple and it actually has a buildup. Most of these scenarios are completely ignored amid fights about who did what. Also, women who have been cheated on will completely deny that they have contributed to the buildup of events that made men cheat on them. That’s usually because women do have the ability to connect all the dots but tend to deny and minimize the risk of contaminating their entire life with doubt by denying the clues that were in front of them. In hindsight, after 3 relationships that failed due to my ignorance about the topic, I would say this played the biggest role in why my most important tool today in relationships becomes handling these 3 first stages. Before anyone external can interfere between me and my partner, I would want to make sure that my intentions and truths about what’s going on between us are checked on regular bases. And having that in mind, I might add that things will not always be wonderful, but being able to navigate the intricacies of these 3 stages is the essential playbook on keeping relationships healthy and as far away as possible from external threats.

Coming back to the stages, number 4 looks like this:

4. The fall out of love

Since the energy between the partners was not carefully managed in the first 3 stages, one partner or even both might start looking for another person to fill in the needs and the gaps that their current partner is not able to fill. This stage is a pure explorative one which might not involve anything else that the desperation of finding some ways to fall back on something and not feel like there’s no way out and no better way to live than with this burden of a bad relationship you feel stuck in. Many people find at this point that there are new ways to get energy in their relationships by flirting with other people in the office or in different groups where there’s an opportunity to get some new attention and fresh perspectives over dating from less entangled people.

5. The first attempt

After the “orientation phase” when you were pushed to look for other people because you are no longer that much in love with your partner, the next step is to look for a specific new person to try and start something new. While this phase is not really cheating yet, it does become the pursuit of a new person in particular which might involve stalking the new person on social media, looking to see entry points to connect or even talking to their friends to see if there is a bit of interest on their end as well if there’s a closer tie around the new person and the current group of friends. Despite all the efforts of your current partner to revive the relationship, there is already a big sense of rejection from your end to reconnect and rekindle things at this point.

6. The deed

As soon as there’s a green light on your new crush, you’re directly going into the deed of either asking them on a date, kissing or even having sex with them. This point is a very delicate one because if very much determines the next one. There are 2 options after you’ve been with someone else:

• you either go for the full-length new relationship ( which is stage 7)
• or you feel extremely guilty and you turn back to your partner to fix things and make things work this time with a lot more presence and focus on your partner than ever before

For whoever has been through this stage as the “cheated” partner, you should know that getting someone back after they’ve cheated on you is not weakness or stupidity but a greater empathy than ego in the hindsight of your pitfalls from the first 3 stages which lead to the buildup I was talking earlier.

7. The affair

There are multiple ways in which affairs can withstand the test of time from the initial deed to a second and third time. The reasons behind continuing can vary but the most common nominators are as follows:

• A new affair is an inaccessible person and that creates a sense of relief that it doesn’t escalate and it won’t affect your current one as long as you keep it hidden.
• you chose a new person who’s a lifestyle, moral values or social class doesn’t match up with your interests so you only enjoy the attention of that person while your partner is busy and not filling up your love tank.
• there’s a high dose of adventure and excitement connected to the new person that turns you on and you missed spicing things up with your current partner
• the upgrade or “later edition” to your current one which matches your new interests developed in the 2nd stage much better than your current partner. This is usually the type of “affair” that becomes your new official partner once you finally decide to break up with the former.

Looking at the complexity of relationships, I would not say that these are exhaustive rules and stages that people go through when they decide to cheat. However, from my own experience of being cheated on, I would say that these have a pretty solid sampling behind them which makes them truer than not. Also, in my own experience, the speed of going from one stage to another can be in the course of a few years up to a few hours if things are badly managed.

The biggest mistake of all is to assume that our partner can hold up a little longer with our lack of time, attention and presence in the relationship while we get to solve our shit and be present again.

The “time” factor becomes a value more connected to the amount of unhealed trauma that our partner has to withstand the test of time than it is about the stoicism they have. Also, expecting that someone would wait for us to solve our shit while they feel neglected in the relationship with us is just as bad as doing the deed even if we stay stuck in limbo in the first 3 stages for years.

Emotional regulation and the connection to falling out of love

As emotional regulation has to do with our ability to handle emotions that overwhelm us, I feel the need to send you to my 3 other posts on the matter:

• How to get off the emotional rollercoaster and spend time in your body.
• How to cope with overstimulation as a highly sensitive person
• Activating a state of calm and relaxation

Looking at the mental health like body health you might notice that while for the flu you take a day off from work, for mental health you generally dismiss the effects it has on you and you go on with your normal daily routines. However, this can be damaging for both you and the relationship in the long run. What I want to emphasize here is that testing your overall level of stress and how you handle emotions in different areas of life is essential to keeping your relationship healthy and long-lasting. While most of the techniques there are for emotional balance purposes, they have a lot to do with how they affect our relationship.

Let me explain why.

Esther Perel talks in her book on Mating in captivity about the wonderful effect of distance and space in relationships. She gives an example that I experienced myself with my partner a couple of weeks back. We were both at a social event, he was leaning on the bar, talking to a beautiful girl and I was sitting 2–3 meters away talking to another guy about something I can’t even remember because all I remember was that I was looking at him from that distance and feeling so in love with how sexy he was while talking so confidently to that girl. It was not jealousy nor it was ownership. I was just happy to see how sexy he is in his natural element, talking about something he is passionate about and loves. These micro-moments can help create a nice balance between what we see when we are too close vs when we distance a bit to see who they are without us. And I know it would not be the same if he would only be tied with a leash to me every time we go out. But the ability to realize that comes from my internal work of emotional regulation. If every time my partner talks with a beautiful girl I freak out and unleash the dragon or spill flames out my nose, I only show my insecurities about the fact that I feel less interesting than the person he is having a good time with. The more I can contain my insecurities and understand what I need to improve on with myself before blaming my partner, the more I gain from him looking at me as a safe partner to be with because I don’t restrict his freedom.

Freedom and balance in relationships

The need to control or summon our partner to do things for us comes from our codependent nature with is a result of early childhood trauma. The way to accept that every individual is free even when we enmesh ourselves in relationships comes from the acceptance that we can’t even control our own emotions sometimes, not to mention those of others. Once I realized that for myself I stopped expecting things like complete loyalty and blind love. There’s no such thing as continuous and unconditional love. Love is conditional and it does change every day bit by bit just like our energy when we wake up every day. What we can cultivate though is a safe space for exploration within boundaries and create a healthy balance between moments together and moments apart. As we transition to more entangled relationships when we become a family, kids will also require our attention either together or separately so again we get the change to be away from our partner while still together. The manageable thing to do here is to allow every feeling to exist and coexist and label them from their source to see what comes up most often about our partner. If there is more love than anger, then we know we should be able to keep things going. If the opposite is true then that is the symptom we need to work with and reveal how our own emotions had lead to this result.

Falling out of love

This is by far the saddest part of the article. If you’ve managed to see where your emotions come from, what is the source of it and how that affected your relationship and you came to the conclusion that you get more sadness than joy from being together, then falling out of love is probably the stage you are in. However, I might add that being honest to yourself about the emotional availability you had in the relationship in the first place will give you more peace of mind about getting closure than anything else.