A friend of mine asked me to write on infidelity last week… And that’s a pretty big topic. In fact, this is gonna be at least two parts.

So here’s what I know about cheating. If your partner fucks around on the side, and they don’t leave immediately once you’ve discovered it, you have two choices: Leave or stay.

Leaving’s a fine option. I’m not being callous here, but once that trust is violated, it’s damned hard to rebuild it. There are a lot of relationships that can’t withstand the problems of trust that come up afterwards, and being honest and going, “Nope, that’s a dealbreaker” can stave off a lot of future heartbreak.

But mistakes do happen. It’d be nice to think that people only do smart things, but people fuck up once in a while – and while cheating’s a pretty major fuckup, it’s often one fuckup in the middle of years of good being-together time. It’s hard to leave someone you love and are suited to. So here’s the best advice I have for you. If you choose to stay, remember this:

If you want to make a relationship work after you’ve discovered that your partner’s cheated on you, you must totally forgive your partner.

That’s right; if you choose to stay, you have to agree that the cheating will never be used as a weapon against her (or him, or whatever). It’s off the table. You have to genuinely call a no-fault and let it go.

Now, that sounds strange, but I’ve experienced first-hand what happens when you don’t forgive. I was in a long-term relationship where my girlfriend cheated on me, and I stayed… But I didn’t forgive. I always held it against her a little, and as a result I always thought she owed me a little for what she did. That owing made every subsequent argument that much harder. She was upset because she was dating someone who she could never do enough to make it up to him – and let’s be honest, she couldn’t. Whereas I was upset because I felt that she always had to give me her A-game because she cheated on me. And while we stayed together for a long time after that, it was never really good.

What’ll often happen if you can’t let it go is that she’ll cheat again, because she’s still miserable. Or you’ll cheat, because you feel like you’re owed one, and the only way to get out from under that is to equalize the revenge, which isn’t particularly healthy.

I wanted to write a comedy skit about that dynamic:

ME: “Hey, get me a Coke? I don’t feel like getting up.”

HER: “I’m in the bathroom.”

ME: “Given that you cheated on me, I thought you’d be a little more responsive in this relationship. You promised you’d - ”

HER: “Here’s your Coke, you asshole.”

The trick is, of course, that you’re not going to forget what happened. That’s impossible. There are going to be nights where she’s out and you’re shit-scared that oh no, this is happening again, and that sucks. There will be times you’ll be kissing him and suddenly you’ll remember that he was kissing her, and you’ll get angry.

Naturally, just pretending that this didn’t happen and everything is fine now is going to lead to ruin. You have to discuss it – but there’s a fine line in how you discuss it. You have to be able to say, “Wow, I’m really insecure because I’m remembering what happened” and not “Christ, I’m insecure because you did this to me.” You have to be able to say, “This seems like the kind of situation that led to cheating before, and I’m really uncomfortable with this,” and not “Oh God, you’re doing it again.”

That’s a mighty fine line – bringing up the issues caused by the cheating without ever being angry at the cheating.

And that’s gonna be suicidal unless you can determine one critically important fact:

Is he/she going to cheat again?

If you go to all the trouble of forgiving this person and they fuck around again, then it’s even worse. Bad enough feeling chumped once, but twice? Lordy, you just wanna throw your head in a pit.

The only way you can forget – and a surprising number of people do – is to actually get to a place where you’re pretty sure it’s not going to happen again. And to do that, you have to understand why they cheated, and what led to that.

The good news is that there are four basic types of cheating partners.

(Note: A preponderance of he or shes is not intended. But frankly, it’s really fucking tiring to have to alternate “he” and “she” all the damn time so that everyone thinks that I’ve covered the bingo card in an even manner. Regardless of pronoun, any gender can cheat.)

1) The Serial Cheater.
These folks are always on the make, and are pretty obvious about it – flirting heavily with anyone who catches their eye and making subtle offers at every turn. They never act like they’re committed, even in the early stages of the relationship, and go out of their way not to mention their partner (or downplay their partner’s part in their lives).

The good news is that you’re not likely to commit to one of these, because you have to bury your head pretty deep in the sand to ignore the signs. Usually, the only people who are foolish enough to marry them have fine-tuned their skills at ignoring all the rumors going about… Which means, in a weird way, that the two of you are bizarrely compatible.

2) The Tarzan.
This person can’t just end a relationship and have nowhere to go – they have to make sure they have someone waiting for them when they leave. There comes a point when the Tarzan cheater is so dissatisfied with his partner that he’s basically decided it’s over… But being alone is so terrifying that he can’t bear to just call it off, like any sane person would.

So rather than leaping into the void, he tolerates his partner’s odious habits… At least until he can latch onto someone else. Then, once he finds them, he leaves Old Partner for New Partner, transitioning smoothly into a new dynamic.

Like Tarzan swinging from vine to vine, the Tarzan cheater swings from relationship to relationship.

The strange thing about the Tarzan is that they generally cheat only once on each partner – right at the end, when they’ve found someone who’s better. In this case, the cheating isn’t so much a violation of your relationship as it is a way of ensuring that it can’t be restarted. Shitty, but true.

The good news, if you want to call it that, is that the Tarzan cheater is unlikely to ever be happy. The Tarzan cheater doesn’t actually commit to a relationship – given that he’s always quietly looking to trade up, he never actually manages to give anything of worth to the person he theoretically loves. He’ll live off of brief surges of New Relationship Energy for awhile, then discover that his new partner is almost as much a pain in the ass as his last one was.

The Tarzan Cheater tends to spend years in dissatisfied hibernation, waiting for some better girl to come along while he endures the quirks of his current partner. Commitment means willing to change your partner and be changed in return, and since he’s not willing to do the latter he’ll never get the former.

But that doesn’t hurt any less when the Tarzan leaves.

3) The Wild Oat-Sower.
This sort of cheater is generally looking to explore some sort of need she’s never experienced before – something she can’t find within the confines of her relationship with her current partner.

The things a Wild Oat-Sower wants to experience vary. Sometimes, it’s just a woman who married early who needs to find out what other sexual partners are like. In poly relationships, sometimes, it’s a woman who is tired of playing the good girl all the time and wants to discover what happens when she has sex with someone without her husband’s permission.

It can even as specific as a type of person. If a girl’s always attracted to a kind of person who her husband loathes, she might sleep with a guy like that to find out whether it’s all it’s cracked up to be.

The weird thing about Wild Oat-Sowing cheating experience is that sometimes, they can actually improve the relationship. Yes, the pain of cheating hurts if they’re discovered – but assuming they go to the other side and find the grass isn’t necessarily greener, they’re often far more appreciative of what they have. Which, in turn, can lead to greater commitments.

So if a Wild Oat-Sower has scratched that particular itch (and doesn’t find that whoah, this was way better than she thought), that’s often the end of it. It takes a long time to work through for the cheated partner, but consider it that one time at band camp.

4) The Desperate Housewife.
This cheater is really unhappy with the way things are going – but not so unhappy that she’s willing to end the relationship. She still loves you, but there are a lot of things that you aren’t giving her… And that’s making her deeply unhappy. So she’s trying to fill in the gaps by finding people who are fulfilling her needs.

Generally, she’s rebelling against you by having sex with someone who is your polar opposite – if you’re a control freak, she’s screwing the dirty hippie she met at the festival. If you’re a laid-back slacker, she’s dorkin’ the Yuppie with the severe career ambitions. Depending on how bad your relationship is, sometimes she’s even screwing your worst enemy because she knows you hate that and she wonders, deep down, whether there’s something of interest to be found in that loathing.

It’s dysfunctional, sure, but it’s what happens when all other communications break down. This is a way of her showing that she really hates what you’re doing – and guess what? You are doing something wrong. People in content relationships generally don’t cheat, which means that there’s something drastically wrong with not just her, but both of you.

If you catch her in mid-act, she says she wants to make this work. Strangely enough, she does. This is the sign that you need to bring something new to your dynamic.

The problem with Desperate Housewives is that what they say they want is often divorced from what they actually want. These are people who may be afraid to ask for what they really need, or believe deep down that “good” relationships have an ESP where their man should instinctively know these things, or they may just be so non-self-reflective that they genuinely don’t have the faintest clue what would actually make them happy.

Regardless, if you want to make this work, you have to discover what’s lacking in your dynamic that made them feel like they had to go elsewhere. Yes, they’re at fault for cheating, and that makes you less willing to change. But if you want to make it work, you need to discover what the real problems are… And quickly.

Temporary Conclusion:
There are your basic cheaters. Now here’s the trick.

When caught, a #4 almost always claims to be a #3.

More on that tomorrow.

Tags: cheater types, relationships

(Tell me I'm full of it)