Caught: Don’t Lie to Me About Cheating and Affairs.

I once believed that cheating was rare, but I now know it isn’t. It’s hard to get accurate statistics on the subject, mainly because it’s a covert activity that people aren’t proud of and don’t want judgment about, so they keep it to themselves or, at most, tell a best friend or a few trusted others.

No matter who you are, you know it’s wrong, and since most people will fight to the death not to be seen as villains or having done bad things, they’ll deny the ugly truth of what they’ve done unless caught in bed in the buff with another person by their spouse. And even then, I’ve observed people trying to deny it — “It’s not what it looks like!”

Of course, married men and women seen in photos doing something inappropriate with another will claim it’s been photoshopped. Many years ago, I had a male client whose wife received time-lapse photos of him receiving a massage with a happy ending from a man, taken by the man, obviously, and my client used the Photoshop excuse. Good luck with that, people. I fully expect someone to blame artificial intelligence soon; marriage therapists do not thank you, technology.

And you wonder why I won’t believe you if you minimize or deny an affair?

Yes, I’ve heard it all; every excuse known to man and woman, and even when an unfaithful partner does admit to the dirty deed of cheating, I will be showered in a spray of minimalization until I almost drown: It only happened one time, it was a nothing-burger, we just kissed and petted only, or they wanted to have sex badly but in the end, decided not to.

Right. Don’t insult my intelligence, and you know what? There’s usually no point in getting to the truth details because pulling it out of someone clamped down in a sexual cover-up is as difficult to find and as elusive as a white peacock. Will I waste time and energy looking for it, or go ahead and know it exists, treat it as if it exists, and stop the search? Surely you can guess the answer. Bottom line: If you admit to a minor marital betrayal, I will assume it was way worse, and I don’t know that I have ever been wrong.

There are statistics on how many married people committed adultery, but I doubt their accuracy for the reasons I just listed. For example, according to the General Social Survey GSS, a nonpartisan research organization dedicated to “understanding the world” and studying the “complexity of American society. “Twenty percent of men and 13 percent of women reported cheating,” and if that low number is correct, I’ll eat my favorite handbag. I don’t know how many people have extramarital sex exactly, but I have my own stats on cheating, all made up in my head. My opinion, based on my experience as a human and marriage therapist, is a hell of a lot of people cheat. More than most of us can imagine.

There are different levels and types of affairs, from being very serious and potentially marriage-ending to not marriage-ending. A one-night stand is the easiest to recover from, and long-term love affairs are the most difficult. You can take a love affair to an even higher level of impossibility to heal if the affair took place with a family member or among close friends. I have seen both numerous times.

Research tells us that 75 percent of couples recover after an affair is revealed, although it is likely to take a long time to heal if ever they do. Some scenarios are far more hopeful than others. The two things that are true for everyone, however, are that cheaters lie and minimize, and that’s another reason I won’t believe you when you start doing that in front of me.

Infidelity in marriage crisis, or, don’t you lie to me, and more about why I won’t believe you.

A phenomenon I have long noticed is that once a person decides there is no hope for the marriage they are in, over nine in 10 people line up a romance — serious, not serious, or somewhere in the grey area — that will serve as a stepping stone out of the marriage. Having a romantic partner to lean on through the pre-divorce and post-divorce period gives a person the courage to leave and stay the course of the ending process. When I see a person who has recently changed their behavior or appearance, turned their back on the marriage, and has no interest in marriage therapy, I look in the barn to see if rats are eating the grain.

When I first started out in marriage therapy, I was far too trusting and wanted to believe people who said they had not cheated when all indicators said they had, and I was played the fool over and over. Yes, Becky was duped, lied to, and misled. Many times. I look back at neophyte therapist Becky with a loving eye, but she’s had to come a long way. No longer do I believe the baloney and bullshit thrown at me by people who have every appearance of having cheated and who tell me they didn’t. Nowadays, I assume the worst and refuse to argue with people about it. It’s the only sane way to work.

What constitutes the marital felony of cheating, infidelity, or adultery? For my purposes in helping couples work out their problems, I define it as “Any secretive, erotic activity with a person outside the marriage.” That includes talking, writing, texting, emailing, video chats, etc. Emotional connection, touching, and having sex qualify, of course, but are not necessary to meet the definition.

Suzie and Royce, one is a poster child for telling lies about cheating.

Suzie and her husband Royce came to me after he had found her writing a text message to another man. With this discovery, the marital shit hit the fan, and they were in a full-board marital crisis. With the inappropriate texting disclosed, Suzie said all she had done was text with the man, but in her post-revelation place, she was in a defiant mood and laid brutal honesty on the table concerning her marriage … she admitted to being miserable in the relationship for a long time, and knew she wanted to separate. She hoped to work things out with Royce but wasn’t sure she could. She had no interest in marriage therapy for now and just wanted space.

After all these years of experience with couples, I see things.

“Was Suzie “only texting” and acting like this?” I asked myself. It made no sense. With her back turned solidly away from her marriage and no interest in marriage therapy, her actions told me she was involved with someone in a more serious relationship. The only thing to do, the best thing, was to check the grain in the barn.

Although it’s not my favorite suggestion, I told Royce he’d be wise to look around. I would never ask this of anyone unless there were suspected lies, serious trust issues, and a need to get to the truth. I say the same thing to all my marriage crisis clients who come to see me alone, hoping to avoid a divorce they don’t desire.

In our conversation, they describe the new and different behaviors their spouse had been exhibiting.

“Are they cheating?” I ask.

“I asked and they said they aren’t,” they respond.

“Hmm, I’d check if I were you.”

In the scenario above, I already know my client’s spouse is cheating and lying about it, but so many betrayed spouses believe their partner’s lies, so stop doing that and listen up.

Like my other clients, I wanted Royce to poke around a little for his own sake so he could practice self-care and decide what was best for him and their young children; he’d need to know if there was more going on than Suzie would admit to figure out how to proceed in the healthiest way.

Within a few days, Royce discovered the man’s identity and found a love letter Suzie wrote to him. She had professed her undying love to the man she was “only texting.”

She addressed her married affair partner in the letter using prose possibly plagiarized from a dimestore romance novel, filled with passion, longing, and a determined desire for a future together. Suzie was busted as misleading us about the seriousness of her affair, but her response was to remain defiant. Although she lived in the same town as and worked near her cheating partner and had been caught lying about various things already at least six or seven times, she wanted me to believe that after all of the lies and deception and the numerous make-out meetings she admitted to, she had drawn the line at sexual intercourse. Really? When I expressed skepticism with her story, she began pounding the table with her fist and clinching her teeth angrily, “I did not have sex with that man!”

“Doth thou protest too much?” I thought.

Anyway, my thinking is that if you are in an emotional affair with someone who lives within 100 miles of you, you are having sexual intercourse, and don’t tell me otherwise. I’ve been around and done this too long. Still, to save myself the misery of listening to lies and minimizations, I tried to shut Suzie down from her sanctimonious stance that she was ‘in an affair but pure sexually,’ but it enraged her even more.

“It doesn’t matter if you did, and I sincerely don’t care,” I told her. “Even if we take out the idea of cheating and sex with another in a situation like this, it is already as bad or damaging as it gets as far as betrayal and lying goes. I mean, you did send a letter to a married man with children saying you have never felt this way about anyone and would wait for him to leave his family for as long as it takes. That’s pretty awful betrayal-wise if you two break up one another’s marriages, so whether you fornicated or not is not worth quibbling about.” And it isn’t.

Credibility. Now, the roaches of betrayal arrive.

Once numerous lies have been uncovered, how could anyone think they have one shred of credibility in the therapy room? They don’t, and that’s why I shut down talking about it and move on to something else, like, how are we going to manage this mess so that the innocent children in these families have the best possible outcome? I am also concerned about the betrayed spouse being put through a nightmarish separation period where they could possibly be misled into thinking there is hope.

I don’t like couples like Suzie and Royce to separate, at least how I help people do it. Suzie was leaning as far out of the marriage as she could be and was distracted by and in love with a third party, and I highly suspect she has no intention of ever working things out with Royce. The primary separations I manage are for people who hope to reconcile, have just hit rock bottom, and want to find a way back up if possible.

I have a separation agreement for couples who have decided to divorce, and I gave one to Royce and Suzie, along with the one designed to tilt couples toward reconciliation, which I don’t think they’ll use. When a third party is involved, a person like Suzie won’t approach the situation with an eye toward saving the marriage and repairing herself. She is far more likely looking forward to having time to sneak away with the other cheating spouse. In this case, the reconciliation-oriented agreement will be a waste of time. P.S. If you ever question or suggest that they may be using this opportunity for less than honest reasons, they will rise up from the depths of hell in anger and rage — another “Thou doth protest too much” scenario.

My concerns about Royce and Suzie using my managed separation for the wrong reasons are:

1) Suzie is showing every sign of heading toward an eventual divorce and no sign of interest in reconciliation.

2) She clearly wants to control how others see her by controlling the narrative.

3) She wants to be the one who decides and controls if they stay together or divorce and when. (Royce has said if he finds out she has had sex with the other man, it will be a deal-killer.)

3) There is a good chance she has already decided to divorce Royce.

4) Part of controlling her story is to put on a show for her family and children so she can say they did all they could to save the marriage, even though she never intended to work it out.

Only Royce can decide if he wants to endure a long separation process that might prolong his healing and is not likely to produce the desired outcome in exchange for the infinitesimal chance that Suzie will return to a different state of heart and mind. The important thing is for Royce to get clarity on the truth of Suzie’s love affair, the odds against her wanting to reconcile, and decide what’s healthiest for him within that dynamic.

If you cheat, you will lie, and that is that.

I can’t help people who lie and hold back important details. It creates skepticism within me about the accuracy of anything they say and hampers everything we’re trying to do. In my work, dealing with the truth is important and can help even the playing field. After all, when a person thinks of leaving their marriage, they have temporary leverage over the person they are considering leaving. If we find out that they are in an emotional or sexual relationship, they are likely to lose that leverage, and now, I have something to work with on an equal playing field with two players who have not handled the issues in their marriage in the best ways. The only obstacle, though, as mentioned previously, is that a cheater who has been revealed will either be humble or defiant. If they aren’t humble, the odds of saving the relationship will be bleak.

Are unfaithful people bad people?

Is the person lying and betraying an irredeemable villain and scumbucket? Of course not, and I want to address the subject of feeling compassion toward any unfaithful person I work with. Yes, I do have and feel it. I understand the context in which cheating usually occurs, including loveless and cruel marriages, loneliness, neglect, unreasonableness, addictions, and more. I’m sure Suzie’s husband wasn’t the greatest. I could see many things about him that would wear on someone, but there are no justifications for cheating; it is my least favorite way for people to handle their marriage problems.

People like Suzie are defiant because they want to control the narrative. She is a mother, wife, and cherished family member in a profession where integrity matters. She wants desperately to be seen as a good person who is in emotional pain and has good reasons to step away from Royce and her marriage. She was fighting not to see herself or have others view her in an unflattering light or be seen as a person who has betrayed her family for her own emotional needs.

As I always say, people like Suzie had a chance at being seen more sympathetically had she worked out her marriage one way or the other before the infidelity. If your marriage was a nightmare and you cheated, however, you become a much less compelling figure in the story than had you not cheated. The decision as is will not work in her favor if she chooses to divorce Royce, and especially not if she ends up with her lover, who has a family of his own he would be leaving. His future ex wife and Royce will likely not want to make their new life together easy, and their children will resent the stepparent who played a major part in breaking their original family apart. The odds against it working for anyone’s benefit over the long term are slim.

Have a question? If you have a subject you’d like to see me write about or a situation you might want to present that I could discuss in a blog, please email me at Becky@DoctorBecky.com.

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Becky Whetstone, Ph.D., is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Arkansas and Texas* and is known as America’s Marriage Crisis Manager®. She is a former features writer and columnist for the San Antonio Express-News and has worked with thousands of couples to save their marriages. She can work with you, too, as a life coach if you’re not in Texas or Arkansas. She is also co-host of the YouTube Call Your Mother Relationship Show and has a telehealth private practice as a therapist and life coach via Zoom. To contact her, check out www.DoctorBecky.com and www.MarriageCrisisManager.com. Also, here is how to find her work on the Huffington Post. Don’t forget to follow her on Medium so you don’t miss a thing!

For licensure verification, find Becky Whetstone Cheairs.