Emotional Starvation

Rachael wants to talk about this term because it's one you're going to run into a lot if you go looking for answers about why she cheated, and she wants you to understand it fully, not just the surface version. Emotional starvation is what it sounds like: being in a relationship, married, living together, sharing a life, and still feeling profoundly alone. The emotional connection that's supposed to be there, the being truly seen, truly known, truly met, just isn't there. Or it isn't there enough.
Now here's where a lot of articles and videos stop, and where Rachael thinks they get it wrong. They'll tell you this is why she cheated, because you were emotionally unavailable, because you couldn't give her what she needed, and so she went and found it somewhere else. Rachael wants to push back on that, because it's incomplete. A person with healthy relationship skills who feels emotionally starved does one of two things. They work to fix it, they have hard conversations, they ask for what they need, they get help together. Or they leave.
Staying in that emotionally starved place and quietly seeking connection outside the relationship instead, that's not actually about the starvation itself. That's about never having learned a healthier way to handle conflict and disconnection in a relationship. That skill gap traces back to childhood too, back to not having a model for how you're supposed to fix things or advocate for yourself. So if this was part of your story, Rachael wants you to hear this: emotional starvation may have been real in your marriage, but it wasn't the reason she cheated. The reason was never having learned what else to do with it.