The Reason Women Cheat on Their Husbands

There's really only one reason women cheat on their husbands. Everything else you've heard, read, or watched about why women have affairs, it all boils down to this one thing. I want to walk you through it today, and I promise to stick with you all the way to the end, because before we're done, I'm also going to give you some real hope and real tools for getting through this if it's the reality you're living in right now. 

Maybe your wife led a total double life, everything at home seemed completely normal while something else was quietly going on in the background. Or maybe you did notice signs and symptoms that things weren't okay while it was developing. Either way, what I hear from a lot of men is that it's shocking. They don't understand how she could lead two lives. Which one is true? Which one is her? What's the lie? It can start to feel like you don't even know this person, and that betrayal runs so deep. It's not just sexual betrayal, or even emotional betrayal. It's the sense that the person you committed to share a life with might actually be someone you don't know at all. 

So Why Do They Do It? 

Affairs always, always, always boil down to one thing: trauma. 

And I want to be really clear about what I mean by that word, because trauma is not necessarily sexual abuse, or neglect, or abandonment as a child. Trauma is what happens inside of us in response to some external circumstance that damages our ability to connect in relationships with other people. A lot of different things can hurt our ability to sustain healthy relationships, and any reason you hear for an affair, every single one of them, traces back to trauma, to a damaged ability to connect and relate. 

You'll hear reasons like low self-esteem, craving excitement, anger or retribution for a partner's perceived failures. You'll hear insecure attachment, midlife crisis, numbing emotional pain, mental health conditions, emotional isolation in the marriage. Every one of those reasons is actually about trauma. 

Take low self-esteem. Babies are not born with low self-esteem. Babies are born confident, curious, playful, adventurous. Low self-esteem is something we learn. Something happens to us that teaches us we're not good enough, not valued, not lovable, and we learn to cope with that in certain ways. 

For some women, that coping might look like seeking a lot of external validation and attention, and that can lead to cheating. For some men too, a compulsive need for external validation and assurance that we're good enough, because at some point as a child we learned that we weren't.

Here's the thing to understand about trauma: when our ability to feel safe in relationships gets damaged when we're young, the way we survive it tends to form a pretty rigid pattern. If something happens to us as kids and we learn that acting out and seeking attention makes us feel better, helps us get through, that pattern can become deeply ingrained and completely subconscious. 

Why Sex Can Fill the Gap 

For a lot of people, men and women both, sex fills the gap where emotional connection and support are lacking. 

If emotional connection wasn't available to you as a kid, if your parents weren't emotionally engaged, if your mother was cold, if your father was angry or loud, or the reverse, if your parents were disappointed and gave you that horrible glare, or if you were simply left alone a lot to self-soothe and get through scary feelings by yourself, you might learn that emotional connection and safety aren't really stable. And for people who've had that experience, sex can become a kind of halfway point. It gives you the feeling of intimacy, the feeling of connection, but because there's no deeper emotional tie, the bottom can't drop out on you. You can't be hurt in the same way. Sex becomes a way to get the oxytocin, literally the drug of bonding, without becoming more emotionally attached or connected. 

How She Can Live Two Lives at Once 

One of the things that can be so disorienting about discovering an affair is how someone was able to segregate the two parts of their life, the affair on one side, the family on the other. How is that even possible? 

This is another impact of trauma. It's not true for everyone's trauma, it depends on how we survived what happened to us, but for a lot of people, the way they survive is by splitting off parts of themselves. They learn to shut down their sensitive, kind, loving part in order to survive abuse, neglect, or rejection. They learn not to let certain parts of themselves be seen, to avoid being bullied, abandoned, hurt, or to avoid burdening a parent who couldn't handle it. We might learn to hide our anger, our sexual desire, or even the softest, most loving part of us, if none of that felt safe. 

Some people get stuck with a part of themselves permanently closed off, and they have a hard time accessing their softer side at all. But for others, nothing about them at home looks shut down. They're loving. They're present. They're connected, and there's an almost entirely different persona running underneath, in the affair. That's what it looks like when someone survived their childhood by splitting off the loving, nurturing part of themselves from a daredevil, risk-taking, adrenaline-hungry part that helped them get through their adolescence.

So at home, you were engaging with one part of her, while she'd successfully compartmentalized the other, right up until it lit back up inside the affair. 

I know this can sound strange, like she has multiple personalities or doesn't know who she is. She's not, and she does. We all develop survival masks as we grow up, faces we put on, roles we play to get through family life, school, a world with high expectations and very little tolerance for our human emotions. We all learn to hide grief, fear, and anger in different ways. When someone's trauma is more severe, those masks can become stronger and more rigid, and they can compartmentalize whole parts of their personality so those parts don't damage each other. The problem is, when that disconnect stays unhealed, we're prone to things like affairs that can damage or even ruin a marriage. 

"Emotional Starvation" Is Still Trauma 

I recently learned the term emotional starvation, and it's a very apt description for what happens to some people in relationships. If your partner is emotionally, or even physically, unavailable, and you're really alone in the relationship, you might feel emotionally starved in your marriage. A lot of articles and videos will tell you that's why women cheat, because the man is emotionally oblivious, or he's suppressed his emotions and can't create the deeper intimacy she needs, so she goes and forms that connection outside the marriage. 

But even this traces back to trauma. A healthy person in a relationship with no emotional intimacy does one of two things: they take steps to fix it, find the root cause, address it with their partner, get support and healing, or they leave the relationship. Someone who stays in an emotionally starved relationship and seeks that connection elsewhere doesn't have a healthy skill set for handling conflict. That means they grew up without a healthy role model for navigating and resolving problems in relationships. They're carrying childhood survival skills into adulthood, as though they still don't have the power to fix things, as though they have to get what they need wherever they can find it, because that was true when they were a child being raised by parents who couldn't give it to them. 

As an adult, that's simply no longer true. You can leave. You can sit down and communicate. You can go to couples counseling. You have options a child never had. But people still act out that same childish pattern, because they're carrying that survival skill forward, unexamined, unhealed. 

That's what trauma does. Trauma freezes us in time. It causes our brains to forget that we're adults, that we have choices, resources, people we can ask for help, and the ability to change our circumstances in ways we couldn't when we were children. One of the hallmarks of trauma is that the brain loses the ability to distinguish then from now. So when we're triggered, we react as though it's still then, as though I'm still a five-year-old who didn't have options, or a twelve-year-old girl who didn't have these choices.

Trace back any instance of a woman cheating on her husband, or a man cheating on his wife, and you'll find these same childish patterns of survival, patterns that were never upgraded. And that's exactly the role therapy plays. That's the role coaching plays. That's what all personal development work is for: helping us recognize the patterns we're carrying forward from childhood that don't serve us, so we can heal and let them go. 

What Matters Now Is Your Healing 

If you're dealing with a wife, an ex-wife, or a soon-to-be ex-wife who cheated, you are also carrying childhood patterns that need upgrading. We all are. And they're going to come out in these overwhelming emotions. Start noticing how you're reacting to the news. Are you getting angry? Lashing out? Withdrawing and hiding? Desperately trying to win her back and seeking her approval? Maybe you do all of it, in a different order. 

Regardless of why she cheated, regardless of her specific trauma story or childhood patterns or her ability to split off parts of her personality, what's important right here, right now, is your healing. 

Healing from this looks like moving past the denial, past the shock, past the anger, and letting yourself get to the grief underneath. Because that's what an affair leaves us with. Underneath all those other feelings is a sadness, because this was a person you thought was there for you, and they betrayed that trust. There's rejection, hurt, grief, and loss. And once you allow yourself to face that grief and move through it, that's when healing starts to occur, and you can find acceptance and a real moving forward. 

Where to Go From Here 

If you'd like support doing exactly that, come join me in my free master class: How to Take Back Control of Your Life After Divorce. Inside, I share the one emotional regulation strategy I use with every single one of my clients, the strategy that helps men finally peel back those layers and confront the grief underneath, so they can let it go and move forward with their lives. 

Thank you for reading. I really hope this gave you some insight into what's going on inside the mind of the woman who's done this to you. Please keep seeking support and help, and I hope to see you in the master class soon.