Cheaters could be good guys!

You’re probably surprised by this statement but in my 30+ years of work helping couples successfully heal after infidelity I know this to be true in many of the cases I’ve worked with.

I also want to clarify that in no way do I say it is okay to cheat on your partner either, so hear me out…

I want to start this article by sharing an analogy:

Comic strips tend to portray their characters as being very one-dimensional like caricatures.  When growing up, I would read the comic “Dennis the Menace” in the Sunday New York Post. Dennis was always a menace. 

You never had a comic strip where Dennis was nice to people. 

Many of the typical sitcoms on TV have characters that are very one-dimensional. They’re actually quite predictable because they always act in the same way. We do in real life as well.  

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard people say cheaters are just jerks or once a cheater always a cheater. The truth of the matter is that we are multidimensional. 

There are many wonderful people that have made a very hurtful decision to cheat on their spouse. 

It is hurtful and I am not in favor of that decision. However, I have found it far more helpful to view people who cheat as people who have other parts of themselves and other qualities that are quite loving and quite valuable to society.

When we shift how we look at the cheater and see that cheaters could be good guys, it can actually help the healing process.

In addition to that, when we look at people who commit infidelity as bad, we cut off any possible chance of helping them grow and develop into a better version of themselves. 

We are not static, folks. We are people in the process of becoming. 

If a person is betrayed, he or she may not want to or may not be capable of overcoming the fact that they were cheated on and they have every right to leave. That is totally a different story than branding a cheater as someone who is a piece of you-know-what or an overall creep. 

I’ve written and talked about this for a long time, but a better way to look at infidelity is as a  kind of communication. 

Looking at infidelity as a form of communication  (as immature or hurtful as it might be) leads to asking questions such as “What made you do it?” Or “What were you going after?”  Or “What were you trying to experience?”  

When people cheat, they need to be listened to and understood and seeing them as good people enables us to do that.  

I have worked with many couples where the betrayed partner, despite his or her deep pain,  chose to perceive the partner as worthy of listening to. This helps both partners.   

I do believe that we all need to be responsible enough and mature enough to go deeper and to not label people with superficial negativities such as cheaters are bad guys or cheaters could be good guys.

 Of course, there are some people who truly are so self-absorbed and even sociopathic that they are not capable of being good people. I find that to be the small minority of people who cheat.   

I have a definition of the word ‘good.’  

It’s somebody who’s capable of thinking about other people and making decisions that promote the wellness of others and not just themselves. So for many people that I have worked with who have cheated, the problem is really more of a developmental one. It’s really about helping a person mature and solves their own emotional issues without such a big expense to a partner. 

It’s learning to solve problems with other people in mind.

For example, imagine a couple where the partner cheated because he felt lonely.  He did not communicate this with his wife though. He came from a family where no one talked about feelings and basically he was “on his own” when he had emotional pain.  Maybe he once told his dad he was scared and the dad’s response was – “Toughen up and don’t be a baby.”  

So is the cheater not a good person?  Or is it more accurate to say that the person who cheated has to unlearn negative beliefs about relationships and feelings and then replace them with healthier beliefs? If you take the second view it becomes possible to see that cheaters could be good guys.

For example, this person could go from the negative belief that ‘people don’t care so why even bother communicating’ to ‘people do care and I don’t have to keep my problems to myself’.  This kind of dynamic is common in my practice so it was easy to make up that story.  

The person who cheated is not bad.  

He just had to break out of the trance his parents put him in to see himself as someone who can express himself and his partner as someone who cares about his feelings.  Instead of being lonely because of his lack of communication and then acting out with an affair, he can now develop a closer relationship with his spouse.  

When you look at it this way, being bad has nothing to do with it and it becomes possible to see that cheaters could be good guys

There are many other dynamics and factors that can lead to infidelity. I do believe that almost all people are basically good and they do hurtful things as immature ways to solve emotional problems. My wish for our interpersonal society is to look deeper. 

My wish is for us to look past the hurtful patterns and see the innocence and healthy cravings deep within each person.  When we are able to do this it is then possible for us to see that cheaters could be good guys underneath it all.

That is how we will have a healing. That might be the only way to reduce the incidences of this very painful experience of infidelity.