Is Your Partner Cheating?

"Is he cheating on me?" People ask themselves some version of that whenever a partner suddenly seems different. A new mood, an odd schedule, a phone held a little closer, and the mind jumps straight to betrayal. Plenty of those suspicions turn out to be wrong. And cheating, whatever excuse gets attached to it, is still cheating. What gets missed is that the trouble inside a relationship can be part of what pushed a partner toward someone else.

This isn't a piece about the psychology of infidelity or about personal growth. Search the Internet and you'll find endless writing on why people stray and how it reshapes the person who did it. What I want you to sit with is a harder question: why does your partner cheat on you, specifically? Have you considered that something in your own behavior fed into it? When the affair finally comes to light, the first instinct is to aim everything at the other man or the other woman. That reflex is normal. It also skips the part where no one, and no relationship, is without fault.

A wise man once said that a person doesn't want hell at work and then hell at home too. Most people don't grasp what that means until the damage is done. If you're still together, you haven't hit that point yet. So decide, truthfully, whether you want to stay. Weigh what the relationship gives you against what it costs you. If the costs win, walk away. Sometimes the choice isn't yours to make, and that's survivable too. If it has to end, or if your partner is the one leaving, end it understanding that your own actions were part of how it got here.

Try not to treat every absence as proof. Assuming your partner is always cheating ends up working like a free pass: you've already decided the verdict, so why would they bother behaving otherwise? Say the accusation out loud and the whole thing gets worse. Trust holds relationships together, and constant accusations are really a confession that you don't have it. Stop dissecting every little thing. A work trip becomes an affair in your head. Coworkers of the opposite sex become rivals. You start believing the whole world wants your partner. Pause there. What your partner hears is that no amount of good behavior will change your mind, so they may as well do the thing you've already convicted them of. Go looking for something rotten and you'll always turn something up.

Guard the relationship the way you'd guard your paycheck. Your partner will always have other people to talk to, and some of them will be of the opposite sex; that's just life. Your job is to make home the place worth returning to. A relationship isn't supposed to run on chaos, and it isn't everyone's business. Home is meant to be the calm part of the day, which means someone has to keep it calm. Cooking, cleaning, actually listening. Small things, and they give a person a reason to come through the door.

Unhappy partners vent. They find someone to hear them out and hand over advice, and too often that someone is of the opposite sex. Once the complaints are about the relationship itself, you've left a door open for that listener to step in.

Make your partner feel wanted. Needed, even. Flatter the ego sometimes. But don't tip into helplessness, because it backfires; lean on someone too hard and they start to feel like they're raising a child instead of loving an adult. Let your partner be an adult.

The most common reason people cheat is that their partner belittles them, and it shows up more with men than with women. Sometimes you have to let a man be a man, even when he's wrong about something. Men want to feel in control. When a man makes a call meant to protect his family or his woman, back him on it. Women want to feel wanted just as much. Don't treat a woman like a trophy, and never let her think she should count herself lucky to have you. Anyone who feels devalued will go find the person who doesn't make them feel like nothing.

Cheating ends most relationships it touches, and even when it doesn't, it takes the trust with it. There's always a reason behind it. And when a partner chooses to be monogamous with you, understand what that costs and work twice as hard to keep it. - Heather Browning, MBA, BA

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