Episode 99: Q&A: Serial Cheating

by | Last updated: Oct 28, 2024 | Podcast

In this episode of The Loving Truth podcast, I address the deeply painful issue of serial cheating. Inspired by a listener’s story of repeated betrayal in her marriage, I delve into why some people may repeatedly break trust.

I explain how inner conflicts, addiction to novelty, and a lack of self-awareness can lead to ongoing infidelity.

Finally, I offer compassionate advice on how listeners can find clarity, peace, and direction after discovering serial cheating in their own relationships.

Listen to the Full Episode:

What You’ll Learn In This Episode:

03:25 I explain Martha Beck’s concept of the “social self” (the person we show the world) versus the “essential self” (who we truly are). I connect this idea to Amy’s husband’s behavior, illustrating how his ideal self conflicts with his actions.
05:45 I discuss how people’s actions reveal their true intentions more than words do.
08:20 How serial cheating compares to addiction
14:10 The importance of being honest with oneself and one’s partner.
15:20 In my advice to Amy, I discuss how clarity around one’s own needs and desires is crucial after betrayal.

Mentioned On Q&A: Serial Cheater

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Book a Truth & Clarity Session with a member of my team. We’ll discuss where you are in your marriage and explore if there’s a fit for you and I to work together so you can make - and execute - the RIGHT decision for YOU and your marriage.

Welcome to the Loving Truth podcast, where it's all about finding clarity, confidence, and peace in the face of marriage challenges. And now, your host, relationship expert and certified master life coach, Sharon Pope. Hello, loves. This is Sharon Pope, and this is the loving truth. Today we're going to be talking about serial cheating. Yeah, when someone cheats over and over and over again, maybe inside the same relationship, maybe inside multiple relationships.

And this was a result of a woman named Amy who wrote into us, and I will read to you what she wrote. But if you have a question that you would like for me to answer, then I would encourage you to dial into our hotline, which is 727-537-0359 and just leave us a voicemail message. No one's going to pick up an answer. You just leave us a voicemail message.

And if you want it to be anonymous, you can make up a first name. It doesn't matter. You'll recognize your question, and I would love to be able to help you if I can. So here's what Amy had to say. She said, I have a question about the psychology of serial cheating. I discovered my husband of 27 years had been having an affair last April. At the time it came out, he told me that it had been going on for three years.

We immediately began marriage counseling. After a few months of this, two more past affairs trickled out, as well as multiple online hookups and texting relationships. He told me that everything had been disclosed and promised he would never lie to me again, wrote new marriage vows to me and everything. Fast forward to three months ago. He provided an additional disclosure of three other affairs. My confusion is about the causation, since these affairs were over the course of our whole marriage.

Some were coworkers, some were random women on the Internet, some had full blown relationships with, and I don't see any continuity in terms of the type of cheating, I guess. And why does he want to write new marriage vows saying that he'll never lie to me again when he clearly is still lying to me? Any insights you might have are appreciated. Well, Amy, first of all, I just want to say I am incredibly sorry that you are experiencing this, that you found out about all this, because I'm sure that you are in a tremendous amount of pain.

So I'm sorry. Now let's see if we can't help you reach a deeper understanding so that you can make some wise choices for yourself and your family. Okay, so my understanding of what's happening, or my thinking about what's happening for you, is that there is the person that your husband wants to be and how he sees himself and how he wants to present himself to the world. That's one person.

But there's this whole other person, which is who he really is, who he actually is now, and how you and or some parts of the world see him and experience him. And those two things aren't lining up. So Martha Beck refers to this as the social self and the essential self. The more we can live in alignment between your social self and your essential self, the happier we are, the further apart those two things are, the more incongruence there is in our lives.

So the unhappier we are. So let's get into what that really means. So your social self is the person that we present to the world. And my hunch is that your husband wants to present himself to the world, and he wants to think about himself as a loving, devoted, successful man, husband and father. That's probably how he wants to be perceived and who he really wants to be.

Like, the fact that he's saying these things to you and rewriting vows tells me he wants different for his life. Here's the challenge, and it's his essential self. Our essential self is who we really are, and that's the totality of us. And that includes our wounds and the wounds that are healed and unhealed, the totality of our life experiences that have brought us to this place, the ways in which we've had to adapt in our lives in order to just exist and move through our lives.

Some psychologists might refer to that as your adaptive child. And so your husband is a man in a boy's body still. He's not grown up. And I don't mean that to be disrespectful. I mean, a lot of people sort of operate from that way in which there's still the little boy who needs that attention. And in this case, it might be, yes, the attention of women, women who desire him because he wants to feel desired and he wants to feel desirable.

There may also be a need for the drama that comes along with secrets and mystery and novelty and adventure and excitement and all of those things that play an enormous role in affairs. So there's who he presents himself to be and how he wants to think about himself, and then there's who he actually is. And you can tell the difference because one is primarily through words and one is primarily through actions.

Okay? And when the actions and the words don't line up as his or not right now, you have to believe their actions, because we take action from how we really feel in our lives and how we feel about ourselves. Our actions are what create the results that we have in our lives, not our words. Our words don't actually create anything. Words are easy. Actions are much harder. And so that gets into probably your next question that you didn't really ask, but I know is on your mind, which is, how can I ever trust him again?

Will he ever change? Can this ever change? If he's a serial cheater, can this ever change? Well, if you think about it, like alcoholism as an example, can someone who has drank their whole life decide one day that they're not going to drink anymore? Of course they can. Will it be easy? No, it will not. Will they have to go through something in order to get to that place of where they're not a drinker anymore?

Yep. They're going to have to do a lot of stuff, a lot of inner work, to be able to hold themselves in that kind of esteem and then act and take action from that place. And by the way, are they going to have to stay with it for their entire lives? Are they going to have to stay on that path and use the tools that they have for their entire lives so that they don't go back to becoming an alcoholic?

Yeah, and I think it's the same thing here. So is it possible that he can step into being the man that he wants to be for his life? Yes. But he has to do that work that is 100% his work. He's not going to do it for you or for anybody else. So until and unless he is sick of his own bullshit and he's really ready to create change in his life, he's not going to.

He's going to do it lip service, and then he's going to continue to hide. And it's that part of him, that unhealed part of him, that keeps acting out in this way and then hiding it because he doesn't want the world to see that. So it doesn't mean that he can't change the man that he is, but he has to want to do it. And it's going to require support and commitment on his part for the rest of his life to be able to stay in a steadier place if that's what he wants to do.

So there's a very real thing that happens at a physiological level inside of our bodies when we're involved in an affair. It's like a dopamine hit, right? Your hormone levels literally change in your body, and dopamine floods every cell of your body. When there's the excitement and the rush of pursuing an affair or pursuing someone that isn't really available, or the drama of secrets and adventure and mystery and novelty and all that kind of stuff.

So that hormonal cocktail has been likened by science to being on drugs, an opioid, or even heroin. When they link up, when they put MRI machine, when they look at the human brain, when they're in an affair, or when they're falling in love, it looks very, very similar to someone who's on drugs. So that's why he can say one thing and he can have very good intentions, but doing it is a whole nother thing, because now you're fighting physiology as well as your mental state.

You're trying to overcome both of those things simultaneously. And that's why the support has to be there for him and the commitment on his part has to be there. So this is going to sound like it's off topic, but I promise we'll circle back to why this is really relevant to the idea of serial cheating. So I once was having a conversation with someone, and we loved talking about business and business ideas and all that kind of stuff.

And he had. He was telling me about these two or three different business ideas that he had, and he was still pursuing, like, one or two other businesses. So he still had. He had a few businesses, but he was pursuing these other ideas as well. And I was like, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. You can't spread yourself this thin across, like, all these very different businesses. You're going to have to choose.

Focus always wins. That was my belief. And he said, well, Sharon, actually, that's not really my thing. And I was like, what do you mean? What do you mean that's not your thing? And he said to me, he goes, I'm the one that comes up with the ideas. I am not the operator of a business. I am not the guy that's going to see it from $100,000 in sales to 3 million in sales.

I'm not the guy to grow it, to manage it, to be the operator of it. I'm just the one that comes up with the idea, and I get it started, and then I move on to the next new thing. And I was like, okay, all right. And I thought about that a little bit, and I was like, you know what? Here's what I respect about that. He knows his zone of genius, even though he's not going to be the one to raise and nurture that child, the child of the business he's not going to be the one to raise and nurture it, but he's going to be the one to give birth to it, to give life to it, to breathe air into it.

I grew to just appreciate that perspective of he's that self aware, that he knows where his strengths are and he stays in his lane and he doesn't try to do something that he's not really great at. Okay, now let me bring this back to serial cheating. So I was also having a conversation with a woman inside my membership who, she described herself as a serial cheater. And she told me about how she had been in multiple relationships and she cheated in all of them.

The man that she's married to now had originally been an affair partner for her, and now she's cheating on him. And she doesn't really like that part of herself, but she's willing to look at it and try to understand it, try to look at it through some honesty. And so, as we were going back and forth on this topic, one of the things that I offered to her was, you know, what if you just.

You like the rush that occurs early on in the relationship? I mean, every relationship sort of has this honeymoon period of where things are really great and it feels like a dopamine hit or an adrenaline rush. And what if you're not the person who wants to be in a long term committed relationship? Because all long term committed relationships, it doesn't matter how sparkly or exciting it is at the beginning.

Eventually they're going to settle into a place that's going to feel more predictable and a little bit lighter and not so crazy and intense. And that's how it's supposed to be. There are historians that will say, and biologists that will say that's exactly how it's supposed to be. Because we're not supposed to live on the mountaintop. We're not supposed to have mountaintop experiences 24/7 otherwise they're not mountaintop experiences.

Right. We will normalize that intensity because we can't exist and operate and run our lives from that place of intensity. If all I'm thinking about is my lover and the next time we're going to be together and all that, who's raising the kids, who's running the businesses, who's making sure that the house doesn't, like, cave in on itself, we have to be able to operate in our lives.

So every relationship, while it starts out with a lot of butterflies and fireworks and intensity and all that kind of stuff, eventually, every long term committed relationship whether you choose to marry or not will settle into a more comfortable and predictable place. And so I just. I wanted to just get curious and ask her, like, what if you're just not the person that's built for that? Sort of like, in the same way that my friend said, I'm not the one that's built to operate this, to grow it and to nurture it to a place where it can last for decades and decades.

He's just the guy that comes up with a new idea. So what if she's just the woman that she loves, the intensity, and every few years she's going to get into another new relationship because she's craving the next hit. She needs that next hit. And the thing I would offer is that there's no right or wrong in that answer. It's being self aware and then telling everybody else the truth about that.

Right. The only place that we go wrong is when we know that we are not the one that's built for long term committed relationship, but we pretend that we are. We tell our partners what they want to hear, right? Because we think, yep, I love you. I'm going to be with you forever. This feels so amazing. And we know we're not going to do that. We know that that's not what we long for and what we aim for.

So I wanted to invite her to be able to own that. That maybe. Maybe she's just not the one that's going to be in a long term committed relationship with one person forever. But that doesn't mean that you can't love someone deeply until you decide to move on to the next new thing. I think we've just got it. First, you got to be honest with yourself about that without judgment.

And then you've got to tell your partners the truth about that so that they can make choices for themselves. Because not everyone on this planet is built for or really desires that long term committed relationship, even though we're supposed to, because that's what society would tell you is the right thing to do. But what if that's just not true for you? So every long term relationship is going to hit that place where it's not all butterflies and intensity and fireworks.

And so if that's the point where you start going looking for your next hit, then you don't have to call yourself a serial cheater. You can just say, like, I'm not the one that's built for monogamy forever. One person for the rest of my life, but I will love you until I don't and if you can make that same claim, then we'll do the best we can to love one another.

Right? Now, I'm not suggesting that everyone's going to want what you want, but the minute you're honest, then the minute you can attract people and create relationships that honor them and you. And then we don't have to call ourselves serial cheaters and all that. So I offer that to you, Amy, only because, you know, maybe that is the case for your husband. You know, maybe he wanted to be the guy who was.

Who would fit that socially acceptable mold, but maybe that's just not who he is. Maybe his essential self is the one that needs that constant drug hit, needs that dopamine hit over and over and over again, which you can't get inside of a 27 year marriage. All right? So I hope that that brings you some peace and some insight and so that you can make some conscious choices for yourself about what's going to honor you and what you really want in your life and in this relationship.

The minute that you two can both tell the truth about that, you'll see if this is something that you can come through together or not. So again, if you have a question that you would love for me to be able to answer on this podcast, I would love to be able to do it. So just leave me a voicemail at 727-537-0359 all right, until next time, everyone. Please take really good care if you're listening to this podcast, because you're struggling to decide whether to stay or go in your marriage and you're serious about finding that answer, it's time to book a truth and clarity session with a member of my team.

On the call, we'll discuss where you are in your marriage and explore if there's a fit for you and I to work together so you can make and execute the right decision for you and your marriage, go to clarityformymarriage.com to fill out an application. Now that's clarityformymarriage.com.