I needed a night out. After months of cutting pancakes into hearts, Googling stain removal hacks, and playing “dragon goes through airport security” with Sisyphean regularity, downing elderflower cocktails at a lavish, kid-free wedding offered a reprieve. I laughed with abandon, danced with as much abandon as a self-monitor like me can manage, and generally reveled in release from responsibility. Until, that is, I saw a married friend flirting with a young guest.
How could he? How dare he?! With complete and categorical certainty that cheating could never be justified, I intervened. His response — not just angry but affronted — took me aback, but still, I didn’t doubt that I was in the right.
TV, movies and pop songs had told me that cheaters are bad people: selfish, callous, and depraved at their core. Sure, some songs acknowledged that the tendency to stray could be catalyzed by alcohol (Kid Rock’s “Picture”) or unmet needs (Amy Winehouse’s “You Know I’m No Good”), and directors sometimes even encouraged me to feel affection for a character who’d landed in the wrong bed (“Brokeback Mountain”). But the endings taught me that punishment is always warranted, like when Diane Lane’s character ruined not just her own life in “Unfaithful,” but also the lives of Richard Gere’s and Oliver Martinez’s characters. I learned my lesson, as Madame Bovary swallowed arsenic, Anna Karenina jumped in front of a train, and Edna Pontellier drowned.
Then, a few weeks after that wedding reception, I met Kelly. She had been in college when a man started showing up at her job with flowers and jewelry, love bombing her and telling everyone she was the perfect woman. If he’d belittled her then, she could have — and would have — walked away, but he didn’t. There was an eye roll here, a joke with a touch too much bite there, but no real red flags. So she built a life with him and had his kids. But like the fabled frog who hops into a pot of tepid water on a recently lit stove, Kelly began to boil.
I first met her husband at a party. Kelly and I were still in the heady throes of new friendship when I cheerily related to him how we’d lost track of time that morning. Due to chubby hands repeatedly chucking toys from a stroller and a scooter that just wouldn’t stay upright, we’d arrived at a children’s museum 25 minutes late for our 30-minute class.
“That’s the problem with Kelly … she doesn’t think,” her husband responded casually, as if commenting on a missed free throw at a Bulls game. It was jarring — for me anyway. Kelly didn’t even wince.
Figuring I just needed to get to know him, I invited them on a double date at a gastro-hipster joint. A week later, we were eating at a prime table just off the sidewalk, when my husband said something about tax shelters for the uber-wealthy. I chimed in with a factoid I’d read. “She wouldn’t understand all that,” Kelly’s husband said with a dismissive flick of his hand in her direction, even though she could and did.
In private, Kelly’s husband was more direct. “This is so typical of you and your failure to anticipate the consequences of your actions,” he ripped into her one evening after she’d spent too much money on a type of lettuce he didn’t like. Other times, he’d chuckle and say, “You can’t do anything right,” in front of their kids. From where I stood, I could see that the constant name-calling and gaslighting were what was scrambling Kelly’s brain, making it hard for her to focus and follow through, and eventually transforming his putdowns into prophecies.
One Saturday, I got a sitter and met Kelly and some other moms at a big public park sans little ones. We were all basking in the slanted afternoon sun and freedom from “Look at dis, look at me, look, look,” when someone mentioned the time, and Kelly shot to her feet. Her husband had told her to be home by 5:00, and even though there was no reason to be — even though he was out and the kids had play dates — she had to make the deadline because he’d equipped every entry to their house with a sensor that reported back to his phone. She said he wanted her home because he was worried she’d cheat.
“And then… she did. She kissed someone one day and felt so whole for the first time in so long, she slept with him the next.”
And then … she did. She kissed someone one day and felt so whole for the first time in so long, she slept with him the next.
When she told me, I was shocked — not by what she’d done, but by my own reaction. My first thought was that the psychological domination she’d experienced had been so severe that her husband had left nothing in her control except her own body.
When Emma Thompson’s character first opened her Christmas present in 2003’s “Love Actually,” tears had streamed down my face alongside hers. I’d recalled, viscerally, what it had felt like, five years earlier, to hear that a high school boyfriend had made out with someone else in a hot tub. That hadn’t just been a thoughtless and wounding act — it had upended my reality. The laws of the universe went from just-me, to not-just-me, forcing a brutal reorientation, like having to shift from a geocentric view to a heliocentric one.
After hearing Kelly’s news, I saw the teenage me sobbing into the arms of the mother I’d barely spoken a civil word to that month. I remembered being sure that breathing in the betrayal would kill me, the way chemical asphyxiation deprives not just the cells in one’s lungs of oxygen but also keeps that life-sustaining element from all other parts of the body.
And still, I couldn’t hold Kelly’s affair against her.
Without the comfort of the black-and-whiteness that had guided my response to the groomsman, I felt adrift. I needed to know: Is what happened with Kelly a thing?
So I turned to the internet. It’s difficult to pin down exactly how rampant infidelity is because many people are wary of admitting to it, but one survey found that 33% of Americans said they’d cheated on a partner in some way. Other studies estimate as high as 40% lifetime prevalence, while still more dip down near 20%. Google offered even murkier answers on why people did it. That sent me to Facebook. I crafted a post asking if anyone had heard of a person finding themselves in a committed relationship characterized by abusive control, and then — and only then — cheating. They had.
Elizabeth, who had been in an abusive relationship, told me, “I would intentionally go out searching and begging for male attention, because it made me feel worthy and wanted.” Sarah balked at the word “cheated,” and said hyper-controlling behavior from her daughter’s father had voided any emotional contract of fidelity between the two of them.
More anecdotes piled up as I read “A Passion For More” by Susan Shapiro Barash, a journalist who has investigated female infidelity for over three decades. Some of the stories she collected from women fit societal narratives about who cheats and when: ignored housewives, vengeful victims who’ve discovered their husbands’ infidelity and damaged children in grown-up bodies. But some of the women sounded like Kelly, Elizabeth and Sarah. Hanna told Shapiro Barash that she cheated after “having my spirit broken so many times, so that I felt I was worthless and could do nothing.” Cynthia said affairs like hers tell men, “this is something you can’t control.”
Women interviewed for another book, “The Secret Life of the Cheating Wife,” by Alicia Walker, used the Ashley Madison website to find affair partners. Walker, an associate professor of sociology and anthropology at Missouri State University, told me that for some of her subjects, the “setting of all the terms … vetting partners and saying, ‘This is the kind of sex I want to have, this is how often I want to see you,’” was an autonomy-recouping response to abuse. Her research also revealed that having a partner who is constantly worried about cheating can cause somebody to say, “Well, I’m being accused either way, so I might as well do it.”
Like a hound who has caught a scent, I couldn’t stop researching. I read Wednesday Martin’s book “Untrue” and reached out to her. She found plenty of women who had strayed for sexual pleasure, but said she also came across people in abusive relationships “who were having affairs in order to ‘test the waters’ with another person.”
Anthropologists call this strategy “mate bridging,” and Martin said it’s even more common when a person doesn’t have the resources to be independent — financially, but also emotionally, which gives new meaning to Corinthians 10:13, “with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape.”
The more I read, the more it seemed like Kelly fell into a subgroup of people who weren’t just trying to get off; they were trying to get out.
However, I couldn’t find anything on the topic in academic journals. Researchers who study intimate partner violence have established that infidelity can lead to abuse. Duh. But no one seemed to have looked at the reverse causality: people who were subject to abuse cheating in response. I’d hit a dead end, and I still had lunches to pack, a health insurance company to argue with, and a million other real-life tasks in front of me. Leashed, I had to stop the chase. I let it go.
Until Steve told me an eerily similar story. For him, it started with a scolding from his wife after he botched a travel arrangement. It was a single incident that barely made a sound. But slowly, ever so slowly, a drumbeat emerged.
Steve messed up all the time, his wife said, because he’s “sloppy,” and, truth be told, “stupid.” A few years into their marriage, words like “always” and “never” entered the mix. He “always fucked up.” He could “never be trusted” — even to fill out a simple form, and certainly not to spend money without her approval.
Steve was told he misjudged people and that he needed his wife to tell him what to say so that everyone wouldn’t hate him, because most people don’t really like him, or at least they wouldn’t if they knew the real him.
Steve was assured, again and again, that he was lacking and needed managing, so he agreed when she told him she wanted to put a tracking app on his phone. One day, when a work meeting got canceled and he headed to the gym, a text popped up: “Where are you going?”
Sometimes Steve’s wife initiated playful banter and reminisced about the good times they’d shared. Sometimes she launched into a vicious rage that could last for hours or days, during which she’d detail his idiotic mistakes and selfish decisions and how they’d set her back. Then she’d reiterate that no one but her truly cared for him or ever would. Steve was in a constant state of anxiety — believing her and never knowing which version of his wife would be waiting for him — and he began to feel physically ill on his way home from work. Once there, his bowels loosened whenever a sneer crept into her tone.
Steve felt so defeated that he didn’t know how to ask to go to couples therapy — much less demand a separation or a divorce. He became clinically depressed. Hanging on to his life by his fingertips, Steve found himself desperate to escape but unable to do anything about it but drink himself into a stupor … or think about straying. Once he did, once he felt validated by the experience, he began to think differently about himself. His confidence resurged, he saw a path forward, and then — and only then — was he able to ask for a divorce.
“When it came to Steve and Kelly, infidelity started to seem less like a moral failing and more like a survival instinct.”
When it came to Steve and Kelly, infidelity started to seem less like a moral failing and more like a survival instinct.
Having combed through psychology studies for work, I already knew that humans require certain needs to be met in order to feel whole. We need to feel autonomous, we need to feel competent and we need a sense of connection. All three of these needs are thwarted in abusive relationships. I learned that victims also often have a low sense of “mattering” and experience “external locus of control,” leaving them feeling like they aren’t of value and have little power over their fates, no choice but to wind up wherever brutality and luck dictate.
As a result, many people in abusive situations become overwhelmed, anxious and depressed. Some turn to alcohol or drugs. But what if sometimes these individuals try to claw back agency another way, a way that also offers connection and validation?
A few weeks after talking to Steve, I found a 2011 academic paper that examined intimate partner violence through an evolutionary lens. “Victims of aggression are unlikely to be passive recipients of violence,” the authors wrote, since survival-of-the-fittest forces will have produced defenses against partners who attempt to influence their mates through verbal derogation, threats, and other “cost-inflicting” tactics. Intimate partner violence can thus “backfire on the abuser, as some women find avenues for escaping,” the paper noted.
It’s been almost 15 years since that paper was published and I’m having a hard time finding anyone else talking about this “co-evolved defense in victims” — about the Kellys and Steves whose partners weren’t just critical or overbearing, but behaved pathologically. Why? “The stigma around infidelity — the way that we conceptualize people who cheat — has to be playing a role,” Walker told me.
That “we” she used is important. In “Lust in Translation: Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee,” Pamela Druckerman wrote that in 1973, 70% of Americans claimed having an affair was “always wrong.” By 2004, that number had risen to 82%. A 2025 poll measured it at almost 90%. Other countries have different norms. Druckerman said people living in places like France and Russia “are baffled by [Americans’] panicky confrontations, our knee-jerk threats of divorce.” One Japanese woman she interviewed “was confused when I asked her if she felt guilty about having a lover,” Druckerman wrote. “I had to repeat the question several times. Feeling guilty hadn’t occurred to her, since she was meeting her obligations to her family.” Ultimately, cheating means different things to different people depending on where and how they find themselves, whether it’s those involved in the situation or those looking in on it from outside.
Years after my original Google search turned up little credible info on why people cheat, I found research on “extradyadic infidelity motives” by Dylan Selterman, an associate teaching professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University. It turns out there are a lot of reasons why people choose to be unfaithful. Some involve deficits in the primary relationship, like Kelly and Steve experienced. Other people cheat for reasons that validate the old cliche, “It’s not you, it’s me.” And a third group of motives straddles those two categories. This heterogeneity leaves us with moral ambiguity, Selterman said, and that’s not what we want to see on TV. “People like the easy, good-and-bad type of narratives,” he told me.
I know I did. But now, I don’t. I can’t.
I know what you’re thinking, but I’m not a cheating apologist. I recognize that infidelity can explode selves and lives, embedding shrapnel in targets and bystanders alike. I don’t want anyone to be gutted in that searing, utterly destabilizing way; and I don’t think anyone deserves it. Realizing that I can never know the full truth of what is right and wrong in someone else’s relationship doesn’t mean I recommend people use cheating as an awesome way to break free from abuse.
When they do though, I, for one, don’t judge. Because I’ve met Kelly and Steve, and every time I think of their infidelity, I hear the words of Julia Nemeth, an assistant professor at Ohio State University who focuses on brain injury caused by intimate partner violence: “women do what they need to do to survive and feel a sense of control.” Men and nonbinary people do too.
It’s been an evolution.
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Note: Names and some details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals mentioned in this essay.
Gail Cornwall is a former teacher and lawyer who now works as a mother and writer in San Francisco. You can read more at gailcornwall.com.
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