According to a recent psychological research report, 37% of married people have extramarital affairs every year, of which 10% are only temporary or single flirtatious acts, and the other 27% maintain long-term and lasting intimate relationships with the same third party while the marriage relationship is still alive.
20%-40% of divorces are caused by the infidelity of one or both parties, and whether or not they end up in divorce, the cheating party will always draw a question mark in their hearts: why did the affair happen?
I am often asked similar questions among visitors. Some people want answers because they want to avoid the same setbacks in their next relationship. There are also people who want to stop self-doubt by understanding the psychology of the cheating party.
There always seems to be a misconception that the reason why the cheating partner goes astray is more or less because the other party is not doing well enough, at least, the mere fact that he can fall in love with the other person is enough to show that the marriage is not successful enough.
But in fact, emptiness does degrade people, but its relationship with triggering an extramarital affair is not what you think.
So, what causes extramarital affairs to occur, and how can we avoid the risks to maintain fidelity in marriage?
1
Research has shown that in long-term stable relationships, most extramarital affairs occur not because of emptiness, but because of people's perception of mate value.
"Partner value" needs to be measured through competition, experimentation and run-in in the spouse market.
Therefore, being in the same stable relationship for a long time will make people gradually become unfamiliar with the criteria of mate selection in the outside world, and thus lose the ability to judge their own "mate value" (Apostolou & Panayiotou, 2019).
Some people may think that the longer the marriage relationship, the more stable and lasting it will be, as long as a virtuous circle is ensured, daily communication can avoid the involvement of a third party.
However, the reality is the opposite, and psychologists have found that when people are in the same relationship for a long time, they are indeed more worried about the sunk costs of a breakup or divorce. However, they will generally re-explore their partner value through marital ambiguity, and try to find someone with higher partner value.
And this phenomenon is consistent with the Social Exchange Theory proposed by the American sociologist Homans.
Homans pointed out that interpersonal interactions are usually based on the balance between "reward" and "cost", and interpersonal relationships, including friends and husbands and wives, are premised on the matching of resources and fair exchange.
Therefore, a person's instinct in the process of communication is to constantly get more opportunities that are beneficial to him.
In other words, our instinct is to constantly search for partner values that match us, and in this way, find opportunities that are more conducive to our own development.
According to evolutionary psychology, partner value refers to how popular a person is in the current spouse market. The definition of high partner value changes culturally, socially, and over time, and when a couple chooses to be in a long-term relationship or get married, they are disconnected from the spouse market.
Professor Schmitt, head of the Department of Psychological Sciences at Kansas State University, pointed out that this long-term disconnect can make people lose their judgment of partner value, so that they psychologically want to re-examine their partner value by contacting and interacting with other people.
As a result, some people want to verify their partner value in the current market by finding a lover other than their partner, while others question the value of their significant other and hope to find a higher-value partner by reaching out to a "potential partner", while trying to avoid loss by preserving the relationship. And these "desire to explore" is actually a normal psychological phenomenon.
At this point, you may ask, if extramarital affairs arise from the instinctive "desire to explore" in human nature, then why don't all people cheat, and what can be done to prevent the desire to explore from ruining the marriage?
2
While most people psychologically expect better opportunities and higher partner values, there are many ways in which people in a marriage can restrain and appease this "desire to explore".
Morality, character, and conscientiousness make most people choose to be loyal to a long-standing relationship.
In an anonymous survey, the majority of participants indicated that the main reason for choosing to stay married and not transgress the line was not to hurt their significant other (Apostolou & Panayiotou, 2019).
"Have you ever thought that if you choose again, you can actually have a more perfect partner?"
"Are you satisfied with your current state of marriage? Does your significant other meet all your emotional needs, and if so, have you ever thought of getting satisfaction from other people?"
"Why didn't you choose to be intimate with someone else without your partner's knowledge?"
University of Denver ProfessorDr. Through semi-structured interviews and questionnaires with 1,294 participants, Knopp found that only 7% of people did not have extramarital affairs because they simply could not accept anyone other than their partner, and most needed to consciously resist the temptations that existed outside the world.
So, what can you do to keep your significant other self-disciplined and boundary?
Probably most people will choose to be more vigilant against the appearance of a third party, so that they inadvertently do a lot of things to restrain their other half, such as checking their mobile phones and bombing them with text messages.
First of all, trust is a necessary prerequisite for the survival of a relationship, and whether your partner has ever had an affair or even cheated on him, overly interrogating and controlling his daily whereabouts and the scope of his communication will only make your relationship more stiff.
After integrating and analyzing relevant psychological data since 1994, McAllister et al. found that marital relationships that regularly check jobs and frequently inquire about their partners' whereabouts are more likely to go to the bottom due to the collapse of trust.
In fact, psychology professor Dr. Fye and Dr. In their research, Mims found that when couples establish healthy relationship boundaries and consciously develop secure attachments in their daily interactions, a sense of boundaries and private space are more conducive to the continuation of each other's loyalty and the strengthening of marital relationships.
Secure attachment was originally applied to the cognition of the mother of the developing child, and in recent years, it has also been extended by psychologists to the cognition of couples and couples to each other.
The main characteristics of secure attachment are that the other person is trustworthy and engaged, and uses the other person as a "safe base" to talk up. At the same time, people who are in secure attachment will see themselves as worthy of love and value.
After investigating and analyzing 20 couples, Dr. Fye and Dr. Mims concludes that in a marital relationship, if both partners develop this secure attachment to each other, they will have a relatively independent social circle and personal space, but their desire to explore higher partner values will be significantly reduced.
3
While partner value is a subjective perception that is interconnected with the spouse market, it increases with increased trust and marriage satisfaction between couples.
There will always be people in this world who look better and have better economic conditions, and from this point of view, it seems that a partner is always fungible.
However, by consolidating trust and improving marital satisfaction, the partner value of the other half in the couple's perspective will continue to increase, and eventually it will not be replaced by others in the spouse market (Conroy-Beam, Goetz, & Buss, 2016).
Since people tend to be eager to explore a spouse who is a better match for them when they perceive that their partner is unbalanced, another way to avoid having an affair is to not let their partner value become unbalanced. In other words, enhance your value in the eyes of the other party.
In fact, partner value is not only about physical appearance, education, and economic conditions, nor does it necessarily mean that you need to surpass everyone else around you in these aspects.
Psychological research has shown that between couples, as trust and satisfaction increase, the value of the partner between the partners will also increase, and because this partner value is more limited and exclusive, it cannot be replaced by others (Conroy-Beam, Goetz, & Buss, 2016).
In this study, participants who believed that their significant other half had a high partner value generally described marriage as happy and had a hard time remembering any irreconcilable disputes and conflicts in the past.
Among them, 87% of them describe their other half as the most trusted loved one in their lives. And this unique companion value cannot be replaced by a younger, more educated potential partner.
In semi-structured interviews, many couples said that they had clear boundaries through mutual agreement at the beginning of their relationship, so that they remained independent even as their married life became more intimate.
But at the same time, they consciously seek out and maintain common interests and hobbies, and even after years of marriage, they still engage in formal dating.
Therefore, the embodiment of the value of a partner is not necessarily to constantly compete with others, but to constantly create a happy experience between husband and wife.
Finally, whether you are struggling with the other party's affair or not, you need to understand that the presence and intervention of a third party has nothing to do with your own worth, and that a solid and reliable marriage is not a unilateral effort by one of the parties, but a process of mutual management.
-END-
This article was first published on the Zhihu platform: Chen Man, Wang Xiao, Zhang Yan
Infringement must be investigated!