It's easy to say someone cheated because, well, they were tempted outside their marriage. But that's not the full story, is it? I'm sure other people had the opportunity to cheat, but they didn't. Why do you think that is? It's because when you have a healthy marriage with your spouse, when you are pursuing the love and the marriage that God intended you to have, filled with mutual selflessness and respect and honor and honesty and closeness, cheating doesn't have the same allure in those conditions, does it? And we have work individually that we need to do, and we have work collectively that we need to do to set us up for the best chance at success and mutually resisting different temptations in our marriage.
And let's work towards creating a marriage where both people value it enough to not jeopardize it. Cheaters, you aren't the victim in any capacity. If you want something in your marriage but you aren't getting it, whether it be closeness or intimacy or connection or sex, are you at any point justified in getting those from someone else other than your spouse? No. Yeah, but what if your spouse isn't giving them to you? Still no. Yeah, but closeness and sex are good things, and your spouse isn't giving those to you. So aren't they partially responsible for you going somewhere else to get them? No, never, ever.
I'll give you an example. If you called me the most vile curse words out there, if you put together the most beautiful string of disgusting, offensive, grotesque, mildly accurate curse words, and I got so angry that I punched you in the nose, breaking your fragile nose with my super strong fist because I work out, who would get in trouble when the cops came? Me. But what if I explained to them, "No, no, they said a bunch of mean words to me." Would they let me go then? No. I'm still 100% responsible for my actions. And that's not a perfect analogy, but that's kind of what I'm talking about.
Bad spouses don't cause affairs. Bad marriages don't cause affairs. Your spouse may have contributed to your unhealthy marriage, but you are 100% responsible for your affair or cheating. That was your decision. You weren't forced to do that. You had a ton of other avenues or options you could have pursued besides sleeping with someone else, but you didn't. So why did you cheat? Because you felt like you needed something that you weren't getting. Doesn't matter if that need was healthy or legitimate or unhealthy, you needed something and you weren't getting it, were you?
And men have a dangerous tendency to think that they don't need anything in their relationships. And yet, when they cheat, they risk everything. They risk their entire marriage. They risk not seeing their kids every day and tucking them in every night. They risk financial hardship for a fling, for a weekend with someone else. You're going to tell me that you weren't trying to fulfill a need in you for something? Because most men who commit affairs say that they didn't actually want their marriages to end. What? What did you think would happen? But that's the thing, they weren't thinking. They didn't weigh the pros and cons. They were simply drawn in a direction and they went that way because their needs that they didn't know existed were being fulfilled in someone else.
And please don't hear me say that that justifies you somehow. That doesn't absolve you of the consequences of your decision. But you need to realize that you need things in your relationship, like appreciation, feeling loved and valued, and you do a disservice to your spouse and your marriage by denying them or ignoring that you even have them. Because we think men cheat because of sex, but it's not sex that they were most attracted to. They were attracted to feeling desired again. They were drawn to feeling respected and valued again.
