Why Do People Cheat?

            

Why Do Happy People Cheat?

(Part 1)

            Have you ever loved someone in your life? Or have you ever loved someone who cheated on you? Perhaps, all of us has ever loved someone in our life. Maybe it was the love that we kept to ourselves because we didn't have the courage to say it to the one we loved or maybe a love that we shared with someone whom we chose to be with for the rest of our lives.

        One of the most hurting situation a relationship could experience is when someone in the relationship had cheated.

        Many people cannot understand why do people who are so much in love with one another suddenly cheated on his/her partner or on his/her beloved? There many ways you can hurt your partner and infidelity is the worst way to shatter the glass. Cheating on your partner gives a lot of questions to the deceived partner and a lot of discovery to the one who cheated. But why do infidelity happens? Why do people cross the line when the relationship is going strong from the outside?

        Relationship therapist Esther Perel had convincing answers to those questions when she explained the reasons behind in one of her TEDTalks. In this article I will explain one of them. 

        According to Esther, people who find themselves cheating on their partner are wanting to discover a lost part of themselves. Trying to recover the once fantasy of who they are. The longing of their dream partner in the past. Like one of her clients, Priya, who was married to a good man. She was a good wife and a good mother, but one day she fell in love to an arborist who removed trees from their yard after the hurricane Sandy, and with his truck and with tattoos, he's quite the opposite of her. As Esther said, "Priya's affair, at 47,  is the adolescence she never had."

        People who cheat are reanimating the love, at some point of the life, that they never had. The love that they wanted but never had the opportunity to make it real. The perfect situation for their fantasy did never come. And when the opportunity presents itself, the past will recover to the surface to fulfill the once they never had. They are willing to turn away to the person they become in exchange to the person who they were to be. They turn away from their present self to go back to old, unfulfilled one. and in that way fulfilling the love that they never had. 

Esther Perel, TED Talk2015