Why The "A" Word Doesn't Always Help Us When We're Talking About Cheating
And I don't mean the word, "adultery."
Object when someone uses the word “abuse” to describe cheating in a relationship, and you are going to be going around and around and around with people. Sometimes for years.
So, from the script of the wonderful film Love Jones (which also depicts a cheating situation), let me break this thing down so it can forever and consistently be broke.
Although cheating can and often does involve hurtful and painful behaviors like lying, gaslighting, and shifting blame, which can be rightfully classified “acts of abuse,” it isn’t always helpful to label the person who cheated “abusive” or an “abuser.”
The reason for this is that a hardcore domestic “abuser” is someone with a hardwiring problem that tends toward violence and is probably not going to change. This person is teetering on the edge of causing life-ending damage to the person they are with and is someone you need to RUN from in NO uncertain terms.
Some of these people cheat. Some of them just make you a prisoner in your own home and financially before they start beating you.
We should not equate cheating to this in most circumstances, because most of the time this does not describe your average run-of-the-mill person who cheats.
Now. Having said that, does that mean I think:
A counselor should consider cheating just another marriage issue? Of course not!
A counselor should ask the betrayed spouse to accept any responsibility for the cheating?
Well, now we’re getting into it.
If the marriage was distant or otherwise bad before the cheating, two people made it that way and two people are going to have to fix it. Especially in those cases where one person was begging for counseling or for issues to be addressed before they cheated, and the other person was giving them the no-never-mind and pooh-poohing it off.
Those situations exist, and to make the cheater grovel for forgiveness and work on nothing else in the marriage is a recipe for disaster.
Of course I am not saying this is every situation.
Instances of cheating are all different, and that’s the entire point.
Am I saying that a counselor should ignore the trauma and damage the cheating has caused? Of course not! (Good grief.)
That a counselor should address the marriage grievances of the cheater before sufficiently addressing the cheating? NO. (Won’t work!)
That a counselor should allow the cheater to blame shift or avoid responsibility? NO.
But, but, but, but, but.
I don’t think the betrayed spouse should be allowed to, either, and that is what everyone seems to want to do once cheating is discovered.
That’s when, these days, the words “abuse” and “abuser” start getting thrown around.
One problem I have with that is that in real cases of honest-to-god violent domestic abuse, WE DO NOT consider the victim to be at fault AT ALL.
And we need to be careful with this when the “abuse” is cheating, because both people are responsible for creating the conditions that allowed another person to come between them.
Yeah, one person pulled the trigger, but they both cocked and loaded that gun. And when we confuse the landscape by using language that conflates the cheater with a domestic abuser, we confuse that issue, especially in the minds of lay people who only know what hardcore domestic abuse is and don’t know much about relationship or family dynamics at all.
Does this mean I think a counselor should minimize repair and amends? Of course not!
But again: Unless a person married someone on the personality disordered spectrum of traits (and in that case they need to look at why, so they do not do it again), there is some degree of repair and amends that needs to come from both sides. At some point.
And, whoo-hoo! Nobody likes hearing that.
Once somebody cheats, all the problems are dumped on “that abuser!” and the spouse gets off scot-free in the minds of the public, and, in fact, some counselors.
This will not work if you’re trying to actually save a marriage.
This is why I use the word “abuse” rather sparingly here when I write about infidelity.
It’s got a double meaning that doesn’t always help us when we’re talking about affair recovery. It helps when we’re trying to get the cheater to realize the impact of what they did, which they may, in fact, be trying to deny. (Not all of them do this, but a good many do.)
But most of us here in the lay public already recognize that cheating is extremely hurtful, which is why most people when asked (who haven’t been through it yet) are one hundred percent certain they would immediately divorce their spouse the living instant they discovered they had cheated.
If we want to educate people about why infidelity happens and what to do about it once it happens (and also how to prevent it!), we don’t need to lay it on any thicker than it already is with loaded words like “abuse” and “abuser.”
We in the lay public already get how bad cheating is.
Really.