I Always Thought Cheating Was Unforgivable. Then A Friend’s Affair Made Me Question Everything.

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. 

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 Julianna Nemeth, an associate 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.

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.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost in September 2025.