In overcoming an affair, the thinking of the cheater is an important issue to deal with. If they don’t view what they did as ‘wrong’, they will not likely change.
In their mind, if they’ve done nothing wrong, there is little reason to change other than to pacify you.
When you view it as wrong and they don’t, there’s little common ground to work with.
In many ways, all the fights, arguments and conflicts are manifestations of the differences of thinking between you and the cheater. When the two of you agree that cheating is wrong, you have a place to begin.
At that point, the two of you share a common enemy. The two of you can work together against the common ‘wrong’.
When there’s no common enemy, it becomes you versus them.
There are many reasons why cheaters may not view what they did as wrong. They may view it as nothing more than a recreational sport.
Each person they score with equates to more points in their column in the game of life. When the cheater has this mindset, they’ll view your efforts at stopping them as ‘preventing them from succeeding in life’.
There are also some cheaters who refuse making room for any authority or God in their lives outside of themselves. In this case, they refuse to see any wrong doing due to not wanting ANY authority in their lives.
Your attempts at convincing them of their wrong will be viewed as you attempting to ‘convert them’ to a moral system they are opposed to.
Some cheaters take the intellectual road. They claim cheating is ‘normal’ in many cultures and societies.
What they don’t tell you is that those ‘experts’ who made those observations and claims were attempting to justify their own adulteries and sexual proclivities.
The intellectual crowd often loves spouting off what some ‘expert’ said, yet avoid looking at the private lives or marriages of those writers to understand the context in which they wrote.
There are also cheaters who don’t understand what wrong is. To them, the behavior is only wrong in that it upset you.
To them, if you weren’t upset, then it wouldn’t be ‘wrong’. For them right and wrong is not a moral issue, it is based on your emotional reactions.
If you react, it’s wrong, if you don’t react, then it must be acceptable. They function like a chameleon, always changing their behaviors and thinking to adjust to your emotional state.
This practice can be termed ‘emotional morality‘, since their moral system is based largely on your reactions.
These are just a few of the issues related to cheaters not thinking that cheating is wrong.
If you want to understand more about their thinking, the ebook, “Why He Cheats” addresses many of the issues underlying the thinking involved.
Best Regards,
Jeff
2 Responses
My spouse refers to her behavior as “barely cheating”. That’s how she minimizes it.
John,
Thank you for sharing how your spouse uses the term ‘barely cheating’. Cheating is an analog type of activity. It is either happening or not happening. There is no gradient involved. A person can not be sort of pregnant or barely dead. These are either/or type of situations. You are or you are not. It is black and white, there is no grey area. There is no ‘barely’ with these kind of things. The addition of the adjective ‘barely’ increases the acceptability of it for the cheater but aggravates the fire out of their spouses.