I was chatting online to a new friend yesterday and we began talking about her best friend who she said had been “replaced by her husband.” I thought about that for a minute before saying that maybe she wasn’t replaced at all. Maybe she was never that important to him in the first place. Maybe she was just convenient.

How many times have you heard people who’ve been divorced say that they weren’t really in love with their ex, they just thought they were? I’ve heard it. The thing to remember is, both men and women are guilty of thinking theyr’e in love. They don’t test themselves because being with *someone* is better than being alone. A few months or years later and they are unhappy and wondering how the hell to change things. Their eyes begin to wander and figure that an affair is better than hurting their spouse’s feelings.

Sometimes, and dare I say it, more than sometimes, we think we’re in love but it’s really a long-term friends with benefits situation that could end at any time if one or the other isn’t getting their sexual needs met. It looks like love because they’re all twittery, holding hands, cuddly but that’s how friends with benefits act too. We get caught up in overwhelming lust and we think it’s love. Love isn’t about sex and that’s where the confusion lies. You have sex when you’re in love but sex is not love. Love is caring about someone during the good times and more especially during the bad times. Love doesn’t look for a way out, instead it looks for a solution.

I’m not saying that every person who’s cheating isn’t in love with their spouse. I’m saying that some people were never in love in the first place.

Do you ever watch that show, Cheaters, on TV ? I watched it for the first time recently and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Why oh why would anyone want to blurb all that crap out on television? While I don’t think we need to keep so many secrets that friends are shocked when it comes out that we’ve been unhappy for a long time – I can’t imagine going on a show and bearing my grief for all to see.

Would you consider doing it if you thought your partner/spouse was cheating?

I’ve been asked before if I knew for sure that my best friend’s husband was cheating would I tell her. That’s a far cry from chasing a wandering spouse to publicly humiliate him or her. I dunno, I couldn’t imagine doing it. I think I’d just prefer to leave and put it all behind me. Think about going through life as “the guy whose wife cheated on him on tv”? or “the woman whose husband pretended to be a talent scout when he was really a janitor?”

How do you feel about Cheaters (the show, not the person)?

According to this month’s Cosmopolitan magazine a whopping 17% of all relationships start with a one-night-stand. Yeah, I couldn’t believe it either but if Cosmo says it, it’s gotta be true, right?

My skepticism waned a bit when I read their reasoning as to why so many people start their relationship from a hook-up. Times have changed. There is no longer the stigma that women carry who’ve had a casual affair. These days, frankly nobody cares what someone else does with their sexuality. From a former president who has oral sex in his office with an intern to televangelists who lose everything for a bit of a romp in the sack – it’s old news. The time between the first date and first sex has reduced to sometimes just a few hours. The rest of the relationship dynamics haven’t changed.

So how does one move a hook-up to a relationship? Start by looking for clues that maybe he or she might be open to doing more things with you than just having sex. If you sense an openness, invite the other person to do relationship-y things. Invite them to a movie or to the theater or to a party with your friends. Yes, it’s a risk you could lose the whole friends with benefits thing you’ve got going on, but you’ve got a 50% chance of getting the whole ball of wax too. Nothing ventured is nothing gained!

ver get an email that tugs at your heartstrings a bit?  It was from a man who’s checking on the web to see if the grass is greener in someone else’s yard.  I doubt he really wants to find someone new. He’s just frustrated. He’s a fitness guru and his wife has put on weight and it’s “bad for his image.” Here’s his email:

My wife and I met at the gym and we used to go jogging together twice a week. Four years ago we moved in together and now have a little girl who’s nearly 1. My wife put on a lot of weight when she was pregnant, and once the baby arrived she said she was always too tired or too stressed to work out. Now, a year later, she’s what I’d call obese and I can’t get her to do any exercise. I’ve begged her to come running with me, and I bought her a membership to the gym, but she refuses to do a thing no matter how much I beg. I’ve talked and talked about it and all she does is get angry so I’ve given up. I do love her, but I’m a personal trainer so it’s embarrassing and bad for business. If I can’t motivate my wife, how good am I ? What can I do?

Many women gain weight when they’re pregnant and that first year after the baby, especially a first time mother, is tiring and stressful. If you add that she’s being judged by her husband for her looks on top of the stress, you should probably add depression to her list of troubles. If she’s having trouble just coping with the essentials, then you need to accept that she’s seeing everything as an exhausting chore. Please don’t compare your wife with a celebrity who loses all the baby weight in 6 weeks.  She definitely has domestic help around the house, a personal trainer and the time to spend with him or her.   Don’t add to wife’s feelings of guilt and inadequacy because it’s only going to make it worse. If you truly love this woman and I mean love in the purest sense of the word, then love her unconditionally.

I’m sure that physical fitness is important to you and perhaps it defines who you are. You see your wife’s weight as a reflection on your ability and you see your wife as lacking respect for you because she’s let herself go. Stop seeing her weight as how it afects you. If you met your wife at the gym and she used to go running with you – that woman is still inside. If you keep nagging and making her feel not good enough over and over, you’ll never find that person again. The gym membership was your idea to fix a problem that you have with her weight – it wasn’t a gift. It was a silent way to say “I don’t like you the way you are now.”

The more you talk about her weight and lack of fitness, the more likely she is to add to her wall of anger and resentment. Remember, this weight and lack of exercise can cause health problems but their her problems to deal with. I would bet $100 that she’s more unhappy about all of this than you are and your vocal disapproval is undermining her ability to make any changes.

I predict that nothing will change until you can love her and respect her as she is and make her believe that it’s true. Have fun together, enjoy that beautiful baby together. The more time you spend having fun, the more she will be encouraged to make changes for herself. She’ll want to be fitter just to keep up. When she does decide to get fitter, keep your mouth shut. Offer to watch the baby while she goes to the gym IF she wants to go to the gym, otherwise let her go at her own pace. If she falls off, leave it and wait for her to get back to it. She will. She probably loves you as much as you love her and she’s sick and tired of being sick and tired. Good luck!

This is an article from Psychology Today which I think bears repeating.

How hard should you work to prevent your spouse from cheating? Should you check their email and their text messages? Go through their car and pockets and purse, checking for unexplained receipts, or underwear that’s not yours? Call them at odd times, to make sure they are where they said they would be, doing what they said they were doing? Should you demand they share with you their Facebook password, so you can make sure they are not using the social site to reconnect with old flames?

Or not? Are these things worth it? Do they help, or do they actually make things worse? Recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology offers some interesting and tantalizing suggestions that these efforts to control your spouse, and command sexual fidelity, might actually increase their desire to pursue extramarital sex.

Lead researcher Nathan DeWall published results of three connected studies that examined the effects of these limits on peoples’ desires. They found that when they created situations that attempted to prevent people from attending to, responding to, or noticing “desirable relationship alternatives,” it actually made people more dissatisfied with their current relationship, decreased the peoples’ commitment to infidelity, and increased their interest in pursuing an extramarital relationship. This effect played out cognitively and behaviorally as well, showing an effect in increasing people’s memory for attractive people other than their partner, and an increase in the amount of time they attended to these people.

DeWall and his fellow authors hypothesize that this effect is related to the concept of the “forbidden fruit.” By telling Adam and Eve not to eat that darn apple, God created a burning desire to have what they couldn’t have, and essentially destined them to break His commandment. By trying to prevent your spouse or partner from cheating, are you creating the same effect? You might be. By setting and enforcing limits, you are almost certainly increasing your partner’s unhappiness with you and your relationship, AND making them more likely to start shopping around for alternatives.

I remember a couple I treated years ago, where the wife was convinced that her husband would one day cheat on her. Recognizing this effect, even back then, I told her that her conviction that her husband would one day cheat put her in danger of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. By telling him repeatedly that she already didn’t trust him, and believed he would cheat, she was removing the barriers to him cheating, and leading to him potentially saying one day, “Why shouldn’t I cheat? She already believes that I will, I’ve really got nothing to lose.”

Working with parents, I often explain to them that their efforts to catch and punish their children breaking rules are likely to backfire. What we know is that such efforts don’t make children behave. Instead, they just make children look for ways not to get caught. When you put your spouse or partner on notice that you are “watching them like a hawk,” what you might really be doing is telling them that they need to be prepared to better hide their actions and desires, and that you don’t trust them.

What’s a better way to deal with this situation? With that couple I treated, I encouraged the wife to instead spend a lot of time paying attention to those qualities of her husband that she admired and respected, which would increase his internal barriers to infidelity, things like his moral character, his commitment to her, his desire and love for her, and the joy that they had in being together. Similarly, I tell parents to instead help their children understand the reasons for rules, the potential consequences of rulebreaking, and respect and praise their children’s ability to make good decisions.

The same things apply here. Want your spouse to be faithful? Here are a few tips, that actually work:

Be clear about what faithfulness means. Many problems happen due to lack of clear communication about expectations and agreements;
Help your partner to want to be faithful, by having a healthy relationship. That doesn’t mean you should always keep them happy, but that you should do your part to communicate and deal with problems;
Pay attention to the things that are working. Often people in relationships only attend to the things that aren’t working, which enhances awareness of dissatisfaction. Instead, we do best by highlighting things we like, even more than the things we don’t. “That which we attend to, grows.”
Deal with your own fears and feelings over infidelity. What does it mean to you, and your beliefs about yourself and your relationship;
Finally – talk about it. Guess what, talking about it with your partner doesn’t make it happen. Instead, by talking openly and honestly about the issue of extramarital sex and desire, with respect and personal ownership of feelings, helps you and your partner make better decisions about your relationship, commitment, and in reaction to those “attractive alternatives.”
DeWall and his co-authors agree with my suggestions. Instead of limiting your partner’s ability to check out other people, they suggest that it works better to work on “enhancing relationship processes that naturally lead to decreased attention, such as focusing on positive aspects of one’s partner.” Rather than making them not cheat, make them WANT to NOT cheat, through having a relationship where they feel no need to do so. Make that forbidden fruit less desirable, less mysterious, and less alluring, than yourself.