A few days ago, I stumbled across an online article from Psychology Today (March 11, 2025) that would have been really useful if I had discovered it twenty or forty years ago. (Oops, bad news, it hadn't been written yet.) The title is "3 Traits That Can Make a Partner More Likely to Cheat," and yes, I have added it to my list of articles posted at the bottom of this page on the left. The short version is that it might have helped me decode Wife's infidelities a lot earlier, though some of what it says finally (belatedly) occurred to me too.The three traits are these:
- Narcissistic tendencies
- Low self-esteem
- Fear of vulnerability and emotional intimacy
I'll summarize how each of these is supposed to work.
Narcissistic tendencies
No surprise here. The article argues that narcissists use sex to bolster their own self-image, because they need constant validation and praise. So if the spouse falls down on the job—or gets tired, or mad, or bored, or boring—the narcissist seeks sexual validation elsewhere.
When I first married Wife, I didn't even know the word narcissism! The first time I heard about it as a psychiatric disorder was during this conversation with D. Even after that it took me a couple of years before I really understood it.
Does this explanation fit Wife? I think so. Whenever she started a new affair it always made her bubbly with New Relationship Energy, and confident enough to take on the world. I certainly saw that in her relationship with the Church Tenor, for instance. (See, for example, here or here.) Given how low she always crashed later, those highs must have been intoxicating.
Low self-esteem
Of course this explanation is the flip side of the earlier one. Desperately low self-esteem prods the sufferer to do anything to get external validation. I talked about this connection early on, in this post.
The article goes on to say that when one partner commits infidelity, that damages the relationship, which in turn gives the adulterer more to feel bad about (and even lower self-esteem). Interestingly, I caught that feature as well, in this post here.
Fear of vulnerability and emotional intimacy
The third trait follows a slightly different tack:
For some, cheating is a way to avoid emotional closeness. They fear being vulnerable and may sabotage their own relationships by seeking external connections that require little emotional intimacy....
When they cheat, they often form external connections that demand little to no emotional investment. These brief encounters provide a temporary sense of control or detachment, allowing them to maintain a surface-level connection while avoiding the deeper emotional work required for a healthy, intimate partnership.
It took me a while to understand Wife's fear of vulnerability. I think the most extensive post I've written on it may be this one, which came some five years after the others that I've quoted. But there were certainly signs there earlier. Her willingness to be involved in the torrid BDSM fantasies of Boyfriend 5 was probably one of those signs. Or in any event I remember reading later the assertion that BDSM appeals precisely to people who are afraid of emotional intimacy, because it provides such a rigid framework for behavior that they never have to worry about not knowing where the boundaries are. And Wife regularly panicked over not knowing where the boundaries were.
I said that this article came along years too late. In some senses, I no longer need it because I ended up discovering all these same conclusions myself. But if I had had it available years ago, think how much time it might have saved me!
