Why Do People Cheat? The Real Reasons, Explained

Why Do People Cheat?

It is late, the house is quiet, and you are typing this question into your phone with the screen turned away from the room. Maybe you were cheated on and you need it to make sense. Maybe you were the one who cheated and you need to understand who you became.

Why do people cheat? Researchers have found there is rarely one reason. Studies point to a cluster of motivations, including anger, low commitment, neglect, self esteem, desire for variety, and simple circumstance. Most affairs involve several of these at once. And the reasons usually say more about the person who cheated than about the person who was cheated on.

That last sentence is the one most people need and almost nobody hears early enough.

Why Do People Cheat? What the Research Actually Found

For decades, the honest answer was that we did not know very precisely. Then researchers began asking people who had cheated to describe their own motivations, rather than guessing from the outside.

Psychologist Dylan Selterman, along with Justin Garcia and Irene Tsapelas, published research in 2019 in the Journal of Sex Research examining what drives infidelity. Their work identified eight distinct motivations that people gave for stepping outside a relationship:

• Anger at the partner, sometimes as retaliation
• Falling out of love, or the sense that love had already left
• Low commitment to the relationship in the first place
• Neglect, feeling unseen or unwanted at home
• Self esteem, wanting proof of being desirable
• Sexual desire that felt unmet
• Desire for variety or novelty
• Situation, meaning circumstance, alcohol, proximity, or opportunity

Two things about that list matter more than the list itself.

First, the motivations were rarely singular. People reported several at the same time, tangled together. Second, the motivations shaped what the affair looked like. Someone driven by neglect tended to build something emotional and long running. Someone driven by situation tended to have something brief that they struggled to explain even to themselves.

So when you ask why do people cheat, the accurate answer is not one word. It is a knot.

The Numbers, With Their Limits

Analyses of the General Social Survey, which is conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, have found that roughly 20 percent of married men and 13 percent of married women report having had sex with someone other than their spouse while married. Wendy Wang of the Institute for Family Studies reported these figures in 2018.

Those numbers are self reported, which means they are almost certainly conservative. People underreport. Definitions differ. Many people would not count an emotional affair, a years long secret correspondence, or a single night they have spent a decade not thinking about.

Statistics can steady you. They tell you that this is common, that you are not uniquely cursed, that the ground under other households is not as solid as it looks from your window. What they cannot do is explain your specific person. No survey will ever answer the question you are really asking.

The Part the Lists Leave Out

Here is what troubles the standard explanation of why people cheat.

Millions of people are lonely in their marriages. Millions feel unseen, undesired, taken for granted, angry, bored. The overwhelming majority of them do not have affairs. They complain to a friend. They start running. They pick a fight about the dishwasher. They sit in it for years.

Which means the reasons cannot be the whole answer, because the reasons are far more common than the behavior.

Somewhere between the reason and the act, something else happens. Call it the moment of permission. It is the internal turn where a person stops asking themselves whether they will do this and quietly begins arranging how. It rarely announces itself. It usually looks like a small logistical decision. A second phone. A lunch that did not need to be a lunch. A password changed. A story told at home that is technically true.

Psychotherapist Esther Perel, who has written extensively on affairs, describes infidelity as often being less about a flight from a partner and more about a flight toward a version of the self a person had lost track of. That framing helps here. The permission comes when someone decides, without ever saying it out loud, that the person they become in that other room is worth more than the promise they made in this one.

That decision is not a reason. It is a choice, made by one person, in a moment they controlled.

This is why the question why do people cheat can never be fully answered by pointing at a relationship. Relationships create weather. People decide whether to go outside.

If You Were Betrayed

You are probably running an investigation right now. You are reviewing years of your life looking for the frame where it went wrong, and the search feels productive, because at least it feels like doing something.

Understand what the search is really for. When you ask why someone cheats, you are usually asking a different question underneath: was there something wrong with me that made this happen?

The research does not support that. The motivations people report are overwhelmingly internal to the person who cheated. Their sense of self. Their handling of anger. Their capacity to sit with discomfort without seeking relief elsewhere. You may have been half of a strained marriage. You were not half of the decision.

This also means the answer, when it comes, will probably disappoint you. Many betrayed partners describe finally getting the explanation and finding it hollow, almost insultingly small. I do not really know. It just happened. I felt invisible. You wanted a reason proportionate to the damage. There often is not one.

If You Were the One Who Cheated

You may be searching this phrase to find yourself in it, and dreading that you will.

Notice what you do with the reasons. A reason can be an explanation, or it can be a place to hide. The difference shows up in the sentence that follows it. I felt unseen at home, and I made a choice to lie about it for eleven months is an explanation. I felt unseen at home said with a full stop and a look at your partner is something else.

Guilt says: I did a terrible thing. Shame says: I am a terrible thing. Researcher Brené Brown has drawn this distinction for years, and it matters here, because shame does not produce repair. Shame produces defensiveness, silence, and a person who cannot stay in the room long enough to be honest.

Understanding why you cheated is real and useful work. It is also work that is far more likely to go well with a licensed therapist than alone at 2am with a search bar. Individual therapy is where many wayward partners actually get somewhere.

Why the Answer May Never Be Enough

Some people get a complete accounting. Most do not.

The uncomfortable truth is that people are frequently poor narrators of their own behavior. The reason offered after the fact is often assembled afterward, a story built to make an act survivable to the person who committed it. This is not always a lie. It is how minds work.

So you may be waiting for a key that does not exist. And meanwhile the actual work, which is deciding what you want your life to look like now, sits untouched, because it feels irresponsible to start before you understand.

You are allowed to start before you understand. You will probably have to.

If any of this brings thoughts of harming yourself, please treat that as urgent and reach out to a licensed professional or a crisis line. In the US you can call or text 988. You do not have to be in danger to deserve help.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do people cheat when they say they love their partner? Because love and desire, and love and behavior, are not the same system. Research on motivations for infidelity finds many people report still loving their partner while acting on self esteem needs, novelty, anger, or circumstance. Loving someone has never automatically prevented anyone from hurting them.

Do people cheat because something is missing in the relationship? Sometimes. Denise Previti and Paul Amato found in 2004 that infidelity operated both as a cause and as a consequence of marital problems. But relationship problems are far more common than affairs, which means the relationship explains the pressure and never fully explains the choice.

Are men more likely to cheat than women? General Social Survey data analyzed by the Institute for Family Studies has consistently shown a gap, with about 20 percent of married men and 13 percent of married women reporting sex outside marriage. The gap has narrowed among younger adults, and self reporting likely undercounts everyone.

Why do people cheat instead of just leaving? Frequently because they do not want to leave. Many people who cheat describe wanting their marriage and wanting something else at the same time, and choosing secrecy to avoid resolving the contradiction. Others stay for children, money, fear, or identity.

Can someone cheat once and never do it again? Yes, and some people do. Repetition tends to depend less on the past act than on what changed afterward: whether the person examined the decision honestly, and whether anything real was rebuilt. Neither is guaranteed.

Does understanding why someone cheated help you heal? It can help. It is not a prerequisite. Many people find their footing while still holding an incomplete answer, and some find that the question loosens its grip only after they stop demanding a satisfying reply.

The Question Underneath

Why do people cheat is almost never the real question. Underneath it, a betrayed partner is asking whether they were enough. A wayward partner is asking whether they are irredeemable.

The research answers neither, because neither is a research question. The first answer is yes, and the affair was never evidence about you. The second answer is that people are not verdicts.

Whichever side of this you are on, you will probably keep asking why do people cheat for a while yet. That is normal. Ask it in daylight, with someone who has sat where you are sitting, rather than alone with a search bar at 3am.

You do not have to sit with this alone at 2am. Auré is a free peer support companion for people healing from infidelity, built for both partners. Join the waitlist today at myaurelife.com.