The clip is less than a minute long, but you can practically hear group chats fizzing. On Lock Upp Season 2, Akanksha Chamola looks Ram Kapoor dead in the eye and says, in essence, that cheating is not a slip. It is a sequence. You undress, you touch, you finish. That does not happen “by mistake.” <\/p>\n
Ram pushes back with the classic defense: in a long marriage, during a bad phase, a one time lapse should not automatically be a dealbreaker. If you have ever sat across from a friend over martinis while she whispers, \u201cHe says it just happened,\u201d you know this argument well. So who is closer to what experts actually see \u2013 the \u201cerror\u201d camp or the \u201cchoice\u201d camp?<\/p>\n
Akanksha\u2019s point is brutally practical. To be physically intimate with someone, you have to send the text, meet up, ignore the voice in your head, remove clothing, and keep going. That is a chain of conscious micro-choices, not a banana peel on the sidewalk.<\/p>\n
Ram speaks to a truth many married couples know: long relationships go through dead seasons. In that exhaustion, a fling can be framed as a \u201cmistake\u201d \u2013 unfortunate, regrettable, but not the whole story of the marriage. The split between their views is really a split in language. Are we talking about intent, or about regret?<\/p>\n
Psychologists define infidelity as secret sexual, romantic or emotional behavior that breaks the exclusivity your relationship is built on. It is not just hotel-room drama. There are four main types:<\/p>\n
Sexual cheating, emotional cheating, combined (both emotional and sexual), and internet infidelity \u2013 that late night DM spiral or explicit chat you conveniently label \u201cjust online.\u201d The mistake-versus-choice debate applies to all four, not only to intercourse.<\/p>\n
Research across multiple studies lines up more with Akanksha than with the \u201cit just happened\u201d chorus. Infidelity involves intention, even if it is messy, conflicted or later regretted. You choose to respond to the flirt, to hide the chat, to book the room. Each step is a decision, however fast it feels in the moment.<\/p>\n
One 2016 study found that sexual impulsivity is linked to risky sexual behavior, including cheating. Translation: some people are quicker to chase immediate gratification. But impulsivity is a trait, not a destiny. You can be impulsive and still say no. You can also be stone cold cautious and still decide to have an affair.<\/p>\n
New work in Archives of Sexual Behavior<\/i> suggests powerful people are more likely to stray. When someone feels they bring more to the table \u2013 more money, more fame, more social capital \u2013 they are more aware of \u201cbetter options\u201d and less committed to the partner they already have. “The belief in having other options … can weaken their commitment to their current relationship,” Harry Reis says. Again, this is context, not a cosmic accident. Opportunity knocks; choice opens the door.<\/p>\nTwo Types Of Cheaters Therapists See<\/h2>\n
The Relational Cheater<\/h3>\n
French couples therapists often talk about the \u201crelational\u201d infidel. This person cheats to find what feels missing at home: sex, affection, calm, admiration, basic emotional safety. The relationship is cracked, and the affair grows in the fracture. Both partners are co-responsible for the state of the relationship \u2013 but the moment someone crosses the line, that act is their choice alone.<\/p>\n
Then there is the \u201cpersonal\u201d or chronic cheater. They cheat in every relationship, even ones they describe as happy. Sometimes there is a family script (a chronically unfaithful parent), sometimes it is thrill seeking or a need to seduce just to feel alive. Here, the betrayed partner is not responsible. The pattern belongs to the cheater, full stop.<\/p>\n
Language is not cosmetic. \u201cI made a mistake\u201d can sound like, I tripped. \u201cI made a choice that hurt you\u201d acknowledges agency and harm. A 2023 affair-site study led by Dylan Selterman found married people in affairs reported high sexual and emotional satisfaction and surprisingly low regret. “These findings paint a more complicated picture of infidelity compared to what we thought we knew,” Selterman says. In other words, a lot of \u201cmistake\u201d talk after the fact is about PR, not transformation.<\/p>\n
If you accept the \u201cmistake\u201d framing too quickly, you risk gaslighting yourself. Seeing cheating as a choice lets you ask sharper questions: What was happening in our relationship, and what was happening in their character? Is this a one time collapse of boundaries, or part of a pattern I have been minimizing?<\/p>\n
Gurit Birnbaum and Harry Reis have shown that a simple mental move \u2013 perspective taking \u2013 can cool desire for that tempting colleague. Participants were asked to imagine a flirtation from their partner\u2019s point of view, right down to the conversation they would have if the cheating came out. “Perspective-taking does not prevent you from cheating, but it lessens the desire to do so,” Reis says. Less desire equals more room to choose differently.<\/p>\n
No, you cannot control every attraction. You can control the set-up. Do you keep texting the person you are low-key into, under the guise of \u201cventing about work\u201d? Do you keep drinking when you are already tired and annoyed at your partner? People often cheat when they are depleted \u2013 too drunk, too exhausted, too lonely \u2013 to access their better judgment. “People often cheat not because they planned to do so. Rather, the opportunity presented itself and they were too depleted … to resist the temptation,” Birnbaum says. Depletion makes saying no harder, but it does not delete the fact that you still said yes.<\/p>\n
So is cheating an error or a choice? Psychology suggests it is always a choice, made inside a particular context \u2013 bad marriage, intense power, poor skills, sheer exhaustion. You can deeply regret that choice and change. You can also dress it up as a \u201cmistake\u201d to dodge accountability. Akanksha\u2019s insistence that infidelity is a process forces everyone to look at each tiny decision along the way. That is uncomfortable. It is also where real repair, or a clean exit, finally begins.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42690,"featured_media":113182,"template":"","format":"standard","categories":[3914],"yoast_head":"\n