First, I want to make clear there’s a difference between justification, and explanation. I think that @Saturated_Brain is very insightful when he says “that cheating partners are usually the symptom of a troubled relationship.” That’s been my experience. Most people I’ve talked to about it feel like they are no longer connecting in any significant emotional way to their spouse. They wonder what happened to the love—to that sense of being soulmates. Maybe they can’t even remember it ever feeling significant and start to believe they are married for convenience. The marriage seems like work, and the relationship turns into a child-raising business.
For ordinary men and women—not in the public eye—they are usually at a loss about what to do. They may not know how to discuss it with their spouses. They fear the anger and mistrust and lack of safety that they think will appear if they do address it. They can’t go to counseling because they believe their spouse would never agree. So things go along, getting more and more tense.
They can’t separate, because of so many reasons: their children, the promises they made; the friends and family they have; the sense of failure; the stigma attached to that failure; not to mention, the economic and circumstantial trauma a separation and divorce will create. So they stay, trapped, in an untenable situation.
They are ripe for betrayal. And here, I believe that it is not just the betrayer’s fault. Both sides of the relationship have equal responsibility for not addressing the problems of the relationship. An affair is just a symptom.
Anyway, they look around—Craigslist is full of people looking for discrete dalliances. They seek sex as a substitute for two lackings in their relationship—sex and closeness. Or they meet in online dating forums or an adult friend finder or on Askville or fluther or any number of other social networking sites. Maybe they meet at work, or at a conference, and they hit it off, and just, without barely thinking about it, try to comfort each other in one night, or maybe several at once, or several spread out over time.
Sex is symbolic of the perfect fix. It promises connection (literally and emotionally); and it simulates emotional connection as well. It is a metaphor, in fact, for love. Of course, everyone denies this. Sex is just sex. Just recreation. We can do it and it won’t mean anything. In doing this, they dig themselves deeper into the hole—separating the relationship between their feelings and their feelings (physical and emotional). It really messes people up, and they don’t even know it. They live in denial. It’s ok to separate sex from emotions. It’s just sex. It doesn’t mean anything.
Sometimes, though, it does come to mean something. Sometimes there are affairs of the heart. The new person is emotionally available where the spouse is not. In any case, it’s all in search of closeness that matters—that which seems to be lacking in their marriage.
If you’re male and rich or powerful, you think you have so much status that you deserve to have all the women who want you. It’s a perk of being an alpha male. You know society doesn’t approve, and the voters might not approve, but in your mind (and this is justification), you think it’s all right for you. You’re different. You’re doing it for all the right reasons. Or at least, acceptable (to you) reasons.
You start to think… maybe you can do it. Maybe there’s a way to get away with it. Maybe you can keep anyone else from finding out, or if they do find out, from telling your spouse. You become open to the possibility. If you never loved your spouse, it’s even easier. Maybe you start looking. All this time, the tension at home is getting worse. It is more and more emotionally painful. At some point, emotion and opportunity collide, and you cheat.
Some people contain their unhappiness, and never cheat, at least, physically. Or even emotionally. They just endure. These people are said to be moral. They are doing what they promised. For better or for worse. Others say that if you are miserable, you should divorce. Divorce first, then find someone else. That’s the honorable thing to do.
The reality for most people, I believe, is that they want to find another ride before they abandon the current one. In any case, they do connect with someone else, and eventually, it becomes too much and they confess, or they are found out. Then, of course, the person who actually cheats is seen as the bad guy, and the other spouse as the morally ascendant person. The disparity here makes it nearly impossible for reconciliation. The cheated up loves the moral power their victim status gives them. The cheater has too much pride to ask for forgiveness.
Unless, they both really do still love each other, and they really still want to be together. They just don’t know how to do it. Then, the affair is a trigger. A sign of the problem that no one can ignore. Either they fix it, or they don’t. In most cases, it’s too hard to rebuild trust, and so the relationship is kaput.
In any case, the disparity in righteousness between the cheater and the cheated is both too much, and a lie. It’s too much to allow for reconciliation. It’s a lie because both parties behaved in a way that lead to the affair, but only one gets blamed for it. Cheaters, I hope and believe, are not cads. They are simply people who are desperate and are separated emotionally from both their spouses and themselves, and in that condition, they can do what was supposed to be unthinkable.
Most people who cheat can’t see much of this. Men tend to have great difficulty in understanding themselves, especially about their emotions and need to be connected to other people. Women, if the cheatee, tend to be righteous about what happened, and don’t see that they had any fault in the matter. Both sides get stubborn and righteous about their own situation, and reconciliation becomes impossible.
Sanford has an additional problem. He’s a politician. He needs votes. He needs character. Everyone will blame him for the problems of the marriage because he’s the one who cheated. He is trying to explain, and also justify his behavior. This does not go over well even if you do it well. If you make a hash of it, well, it’s a train wreck.
The behavior—none of it—can be justified. It can only be explained. Others may not be able to imagine themselves in such a situation, or believe they would make different choices in such a situation, and perhaps they are right. They don’t even try to understand. They just get even more righteous, and the cheater is even wronger, if they can be such a thing. Public relationships really have huge consequences. And all relationships are public to one degree or another. It’s hard to hide your shame completely.
It is, in the end, unexplainable, and unjustifiable, and unforgivable. Yet it seems like you have to take responsibility for what you did—both of you—and find a way to explain, if you are to forgive each other. Justification has to be irrelevant. As long as someone is seeking to keep pride through feeling just, you just can’t forgive. You can’t build trust again. It is, I believe, only if two people both admit they did the unforgivable, and ask for forgiveness, and do not defend what they did, that it might, just possibly, be fixed.
Well, that’s beyond the scope of this question, so I won’t go there. I don’t know if people can understand this. Or really want to understand it. But we who cheat—we’re human, too, and we don’t know what the fuck to do in order to connect to other humans on the deepest level. If we don’t have that with our spouses, then what kind of people are we? We’re already lost, in religious terms. We have already fallen to the devil. If we’re already bad people, it’s not so hard to just act it out and see if you can find any closeness again. You’re already damned.
The devil is a metaphor for the pain and suffering that leads to the act which leads to further pain and suffering. You see no way out. You desperately seek something, and even as you seek something better, you know that even a horrible marriage is better than being all alone. If you’re all alone, you can get depressed, and then you can kill yourself. If you’re lucky, you find someone else to love you before that happens. But you always live with the shame of the failed relationship. And that, I think, is where society plays a role in helping or continuing the hurt.
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