A relationship does not come with a book of rules. Yet, people make some boundaries in their head and expect their significant other to never cross it. There is nothing wrong to have rules but the definition of cheating is mostly different for everyone.

There are couples who date others when they are in a committed relationship. There are some who don’t even talk to their ex because they are in a relationship. It’s just that everybody’s perspectives being so different. Tammy Nelson, sex and relationship therapist and the resident relationship expert at Ashley Madison, stated that people who stray from their relationship either, want to leave the relationship they’re in, or they don’t want to.

Let’s think of different perspectives here. There is a husband who is happy with his wife but he starts dating someone else. His acts simply mean that he wants to get out of the relationship even before he knew himself that he wanted to be out of it.

And then there is another set of individuals who do not want their primary relation to end but they still want to carry out their other relations. These people are the ones who do not identify with monogamy and desire and love more than one person at a time and it comes naturally to them.

Tammy shares,”A man who is not getting his sexual needs fulfilled from his wife, would find it somewhere else. How can we classify this act of cheating? We have to think it outside the box sometimes. A cheater is not always at the wrong side. He/she might have feelings for the committed one but could not get some part of happiness from the other and so to fulfill that empty space, they seek someone else.”

Think like this: A married woman who is alone for any reason, unhappy, doesn’t get love from her husband, or doesn’t get her husband’s respect or time, and then she opts to fall into another relation – is a cheater? How fair is this cheating scale?

Because if there are rules for relationships, they should never be gender-specific – it is applicable for each partner irrespective of the gender. The dynamics of love, marriage and relationships have changed drastically in past decade and so are the defined gender roles having a multi-fold impact on how people view relationships and derive expectations from it.

A few years ago, an article mentioned a real story of a couple who fell in love, got married, were so happy with each other, got their first baby two years after their marriage. When their baby was 3 months old, wife found out that during the entire time of her pregnancy when she could not have sex for some reason, he went to prostitutes. He still loves her. She ended up filing a divorce. This is another type of cheating.

Either way, any kind of cheating sucks. It really does for the significant other.

“How Men and Women Behave Differently in Relationships?” Relationship Advice by Dr. Preeti Chawla

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