Cheaters, Take This Test

Florida Jewish News, March 17, 2006, pp. 12, 17.

If you have ever cheated or wanted to cheat, choose one of the following. You cheated because—

1. you didn’t know how to articulate your needs in your marriage, so they weren’t met.
2. you didn’t even know what your needs were, so you couldn’t articulate them.
3. you did articulate them, but you weren’t meeting your spouse’s needs so he or she wasn’t motivated to meet yours.
4. you did convey your needs and you tried to meet your partner’s needs, but you didn’t think your partner would be capable of meeting yours.
5. it wasn’t about meeting needs; you just got a thrill out of the game.
6. it was as if you were going through motions, very distant from yourself and you hardly remember the event.

Yes, there’s cheating in the Orthodox community. And for every one who acts on his or her desires, there are a dozen people who think of it every day although they won’t take that first fateful step. Most people fantasize and cheat out of loneliness, pain, and because they have given up on their partner. Others act for more sinister reasons. Let’s look at all of them.

• Communication

If only “happily ever after” automatically followed love and marriage. The missing link is being able to let your partner know who you are and how you tick. That’s what intimacy is.

What I’ve found among cheaters is that they never actually experienced intimacy. The problem is that since they don’t know what it is, they mistakenly think they do. They think, for example, that sharing opinions is “expressing feelings.” It is not. They think, also, that expressing anger constitutes “expressing feelings.” Wrong, again. (Anger masks hurt. A “real man” can express hurt without feeling like a wimp. But that’s for another article.)

They also think that they way their family-of-origin did things is “the” way things are done. That includes values, attitudes, and styles of doing things. This creates a big obstacle in communication because they incorrectly assume that since their family did things a certain way—and that is “the” way things are/should be done—there is no need to discuss them with a spouse. It is taken for granted. Then, when the spouse is totally unfamiliar with their spouse’s “truths,” it can lead to hurt feelings.

For example, one family might be loud, boisterous, and expressive while another holds emotion in check. Either partner will be puzzled and will inevitably misinterpret the behavior of the other because it is not what each is used to.

One family might have sharp tongues while another might be considerate of other people’s feelings. One family might think “finagling” in business is normal and smart while another will see it as plain wrong. Of course, being sharp tongued is wrong and cheating in business is wrong, too. The problem is that there are always gray areas and if the spouse is totally unfamiliar with such values and ways, misunderstandings are sure to follow.

Shirley, for example, grew up in a family that was quiet, reserved, and restrained. Her husband, Sol has a different adjective for them: He thinks they’re cold. His family, in his opinion, is warm, dynamic, outgoing, fun-loving, and natural. “They don’t pull any punches,” he likes to say. Shirley would describe them otherwise. She thinks they’re brash, rude, inconsiderate, loud, and meddling. For each of them, being respected and appreciated would be very different. For Shirley, it would mean being spoken to without yelling, not asking questions that are too intrusive, and being treated with gentleness. For Sol, it would mean warmth, effusiveness, and more affection from his wife.

“Affection” is a big red flag when it comes to miscommunication and misunderstandings. Shirley thinks of herself as a very affectionate person—as long as you’ve been treating her nicely. If Sol yells at her, she feels violated and certainly not affectionate. For him, it is totally incomprehensible as to how a person could expect to interact without yelling. It’s a natural and normal part of life from his point of view. For her, it’s an assault.

Only when Sol comes to respect Shirley’s way as simply Shirley’s way rather than thinking of her as “cold”—and then temper his behavior accordingly—will he grow to appreciate her true warmth. As for her, Shirley will have to be patient with his process of changing and not misinterpret an occasional relapse as a personal attack.

What’s more, Sol has to be able to say to Shirley, “I’m trying to be tender and gentle with you. I, too, have needs. I’d like more affection.” Only when people can communicate their needs can they expect the other to meet them. Without communicating what is in the depths of one’s heart, there can be no intimacy.

Being able to do this is not at all easy. It takes skills in awareness of one’s emotions and knowing how to be assertive without being either aggressive or holding back. Intimacy takes work. But this sort of work is a guarantee against cheating when the reason for the cheating was the lack of meeting your partner’s needs.

• Knowing yourself

It is particularly hard to communicate your needs when you don’t even know what they are. But if you don’t know what they are, how can other people?

Socrates was not the first person to espouse the concept, “Know thyself.” The Torah asks that parents raise their children “according to their way,” meaning using the right techniques to fit the individual personality of each child. As that child is handled in a way tailor-made for him, presumably that will help him understand himself better and better as he grows.

What if your parents didn’t do all that? What if you grew up learning to please others, or to allow others to make judgments for you? Such a person will be handicapped in a marriage. It might seem counter-intuitive that marital happiness requires each person know him- or herself well, but that’s exactly how it works. The person who wants desperately to please a spouse will eventually bore that spouse. The excitement and newness of a relationship comes from always finding out more about one’s partner.

For the person who does not really know himself, the task at hand is to go learn who he is. This is perhaps the hardest job of all, but it’s an absolute necessity. The way to go about this is to always ask oneself, “What do I believe?” “What do I value?” “What is my opinion about ---?” “What are my tastes?” “What is my preference?” That is step one. Step two is to express all that.

• Being a lover

Once you’re done with knowing yourself and expressing yourself, you’re only half done. The other half is knowing the person you’ve married. Being a lover means being a listener.

Listening is an art in and of itself. The better you know yourself and want to express yourself, the more challenging it is to be a good listener. The listener must hold back all that wonderful self-expression in order to really hear the spouse.

There is a technique that few people use which conveys to the other that you’ve heart him or her. It’s called “reflecting” or “active listening.” Developed by the grandfather of counseling, Carl Rogers, it is simply a restating of what the other person just said. It seems ridiculous, doesn’t it, just to say back to someone what they’ve just said, yet it works like magic to ensure to the other that you really did listen and “get” what you were being told. I recommend it when couples complain that their partner “never listens.”

If you don’t believe that this is an important tool, I would only remind you that the Shema, our most important prayer, does not ask us to listen, but to “hear,” which is another way to say, “listen actively,” participate in the process by showing that you heard. One way to show it would be Roger’s reflecting and another way could be taking steps to demonstrate it. For example, I can’t go to thriller type movies. Can’t take all that excitement. My husband wouldn’t even dream of asking me to go with him to one of those; he just takes our boys. When we’re about to go to the movies, he says that he really, really wants to see the latest chick flick that he thinks I’ll like. Smart man.

The point here is that not only your needs must be met. Intimacy is a two-way street. Listening is only part of the story. The other part is acting on what you know.

• Believing in the other

Never give up. Hashem never gives up on us, does He? That’s the prototype of faithfulness. He always believes that we will learn and grow, that we will recognize our errors and our insensitivities and will change. For us, that’s teshuva. For Him, that’s patience.

If your partner is working on him- or herself, and has taken baby steps, then don’t give up on the rest! Don’t assume that your partner cannot meet your expressed needs. You may think you’ve given him or her chance after chance, but I know from what I’ve seen that change can be a slow process. The real questions are: How do you get your partner to take those first steps? And, How do you get him or her to continue with that process after it has begun? The answer loops back to the first and second bullets herein: Know yourself and express yourself. Let your partner know what you need and want. Don’t assume that he or she does because that would be a big mistake. Then keep refining that.

Shirley, from our earlier story, realized that she needs and wants peace and quiet. She cannot live with screaming and doesn’t think she ought to “get used to it.” It seems inherently wrong to her. What’s more, the Torah backs her up. So she learned to tell that to her husband. Eventually, he worked on his volume and became gentler and quieter with her. Now, she realizes, with all the noise out of the picture, that there’s a lot more missing. She’s weary of it all; she would like to quit sometimes. Luckily, she didn’t. She let him know that she needs more than quiet. She needs flowers for Shabbos. She wants chocolate on their anniversary. She would like time to talk—and be listened to. She states this to Sol. A thousand times. A thousand and one times. But patiently.

If Hashem has patience for us, can we do less?

• Taking down walls

Thrills are another way of being too distracted to look at oneself. People who want thrills, whether in relationships, cheating, gambling, drugs, dishonest dealings, or whatever, are all escaping themselves. They are avoiding like the plague going to the first two points outlined here. The biochemistry of thrills is that there is so much “noise” in the brain, the individual is too busy to notice feelings, and that’s exactly how he or she wants it.

Rabbi Dr. Abraham Twerski noted that the addictive personality, as he called it, has not in a long time actually experienced pain. Originally, as a child or teenager, there was great pain and this addictive personality rushed to find ways to block it. All addictions, whether initially chemical or not, eventually create a chemical environment in the brain that blocks painful feelings. The addictive personality has gotten so used to that, that “normal” is weird. Grief and pain are absolutely unbearable. Twerski’s solution?—Help that individual get his feet wet. Let him experience pain with your help and support, little by little without resorting to that addiction.

The bottom line is, the addictive personality must take down his or her walls and let in pain. Eventually, that will make room for feeling true pleasure, something that person has never experienced either. And that is a true joy.

• Dissociation

If you’ve ever had moments of feeling that things are unreal or not happening in the moment, that is a taste of dissociation. It develops in childhood when the individual was unprotected and hurt. Whereas the addictive personality engages in certain behaviors that affect brain chemistry, the dissociating person very cleverly can just “check out.” It is a process of providing personal anesthesia to unbearable situations.

Frequently, the individual who cheats doesn’t even enjoy it and if you ask why he or she did it, the typical answer will be, “It just happened.” The individual is so out of touch with him- or herself that the power of the other person is too great to resist.

Once again, the solution, in part is to know oneself. That, however, is only part of the solution, because the rest must entail readiness for stressful situations without relapsing into that state of not being fully in charge of oneself. Therefore, expressing oneself assertively and often goes hand in hand with tuning into oneself as a protection against being led where one really doesn’t want to go. This task is scary and difficult for people who were made to feel afraid to express themselves as children or in their marriages. It can be particularly challenging for people in a marriage with a controlling partner. But, I would point out to that partner, “Would you rather your spouse did things because she or he wanted to from the heart or because you forced the issue?” Once again, developing a robust personality of her or his own, is the best insulator against cheating.