[00:00:00] Marie Vakakis: There is something about cheating stories that grabs us even when it’s not our relationship. We tune in. We dissect every detail. We wonder what we do. In the same situations, affairs can stir up a mix of curiosity, of fear, of judgment, and sometimes recognition. Why do we care so much about something that’s got nothing to do with us?

 

[00:00:22] Marie Vakakis: In this episode, I want to talk about why we are so fascinated by other people’s affairs. How unmet needs in relationships can play out the role of identity, longing, and feeling seen. What portrayal can do to your sense of self, why fantasy feels easier than day-to-day reality. How perpetual problems can follow us from one relationship to the next and what repair and recovery can actually look like both for couples and individuals.

 

[00:00:49] Marie Vakakis: I’m not here to judge or sensationalise. I want to ask what I see in the therapy room and what I think can be talk useful to actually talk about infidelity [00:01:00] can be really hard to define and this makes it hard to do some research about it, to understand the statistics of how common it is and who has affairs more.

 

[00:01:11] Marie Vakakis: People disagree on what counts as cheating. Some focus on physical sex, others on emotional connection or secrecy. This can be different for different people, so someone might feel that their partner watching porn. It’s considered a betrayal for someone else having a topless waitress at a bucks. Would be seen as betrayal and for someone else, neither of those two things would be seen as betrayal.

 

[00:01:36] Marie Vakakis: So what counts as cheating is very different. So the lack of clear boundaries in some relationship actually creates confi. And I see this come up with examples like I just mentioned around Buck Knights in particular. You need to have a conversation of what. The boundaries of your relationship are what counts as cheating, as betrayal, and talk openly about them because it is different [00:02:00] for every single person.

 

[00:02:02] Marie Vakakis: No two people have the same definition of this. So if you’re listening and you’re like, oh, I don’t know what my partner thinks. Have a chat, have a conversation about what betrayal means to you. What is okay, what’s not okay, and talk about different scenarios, different examples, and then if those things come up, what you would like your partner to do about it, how you can navigate that.

 

[00:02:19] Marie Vakakis: The one of box nights is a common one. I know I have some very specific examples of when I think it is not okay, and often I hear people say, well, what do you expect that person to just walk out? Well, yeah. Put on your big boy pants and say, my partner, who I’m supposedly loving and adore would not be comfortable with me watching strippers, for example, and maybe.

 

[00:02:42] Marie Vakakis: That’s your daughter, your sister, you know, your wife’s best friend, whatever. She wouldn’t be okay with this, and I respect her enough to acknowledge that I’m going to go grab a drink. I’ll meet you at the next event. Have the courage to stand up for your values and be the partner that. You [00:03:00] say you are and have integrity because some of those things are not.

 

[00:03:03] Marie Vakakis: Okay. Anyway, I’ve gone off on a tangent, but let’s come back to things. Why are we fascinated by other people’s affairs? It’s maybe ’cause it lets us explore fear and curiosity from a safe distance. We can create hypotheticals, we can talk about what we would do in that situation, and it can be interesting and curious and it can also be kind of confronting.

 

[00:03:24] Marie Vakakis: We can use other people’s stories to reflect on our own values and our own relationship. Sometimes with concern and worry, maybe sometimes with moral superiority of, oh, I would never do that, or my partner would never do that. We also want to know how to avoid pain and whether we’d react in the same way.

 

[00:03:40] Marie Vakakis: What we would do, what support might we have if that’s asked. Gossip and curiosity can serve a social function. And I’m not a big fan of this. I think it creates false intimacy in relationships, but it’s something we’re drawn to. We want to know what’s socially acceptable, what the social consequences are, and [00:04:00] that can fill.

 

[00:04:01] Marie Vakakis: Temporarily connecting. And there’s this concept called social referencing where we figure out what’s acceptable by watching how others behave, and then other people’s responses to how they, so this concept of social referencing can really play out here. So when there’s a cheating scandal in the news, whether it’s a celebrity or a politician, or someone in your local community, suddenly everyone has an opinion.

 

[00:04:25] Marie Vakakis: And you’ll hear things like, I’d leave straight away. That’s unforgivable. But underneath that, what we’re really doing is testing our own beliefs. We’re asking ourselves questions like, would I notice the signs? Would I forgive them? Could I ever do that to someone there? That social referencing where someone else’s experience to figure out what we think and how we might respond if this happened to us as a therapist, I used to think cheating was black and white, and I didn’t understand the nuance of it.

 

[00:04:53] Marie Vakakis: I didn’t understand the depth of. Despair in some relationships, and I didn’t understand that there’s actually a [00:05:00] lot of different ways you can betray trust in a relationship. This is just one of them. In practice, when I’m talking about infidelity, I’m seeing a lot of loneliness, heartbreak, regret, and.

 

[00:05:13] Marie Vakakis: People who are conflicted, who love their partner and feel emotionally starved. And there’s a beautiful quote from Esther Perez’s book, the State of Affairs, which I highly recommend. It’s a fascinating read. It doesn’t have to be for therapists, just for anybody. And she’s got this phrase or this quote, when we seek the gaze of another, it isn’t always our partner we are turning away from, but the person we have ourselves become.

 

[00:05:35] Marie Vakakis: And this is meaning affairs can be about reconnecting with a part of yourself. You feel that you’ve lost. It’s not always about something necessarily in the relationship. It’s not always about sex. It can often start with feeling understood, interested, and alive. And longing can often be at the center of that, a longing for admiration, appreciation, [00:06:00] excitement, feeling like you matter, playfulness, or curiosity.

 

[00:06:05] Marie Vakakis: And if those things aren’t named and expressed, they might get acted out somewhere else for the first. For the is betrayed. Whoa. It can feel like trauma symptoms might include panic, obsessive thoughts, sleep difficulties, flashbacks and research suggests that betrayal trauma can mirror PTSD and its impact.

 

[00:06:27] Marie Vakakis: If the nervous system becomes dysregulated, they have symptoms of anxiety and depression, and it can be significantly a significant impact to that person’s mental health. When I did my couples therapy training on treating a fez and trauma. I was actually quite astounded by the impact that this can have.

 

[00:06:46] Marie Vakakis: And now I, I kind of understand it as I was reading the, the workbook and the manual and doing the training, I was thinking, well, yeah, it makes sense if your partner that you trust and loved was lying to you and it’s has you questioning [00:07:00] your insanity. You, am I reading into things? Am I going crazy? I thought I said that.

 

[00:07:04] Marie Vakakis: Did I say that? Have, and so it can really create a hole. A challenge for that person to trust themselves, not just the other person, but to learn to trust themselves. Again, it’s a really big part of the healing. So the first priority in recovery isn’t making a decision necessarily straight away I’d, I’d actually say pause from that.

 

[00:07:24] Marie Vakakis: It’s safety and regulation. Don’t rush to fix the relationship straight away. Try and stabilise yourself what you need, take care of your mental health and your wellbeing. I’m going to talk a little bit more about recovery for an individual in just a moment. What does recovery for couples look like? Not every couple chooses to stay together after an affair.

 

[00:07:46] Marie Vakakis: That’s okay. That’s their choice. Recovery is not about going back to how things were. The old relationship is dead. It needs to be completely overhauled and have relationship 2.0. It’s about building something new, and this [00:08:00] takes time, honesty, emotional safety, and often professional support. The betrayed partner needs space to express hurt without being shut down.

 

[00:08:11] Marie Vakakis: The partner who had the affair needs to take responsibility and be transparent sometimes for those two things to happen. Each person needs their own support. If you cannot take responsibility without going into a total shame spiral, you might need some support to sit there in the discomfort that you caused pain to the person that you care about, and if you really want to recover and repair.

 

[00:08:36] Marie Vakakis: You need to sit in that long enough to hear them out, to have multiple conversations, yes, over days, weeks, months, maybe even years, and take responsibility. If you cannot do that, get some support. Find a way to be able to do it. The relationship itself needs to be examined. What was missing, avoided, or not spoken about?

 

[00:08:58] Marie Vakakis: Not as [00:09:00] justification for an affair. This happens later. You can re-look at and reexamine what went wrong and how you can rebuild relationship version two. Rebuilding trust requires consistent behavior, open communication, and emotional presence, and that’s hard for people to do. You might not be able to do it on your own.

 

[00:09:19] Marie Vakakis: You might need some professional support. Avoiding blame is important here, but so is acknowledging pain. Those two things can sit together. Couples therapy can sometimes help and hold space for couples to have these complex, nuanced, difficult conversation. And some couples do come out stronger. It requires deep work from both people.

 

[00:09:41] Marie Vakakis: The goal’s, not just forgiveness, it’s understanding reconnection and new agreements. In the couples therapy work that I do, we have three phases of recovery. We call it a tone attune, and attach. Atonement is taking full responsibility without excuses. We don’t know how long this phase will take. It could take [00:10:00] weeks, it could take months, but it’s the person who had the affair taking responsibility without excuses, answering questions honestly, and showing genuine remorse.

 

[00:10:09] Marie Vakakis: And then starting to rebuild a foundation of emotional safety. And then we have the attunement phase. This is exploring the emotional climate before the affair, naming needs that were missed, maybe unspoken, and learning to communicate with empathy and openness. And then there’s attachment that’s rebuilding physical intimacy, emotional intimacy, creating rituals of connection and making shared.

 

[00:10:37] Marie Vakakis: Meaning and planning for the future, but what happens if the relationship starts as an affair? So we’ve talked about, I’ve talked about what recovery can look like for a couple where one person has cheated. I will talk a little later about what to do if you are the person who’s been cheated on. But what happens when an affair, what happens when a relationship starts as an [00:11:00] affair?

 

[00:11:00] Marie Vakakis: These relationships can often feel intense, exciting, and emotionally validating. You feel maybe seen and interested wanted, especially if those needs felt unmet in your previous relationship. It can feel like the connection is next level, that there’s chemistry, there’s a tension, there’s energy. It’s hot, it’s spicy, it’s heat, and it often starts in secrecy, which kind of fuels the fantasy.

 

[00:11:25] Marie Vakakis: That person becomes more than just a person. They might become a symbol of escape or possibility. Affairs rarely begin with sex. Many start with an emotional connection, shared humor, vulnerability, or a sense of being understood, and you might tell yourself, this is what I have been missing, or now I finally feel alive.

 

[00:11:47] Marie Vakakis: This person gets me. It can. Catch you out, and I wanna give you an example, totally made up. But sometimes the thing that we love in someone can be the thing that pushes us away or drives us [00:12:00] batty or bonkers about them. But let’s say you met someone who was introverted and steady and they’re good to you and you liked that.

 

[00:12:08] Marie Vakakis: They were steady, they were always available. You could make plans and. They were happy to come along and over time, maybe you start getting frustrated. You want them to plan more date nights out. You wanna go to more events. You wanna have barbecues or friends over, and they’re not very interested. They’re rather happy to stay at home.

 

[00:12:27] Marie Vakakis: Then you start going to the gym and you meet someone who’s warm and outgoing and chatty, and they ask you about your day. They laugh at your jokes. They remember your name, and you find yourself looking forward to seeing them. You feel more confident and one day you are maybe hanging out after class.

 

[00:12:43] Marie Vakakis: Then there’s a message and then a drink, and then you start telling yourself, this person sees the real me. They get me. They. Wanna go out. They say they would love to have a partner who has dinner parties and they start to validate a thing that you feel isn’t being met. [00:13:00] And you start thinking, see, my needs aren’t unreason, my needs aren’t unreasonable.

 

[00:13:04] Marie Vakakis: This person gets it, and you leave your relationship and start something new. Maybe six months later, the spark fades and you are arguing about. Housework, feeling misunderstood and wondering if you made the right choice. And this will come up in a different number of forms, but problems show up in every relationship you might find.

 

[00:13:24] Marie Vakakis: You might feel that you’ve solved one problem by changing partners, but often the con conflict, it just shifts shape. We have. A term in couples therapy and gottman therapy called perpetual problems, and the research shows that 90, that 69%, so let’s say 70, rounds it up. It’s much easier. 70% of issues are ongoing.

 

[00:13:47] Marie Vakakis: Core differences follow us from one relationship to the next. We don’t solve them. We learned how to manage them. And changing partners doesn’t erase that. So what happens for a relationship that starts and as an affair, there [00:14:00] can be a significant amount of challenges. They are statistically far less likely to last.

 

[00:14:06] Marie Vakakis: Fewer than 7% lead to marriage. And out of those. Around 75% eventually separate. That means then that fewer than 2% of relationships that start as affairs actually last long term. These relationships often struggle with surprise, surprise, mistrust with secrecy and lack of emotional foundation, and there.

 

[00:14:30] Marie Vakakis: Missing foundations here. There’s communication habits, conflict resolution on shared rituals and routines that are missing that that foundation of the relationship was missing those things because it was started as an affair. The mistrust, if they cheated on me, will they? If they cheated with me, will they cheat on me?

 

[00:14:49] Marie Vakakis: There could be guilt, there could be shame, there could be secrecy lingering under the surface. And then there’s parts of the relationship that you might not have ever spoken about. You might have [00:15:00] talked about what you would like in a hypothetical relationship or in a future relationship or something you weren’t getting, but perhaps you weren’t clear about setting boundaries.

 

[00:15:08] Marie Vakakis: Or expectations or holding them accountable because everything was in secret. There was no need for that person to come pick you up from the airport. There was no issue around them. Maybe not helping you prepare meals for the week or showing up to your sister’s child’s dance recital. Those things weren’t happening, and perhaps you didn’t want to start a fight.

 

[00:15:28] Marie Vakakis: You didn’t want to have conflict in the relationship. That was your escape. So all of these things, the foundation of the relationship was built. It was built on dodgy foundations. So it can be really, really hard if you’re an individual. Recovery can be really hard too. It’s rebuilding trust in yourself, and that can be just as hard as building trust in the relationship.

 

[00:15:51] Marie Vakakis: You might question your own instincts, your memory, your boundaries, even your sense of reality. The emotional impact of betrayal can feel like a shock to [00:16:00] the system I mentioned those PTSD type symptoms. You might feel hypervigilant, anxious, numb, or deeply ashamed. And for some people it triggers the physiological responses that mirror trauma.

 

[00:16:12] Marie Vakakis: Sleep changes, appetite changes. Concentration can be affected. You might find it hard to feel safe again. I really encourage people if they’re going through this to get support. If you have friends that you can talk to, tell them that you just need to vent. You don’t want judgment. If you want distraction, ask for that too.

 

[00:16:32] Marie Vakakis: You might need to reduce your hours at work or take some time off and do things that help your body manage those physiological responses. It could be things like yoga, sound bath, healing, flotation tanks, going for long walks, swimming. Anything that helps your body process those physical responses, because it can leave a huge toll.

 

[00:16:55] Marie Vakakis: I’ve seen the impact of this, and it breaks people down. It is. [00:17:00] Horrific, and they need a lot of support. And if you’re a friend and someone’s going through this, don’t just say, what can I do to help? Maybe offer, can I bring you over some food? Would you like to spend some time venting? Or do you want a distraction?

 

[00:17:13] Marie Vakakis: Give them a few suggestions because they might not know. It might be really hard to make a suggestion to make a decision. Give them options of what you’re able to do and say, which one of these would you like? If you’re going through this, it’s really common to doubt your own reactions, your own rash, your whole self.

 

[00:17:32] Marie Vakakis: You just start doubting everything. You might feel pressured to move on or forgive or make a decision quickly, but recovery takes time. And some people feel such guilt for not seeing it coming or blaming themselves for the other person’s choices. So therapy can be really helpful. It can help you reconnect with your core values, your emotional needs, help you make sense of what’s happening without minimising or catastrophising, just laying it out.

 

[00:17:58] Marie Vakakis: To understand and sift [00:18:00] through and untangle understand the impact that this has had on your sense of self. Your safety and trust help you rebuild confidence in your own intuition and boundaries, and explore what safety, respect, and connection mean for you. Now. And that might help you decide what kind of relationship you want moving forward, either with your current partner or with someone else.

 

[00:18:22] Marie Vakakis: There is no one way to respond to infidelity. Some couples stay and rebuild while others leave and they heal separately. It’s important not to rush, not to avoid the pain, and I highly recommend getting some support. If you have a question that you want answered on the podcast, I’d love to hear from you.

 

[00:18:40] Marie Vakakis: I have another episode coming up very soon. Around what to do if you are the person in the affair. But I’ve been doing a whole bunch of work around couples and things like red flags. There was a whole series of those and some videos on YouTube. So go check those out and tell me what you wanna hear. I’d love to do an episode that resonates for you.