I once believed that cheating was rare, but I now know it isn’t. It’s hard to get accurate statistics on the subject, mainly because it’s a covert activity that people aren’t proud of and don’t want judgment about, so they keep it to themselves or, at most, tell a best friend or a few trusted others.

No matter who you are, you know it’s wrong, and since most people will fight to the death not to be seen as villains or having done bad things, they’ll deny the ugly truth of what they’ve done unless caught in bed in the buff with another person by their spouse. And even then, I’ve observed people trying to deny it — “It’s not what it looks like!”

Of course, married men and women seen in photos doing something inappropriate with another will claim it’s been photoshopped. Many years ago, I had a male client whose wife received time-lapse photos of him receiving a massage with a happy ending from a man, taken by the man, obviously, and my client used the Photoshop excuse. Good luck with that, people. I fully expect someone to blame artificial intelligence soon; marriage therapists do not thank you, technology.

And you wonder why I won’t believe you if you minimize or deny an affair?

Yes, I’ve heard it all; every excuse known to man and woman, and even when an unfaithful partner does admit to the dirty deed of cheating, I will be showered in a spray of minimalization until I almost drown: It only happened one time, it was a nothing-burger, we just kissed and petted only, or they wanted to have sex badly but in the end, decided not to.

Right. Don’t insult my intelligence, and you know what? There’s usually no point in getting to the truth details because pulling it out of someone clamped down in a sexual cover-up is as difficult to find and as elusive as a white peacock. Will I waste time and energy looking for it, or go ahead and know it exists, treat it as if it exists, and stop the search? Surely you can guess the answer. Bottom line: If you admit to a minor marital betrayal, I will assume it was way worse, and I don’t know that I have ever been wrong.

There are statistics on how many married people committed adultery, but I doubt their accuracy for the reasons I just listed. For example, according to the General Social Survey GSS, a nonpartisan research organization dedicated to “understanding the world” and studying the “complexity of American society. “Twenty percent of men and 13 percent of women reported cheating,” and if that low number is correct, I’ll eat my favorite handbag. I don’t know how many people have extramarital sex exactly, but I have my own stats on cheating, all made up in my head. My opinion, based on my experience as a human and marriage therapist, is a hell of a lot of people cheat. More than most of us can imagine.

There are different levels and types of affairs, from being very serious and potentially marriage-ending to not marriage-ending. A one-night stand is the easiest to recover from, and long-term love affairs are the most difficult. You can take a love affair to an even higher level of impossibility to heal if the affair took place with a family member or among close friends. I have seen both numerous times.

Research tells us that 75 percent of couples recover after an affair is revealed, although it is likely to take a long time to heal if ever they do. Some scenarios are far more hopeful than others. The two things that are true for everyone, however, are that cheaters lie and minimize, and that’s another reason I won’t believe you when you start doing that in front of me.

Infidelity in marriage crisis, or, don’t you lie to me, and more about why I won’t believe you.

A phenomenon I have long noticed is that once a person decides there is no hope for the marriage they are in, over nine in 10 people line up a romance — serious, not serious, or somewhere in the grey area — that will serve as a stepping stone out of the marriage. Having a romantic partner to lean on through the pre-divorce and post-divorce period gives a person the courage to leave and stay the course of the ending process. When I see a person who has recently changed their behavior or appearance, turned their back on the marriage, and has no interest in marriage therapy, I look in the barn to see if rats are eating the grain.

When I first started out in marriage therapy, I was far too trusting and wanted to believe people who said they had not cheated when all indicators said they had, and I was played the fool over and over. Yes, Becky was duped, lied to, and misled. Many times. I look back at neophyte therapist Becky with a loving eye, but she’s had to come a long way. No longer do I believe the baloney and bullshit thrown at me by people who have every appearance of having cheated and who tell me they didn’t. Nowadays, I assume the worst and refuse to argue with people about it. It’s the only sane way to work.

What constitutes the marital felony of cheating, infidelity, or adultery? For my purposes in helping couples work out their problems, I define it as “Any secretive, erotic activity with a person outside the marriage.” That includes talking, writing, texting, emailing, video chats, etc. Emotional connection, touching, and having sex qualify, of course, but are not necessary to meet the definition.

Suzie and Royce, one is a poster child for telling lies about cheating.

Suzie and her husband Royce came to me after he had found her writing a text message to another man. With this discovery, the marital shit hit the fan, and they were in a full-board marital crisis. With the inappropriate texting disclosed, Suzie said all she had done was text with the man, but in her post-revelation place, she was in a defiant mood and laid brutal honesty on the table concerning her marriage … she admitted to being miserable in the relationship for a long time, and knew she wanted to separate. She hoped to work things out with Royce but wasn’t sure she could. She had no interest in marriage therapy for now and just wanted space.

After all these years of experience with couples, I see things.

“Was Suzie “only texting” and acting like this?” I asked myself. It made no sense. With her back turned solidly away from her marriage and no interest in marriage therapy, her actions told me she was involved with someone in a more serious relationship. The only thing to do, the best thing, was to check the grain in the barn.

Although it’s not my favorite suggestion, I told Royce he’d be wise to look around. I would never ask this of anyone unless there were suspected lies, serious trust issues, and a need to get to the truth. I say the same thing to all my marriage crisis clients who come to see me alone, hoping to avoid a divorce they don’t desire.

In our conversation, they describe the new and different behaviors their spouse had been exhibiting.

“Are they cheating?” I ask.

“I asked and they said they aren’t,” they respond.

“Hmm, I’d check if I were you.”

In the scenario above, I already know my client’s spouse is cheating and lying about it, but so many betrayed spouses believe their partner’s lies, so stop doing that and listen up.

Like my other clients, I wanted Royce to poke around a little for his own sake so he could practice self-care and decide what was best for him and their young children; he’d need to know if there was more going on than Suzie would admit to figure out how to proceed in the healthiest way.

Within a few days, Royce discovered the man’s identity and found a love letter Suzie wrote to him. She had professed her undying love to the man she was “only texting.”

She addressed her married affair partner in the letter using prose possibly plagiarized from a dimestore romance novel, filled with passion, longing, and a determined desire for a future together. Suzie was busted as misleading us about the seriousness of her affair, but her response was to remain defiant. Although she lived in the same town as and worked near her cheating partner and had been caught lying about various things already at least six or seven times, she wanted me to believe that after all of the lies and deception and the numerous make-out meetings she admitted to, she had drawn the line at sexual intercourse. Really? When I expressed skepticism with her story, she began pounding the table with her fist and clinching her teeth angrily, “I did not have sex with that man!”

“Doth thou protest too much?” I thought.

Anyway, my thinking is that if you are in an emotional affair with someone who lives within 100 miles of you, you are having sexual intercourse, and don’t tell me otherwise. I’ve been around and done this too long. Still, to save myself the misery of listening to lies and minimizations, I tried to shut Suzie down from her sanctimonious stance that she was ‘in an affair but pure sexually,’ but it enraged her even more.

“It doesn’t matter if you did, and I sincerely don’t care,” I told her. “Even if we take out the idea of cheating and sex with another in a situation like this, it is already as bad or damaging as it gets as far as betrayal and lying goes. I mean, you did send a letter to a married man with children saying you have never felt this way about anyone and would wait for him to leave his family for as long as it takes. That’s pretty awful betrayal-wise if you two break up one another’s marriages, so whether you fornicated or not is not worth quibbling about.” And it isn’t.

Credibility. Now, the roaches of betrayal arrive.

Once numerous lies have been uncovered, how could anyone think they have one shred of credibility in the therapy room? They don’t, and that’s why I shut down talking about it and move on to something else, like, how are we going to manage this mess so that the innocent children in these families have the best possible outcome? I am also concerned about the betrayed spouse being put through a nightmarish separation period where they could possibly be misled into thinking there is hope.

I don’t like couples like Suzie and Royce to separate, at least how I help people do it. Suzie was leaning as far out of the marriage as she could be and was distracted by and in love with a third party, and I highly suspect she has no intention of ever working things out with Royce. The primary separations I manage are for people who hope to reconcile, have just hit rock bottom, and want to find a way back up if possible.

I have a separation agreement for couples who have decided to divorce, and I gave one to Royce and Suzie, along with the one designed to tilt couples toward reconciliation, which I don’t think they’ll use. When a third party is involved, a person like Suzie won’t approach the situation with an eye toward saving the marriage and repairing herself. She is far more likely looking forward to having time to sneak away with the other cheating spouse. In this case, the reconciliation-oriented agreement will be a waste of time. P.S. If you ever question or suggest that they may be using this opportunity for less than honest reasons, they will rise up from the depths of hell in anger and rage — another “Thou doth protest too much” scenario.

My concerns about Royce and Suzie using my managed separation for the wrong reasons are:

1) Suzie is showing every sign of heading toward an eventual divorce and no sign of interest in reconciliation.

2) She clearly wants to control how others see her by controlling the narrative.

3) She wants to be the one who decides and controls if they stay together or divorce and when. (Royce has said if he finds out she has had sex with the other man, it will be a deal-killer.)

3) There is a good chance she has already decided to divorce Royce.

4) Part of controlling her story is to put on a show for her family and children so she can say they did all they could to save the marriage, even though she never intended to work it out.

Only Royce can decide if he wants to endure a long separation process that might prolong his healing and is not likely to produce the desired outcome in exchange for the infinitesimal chance that Suzie will return to a different state of heart and mind. The important thing is for Royce to get clarity on the truth of Suzie’s love affair, the odds against her wanting to reconcile, and decide what’s healthiest for him within that dynamic.

If you cheat, you will lie, and that is that.

I can’t help people who lie and hold back important details. It creates skepticism within me about the accuracy of anything they say and hampers everything we’re trying to do. In my work, dealing with the truth is important and can help even the playing field. After all, when a person thinks of leaving their marriage, they have temporary leverage over the person they are considering leaving. If we find out that they are in an emotional or sexual relationship, they are likely to lose that leverage, and now, I have something to work with on an equal playing field with two players who have not handled the issues in their marriage in the best ways. The only obstacle, though, as mentioned previously, is that a cheater who has been revealed will either be humble or defiant. If they aren’t humble, the odds of saving the relationship will be bleak.

Are unfaithful people bad people?

Is the person lying and betraying an irredeemable villain and scumbucket? Of course not, and I want to address the subject of feeling compassion toward any unfaithful person I work with. Yes, I do have and feel it. I understand the context in which cheating usually occurs, including loveless and cruel marriages, loneliness, neglect, unreasonableness, addictions, and more. I’m sure Suzie’s husband wasn’t the greatest. I could see many things about him that would wear on someone, but there are no justifications for cheating; it is my least favorite way for people to handle their marriage problems.

People like Suzie are defiant because they want to control the narrative. She is a mother, wife, and cherished family member in a profession where integrity matters. She wants desperately to be seen as a good person who is in emotional pain and has good reasons to step away from Royce and her marriage. She was fighting not to see herself or have others view her in an unflattering light or be seen as a person who has betrayed her family for her own emotional needs.

As I always say, people like Suzie had a chance at being seen more sympathetically had she worked out her marriage one way or the other before the infidelity. If your marriage was a nightmare and you cheated, however, you become a much less compelling figure in the story than had you not cheated. The decision as is will not work in her favor if she chooses to divorce Royce, and especially not if she ends up with her lover, who has a family of his own he would be leaving. His future ex wife and Royce will likely not want to make their new life together easy, and their children will resent the stepparent who played a major part in breaking their original family apart. The odds against it working for anyone’s benefit over the long term are slim.

Have a question? If you have a subject you’d like to see me write about or a situation you might want to present that I could discuss in a blog, please email me at Becky@DoctorBecky.com.

We’ve got lots of news and exciting things going on in the relationship realm … so I’m preparing to send a regular newsletter with the best relationship advice on the planet. To get on my email list, click here.

Becky Whetstone, Ph.D., is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Arkansas and Texas* and is known as America’s Marriage Crisis Manager®. She is a former features writer and columnist for the San Antonio Express-News and has worked with thousands of couples to save their marriages. She can work with you, too, as a life coach if you’re not in Texas or Arkansas. She is also co-host of the YouTube Call Your Mother Relationship Show and has a telehealth private practice as a therapist and life coach via Zoom. To contact her, check out www.DoctorBecky.com and www.MarriageCrisisManager.com. Also, here is how to find her work on the Huffington Post. Don’t forget to follow her on Medium so you don’t miss a thing!

For licensure verification, find Becky Whetstone Cheairs.

A marriage crisis has to be one of the most frightening experiences a couple can have. It begins when the partner, whom I call The Decider, tells their spouse, whom I call the Leaning-in partner, that they think they want a divorce or need time away.

In a few moments, everything forever changes for the couple. The Decider’s autonomic nervous system is firing, and they are in flight mode, feeling an urgent need to get away from the Leaning-in Partner. Once the news is revealed, the Leaning-in Partner’s nervous system becomes activated, too, and they go into fight mode. The Decider’s brain tells them there is a survival threat and to run for their life, and the Leaning-in partner’s brain says there is a survival threat and to fight for the marriage. Unfortunately, the need to get away from one spouse and the instinct to chase after the leaving spouse have opposing purposes, and that’s where I come in.

At this point, things could quickly go south and get worse. The first step is to call a marriage crisis manager like me. We can coach each of you so that the situation can be stabilized, mistakes can be avoided, and intelligent decisions can be made. What we ask of you will be counterintuitive and difficult, but doing these things will give you the best chance at reconciliation or an amicable parting.

How I became interested in marriage crisis management.

I started helping couples manage marriage crises over 20 years ago. I started doing it because there was a huge need for it. For eons, marriage therapy theories centered around helping heal broken marriages, teaching communication skills, and changing patterns of behaviors that don’t work, but when it came to one person so fed up that they were seriously thinking of leaving, the average marriage therapist had no idea what to do or how to help. I learned that the hard way in 1992 when I was The Decider, and our marriage therapist sent us away, saying, “If you get motivated to work on your marriage, Becky, call me back.” Really? My gut told me there had to be something else, but the Internet was not readily available then, and I had no way to figure it out. We were left to separate and manage our crisis ourselves, made a huge mess of everything (of course), and ended up divorced when I know now there were things we should have tried before giving up. Our children certainly deserved better.

Since I knew there was a need for this type of expertise, and I was endlessly fascinated with the subject, I decided to prepare myself to do this work. In 2001, I was a single mom, left my journalism career, and entered graduate school to become a marriage and family therapist. Never considering myself the scholarly type, I intended to get my master’s degree and leave it at that, but my best friends in my cohort begged me to keep going along with them, and three years later, I got my doctorate — thanks, guys.

During five years of graduate school, whenever I had a choice of subject for a research paper or presentation, I focused on marriage crisis, separation, the decision to divorce, and the effects of divorce on family members. I also spent one solid year studying the subject for my dissertation in 2005. What I learned that year blew my mind, and I felt an urgent need to get this information into the mainstream, knowing it would help people make wiser decisions about their marriages.

I wanted to write a book for a mainstream audience and sent out book proposals to agents nationwide, attended writer’s conferences, met book agents in person, and not one person was interested in representing a nonfiction book on marriage crisis. “Too negative,” was the most frequent response.” “Maybe, but only if there is a happy ending where the troubled marriage can be saved,” said some. And, my favorite, “Great topic, you are qualified, but your social media following isn’t strong enough and you’re not famous.”

About the topic being negative, I thought, “Some stories don’t have Disney movie endings, some marriages will not be saved, some might can be saved that otherwise would have ended with this information, and the reality of the situation is marriage crisis is a very tough and unpleasant subject indeed, but does that mean people should not have access to the good information available to them when the shit hits the fan in their marriage? With the right information and some luck, couples that would have divorced might be able to resolve their marriage issues and reconcile in a way where the post-crisis era is better and healthier than any other stage of their marriage.

Marriage problems and crisis: the subject no one wants to talk about.

Like cancer, no one wants to read about marriage crises unless they’re being directly affected by it. I try telling my friends about my soon-to-be book being published at long last, and their eyes glaze over. I understand; it doesn’t interest you if you’re not in a marriage crisis yourself. But when it happens to you, you will obsessively search for any information you can find, and there isn’t much. My book will correct that wrong, and in the meantime, I write this blog about it and have a website completely dedicated to the subject. I hope my book will clear the way for more like it that will help people when they look for the best solution for their marriage crisis. There has to be.

In 2022, there were 673,989 divorces across 45 U.S. states (1). Unfortunately, not every state reports these numbers yearly, and I am betting that every single one of those marriages that ended experienced a marriage crisis. This leaves out the marriage crisis experienced in the other five states and the situations where couples did not legally divorce, so there is a strong need for information on what to do when one spouse comes in the room and says they are unhappy and are considering divorce.

Divorcing couples and those thinking about it is a huge audience, and why book publishers, television shows, and magazines believe the reality of the marriage crisis is too negative to focus on, even though the information could save numerous families from breaking up, is something that doesn’t make sense or sit well with me. Maybe my book, which covers the subject completely and will be published by HCI Books, will open their eyes. The blog I wrote, an excerpt from that book, has had tens of thousands of readers and more every day. If that doesn’t speak to the need for solid information on what to do in a marriage crisis, nothing does.

Preventing a marriage crisis.

In the months and years before a marriage crisis, both partners are usually keenly aware that they have marital problems, but one person in the marriage either thinks the issues aren’t that serious or that their partner will never leave. This miscalculation, or perhaps denial, prevents the person who will later become the Leaning-in partner from doing any hard work on themselves or directly dealing with marital conflicts in a significant way when there was still a chance the unhappy marriage could have been turned around.

If I could tell anyone in a struggling marriage one thing, it would be do not ignore pleas for change from your spouse. Take their concerns seriously, and address what you can. If you think the requests aren’t reasonable, go to marriage counseling and ask them for an opinion. I hear unreasonable requests sometimes, and I have to tell the person who wants more than what is reasonable that they’re out of line. But if the requests are reasonable, be responsive. The lack of responsiveness for course corrections in marriage will always trip you up in the end, trust me. Why? If you aren’t responsive, your partner will experience a loss of hope, which leads a couple down the path to a marriage crisis; once you hit that point, the odds drastically lower that your marriage can be rescued.

I don’t know what you or anyone else thinks of marriage therapy or reasons people choose not to go, but I’ve talked to enough people to know that a lot of people think it is for couples who are in a really, really bad place with deep-seated real issues that are serious and marriage threatening. Not so.

Marriage therapists can keep you from getting to that place if you come in soon enough before damage and resentments have piled high. Human beings are not born with relationship skills, unfortunately, and there are few places to learn them, that’s why I think every married couple should consider it relationship school. Perhaps it would be more universally acceptable if we called it relationship university rather than marriage therapy. If people did get professional help, there would be fewer marriage crises and divorces, and our close friends and family members and the world would thank us.

Honestly, maybe you weren’t cut out for marriage.

Some people aren’t cut out for marriage but don’t know it. My dad was one of those people. In his head, he wanted marriage and ten children. When it came down to application, he married a woman he wasn’t crazy about because he got her pregnant — hey, in 1940, he thought it was the right thing to make an honest woman out of her.

They had five children over 17 years, not ten, and the last couple of kids he wished had never been born; they were unintended. He hated the noise and shenanigans of children; he wasn’t playful and didn’t relate to them on any level, and they could tell. As a child, I saw him as stiff and serious, like a funeral director.

How many times he cheated on my mother is a number too high to imagine or know. I know of at least ten just in my lifetime, and I was the baby. The stories of angry husbands calling my mother to say dad was fooling around with his wife were numerous. I always wonder how my life would have been different if I’d had two parents who loved and respected one another and role-modeled a healthy relationship, a warm, fun, adoring, and affectionate dad, and a confident, nurturing mom.

People like my dad are so self-oriented, entitled, and focused on their own needs that they weren’t designed for a give-and-take relationship. They find it a burden to sacrifice for others. That’s fine; acknowledge your need for freedom and independence, and don’t inflict yourself on others and make their lives miserable with your inability to be relational. Some of these things can be repaired in trauma therapy if you put in the effort, and the truth is, I wish every person would go to trauma therapy to get insight into the areas where they may have emotional disabilities — I think everyone would be surprised at what they’d learn.

I always tell my clients that you marry someone as is, so make sure the person you select is healthy, kind, relational, and has integrity before you say the vows. I’d love to see adults prepare themselves mentally, emotionally, and spiritually to be healthy in relationships before they go seeking them.

Other people who might want to do some work before putting their dating shingle out are those who are needy, anxious, or avoidant-attached, moody, or controlling, have unrealistic expectations, have no interest in meeting their spouse’s needs, are masters of the blame game, and feel entitled to do what they want when they want. All these are signs of emotional immaturity; as I always say, marriage is for grown-ups.

Sometimes, time apart done the right way can save marriages: The Managed Separation Agreement.

​When a couple in crisis calls and I visit with them, I often see one person experiencing a crescendo of stress and needing to get away from their partner while the other has fallen into an obsessive need to win them back.

I experienced this myself long ago with my children’s dad, and it’s a common problem in marriage crises. When this happens, a person’s sympathetic nervous system is firing, and their brain sends the message that there is a survival threat. When I hit the peak of stress, I felt my husband’s energy in the house, and when I felt it, it overwhelmed me to the point where I felt I might die. Seriously. When a person feels like that, they can’t make sense of anything, and the best thing for all involved, even if you have young children, is to take a break, not make any major decisions, but spend some time apart so the Decider can come out of their stressful state where rational conversations can take place.

Because so many couples who separate on their own make so many errors in the process, I created a plan for doing it that has a purpose and a timeline.* It ensures that couples don’t end up in separation limbo and do the necessary things to lead them to the right decision about their marriage. The managed separation agreement I created has rules to follow, a timeline, and requirements for each person to be in individual therapy throughout and touching base with a marriage crisis manager, usually a marriage therapist familiar with the process, who ensures that everything is proceeding forward. This is the only way I know to deal with a marriage crisis intelligently and in a way where mistakes and regrets are avoided.

The marriage therapy profession always needed something like this to help couples on the brink when the Decider didn’t actually want to work on the marriage at that moment and wasn’t sure they wanted to divorce. This fills the gap and serves to escort them through it. If you know anyone in a marriage crisis, let them know it’s available.

• If a couple decides to part permanently, I have also created a plan for an amicable divorce. It’s available here.

.(1) CDC/NCHS National Vital Statistics System.

Have a question? If you have a subject you’d like to see me write about or a situation you might want to present that I could discuss in a blog, please email me at Becky@DoctorBecky.com.

We’ve got lots of news and exciting things going on in the relationship realm … so I’m preparing to send a regular newsletter with the best relationship advice on the planet. To get on my email list, click here.

Becky Whetstone, Ph.D., is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Arkansas and Texas* and is known as America’s Marriage Crisis Manager®. She is a former features writer and columnist for the San Antonio Express-News and has worked with thousands of couples to save their marriages. She can work with you, too, as a life coach if you’re not in Texas or Arkansas. She is also co-host of the YouTube Call Your Mother Relationship Show and has a telehealth private practice as a therapist and life coach via Zoom. To contact her, check out www.DoctorBecky.com and www.MarriageCrisisManager.com. Also, here is how to find her work on the Huffington Post. Don’t forget to follow her on Medium so you don’t miss a thing!

For licensure verification, find Becky Whetstone Cheairs.