Treating the Affair Partner

Over the years, through my teaching, clinical work, and podcast conversations about relationships, I’ve worked with countless people grappling with infidelity. Along with helping couples navigate the aftermath of affairs, I’ve also been a therapist for (or friend to) people involved in affairs as the affair partner. And I’ve seen how the experience of affair partners gets sidelined or misrepresented in the shuffle of crisis, judgment, and attempts to end or repair a primary relationship. When it comes to infidelity, our culture—and our field—focuses mostly on the betraying and betrayed partner (I use the terms “affair partner,” “betraying partner,” and “betrayed partner” for clarity, though these labels oversimplify a complex reality.) In the process, we lose sight of the fact that there are three people involved in affairs: the one being cheated on, the one cheating, and the affair partner.

Affairs, like families, are dynamic systems. To understand them, we need to understand all the players, their needs and vulnerabilities, and their interconnectedness. Psychiatrist Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, one of the founders of family therapy, speaks of “multidirected partiality”—a practice of empathically considering the perspectives of each member of a relational system (including absent members).

Even if we, as therapists, have only a single person in our consulting room, we still need to hold space for the full relational system. And we need to consider how each person’s actions, wounds, and needs ripple through it—including the affair partner’s—to center both accountability and compassion in our work with the complexities of infidelity.

Making Sense of Cognitive Dissonance

We can begin thinking about the affair partner’s often neglected experience through the lens of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the friction and mental discomfort that result from holding two conflicting beliefs, values, or attitudes. We all have internal mechanisms that we use to resolve the discomfort of cognitive dissonance. We tell ourselves little lies to make something okay that’s not okay.

Sometimes, the affair partner tells themselves the story, “I’m single, so it’s okay.” Another story is, “I’m not responsible for their unhappy marriage.” And they’re not! The unhappy marriage of the betraying and betrayed partner likely started long before they entered the picture. It’s important to validate this and still help the affair partner get curious about how they’re resolving their cognitive dissonance and making it okay for themselves to engage in the affair.

If the affair is in the past, it likely ended quickly, either because one of the participants ended it or they got caught. Then, the experience goes underground. There’s a risk in burying one’s experience of an affair charged with shame, sadness, and confusion. The energy of the affair remains present, but the affair partner doesn’t get to learn from it. They don’t get to look at how they made it okay, or at how their past set them up to be drawn into this role, or at persistent internal messages they may need to confront.

As therapists, it’s not our job to make an ethical or moral declaration about the affair partner or their choices. But we can take a page from the Sufi poet Rumi, who wrote: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” That’s the field we want to enter with the affair partner. It’s a place where exploration serves healing.

Amplifying the Four Whispers

Affair partners give themselves one or more of four messages simply by virtue of choosing to be in the affair dynamic. I call them the “four whispers” because even though many people try to ignore or override them, they’re still present, and they’re important to challenge.

I can stay focused on the narrow. One of the first things that affair partners have to do is keep their lens tightly focused on just the two of them. If they widen the lens and look at all of what the other person is putting in jeopardy by being with them, that would create the conditions for guilt, shame, and overwhelm. When they tighten their lens—when they just focus on right here, right now—it’s a coping mechanism protecting them from those feelings.

But it’s a risk because they’re cutting their own awareness short. Any relationship is complicated, with a lot going on at any given moment. Having a big, wide expanse of awareness and making space for all the truths—that’s a skill we need to have healthy, vibrant relationships. When affair partners narrow their awareness in an attempt to quiet cognitive dissonance, that cuts them off from access to their own inner knowing. And that inner knowing, that wisdom, is what can guide them to the next right thing.

I can reduce my own empathy. To participate in an affair, affair partners protect themselves emotionally by cutting themselves off from any empathic narrative about the partner who’s being betrayed. If they were to put themselves in the betrayed partner’s shoes, they’d feel compassion. The goal isn’t to push them to feel guilty or ashamed but to invite their awareness to the parts of themselves they shrink or cut off from to take on this role.

I can participate in duplicity. It’s our birthright to stand in our own integrity, which has been defined as “the state of being whole and undivided.” Participation in infidelity compromises wholeness. Affair partners are divided. They’re participating in something that’s cut off, disintegrated. Lies and deceit take us out of internal alignment. Affair partners deserve to move through the world without secrets. They deserve to experience themselves as honest.

Being near someone who lies is another way affair partners compromise themselves—they put themselves in a space where they collaborate with and witness deceit. In doing so, they’re giving themselves the message that their own integrity doesn’t matter.

I’d challenge affair partners to look at how that pattern creeps into other parts of their life, or has been there all along in other ways. When the affair partner was growing up, did they watch the adults in their home keep secrets? Did they watch them live a double life or live out of integrity? If so, it makes sense that they’re drawn to someone who’s doing the same. That absence of wholeness feels familiar, feels like love. Paradoxically, it feels safe.

I deserve only crumbs. Being an affair partner means telling oneself, “I’m not worthy of a relationship that’s out in the open, in the light.” This isn’t a moral judgment. It’s not even about the marriage that the affair is endangering. It’s about what the affair partner is telling themselves about their own worthiness.

Affair partners often “agree” to be affair partners because they’ve had experiences in their life that have left them believing they’re unworthy of something whole. What began as vulnerability contributed to an experience that then reinforces the original vulnerability. How can they bring compassionate awareness to that reality—that there may be something from the past they’re at risk of perpetuating, something they’re reinforcing by participating in an affair?

Unpacking the Draw of Being an Affair Partner

It’s crucial to understand these whispers. But it’s also important to understand what draws someone into this role in the first place. I’ve noticed three ways this role can be compelling: goodness-of-fit, object of desire self-consciousness, and redo of a childhood wound.

Goodness-of-fit. With any relationship, there’s always an element of timing—what are we available for at this moment? What was going on when a person stepped into being an affair partner? Infidelity isn’t just one choice—it’s a series of boundary crossings. Affair partners can think about the timing of these boundary crossings that led them to get to where they are now.

It may be that they were coming out of a relationship where they themselves were cheated on, and a piece of them was drawn to playing out the “other” role. Or they might be interested in romantic and erotic connection. Sex therapist Jack Morin came up with the “erotic equation”: attraction plus obstacles equals excitement. There’s no bigger obstacle than risk and secrecy. By participating in an affair, they get this little slice of a person without feeling a sense of responsibility toward them.

Object of desire self-consciousness. This idea was developed by psychologists Anthony Bogaert and Lori Brotto and is somewhat gendered. Nonetheless, research has shown that many people, especially cisgendered heterosexual women, are turned on by being wanted or desired. Their turn on isn’t so much about the other person as it is about them seeing the other person want them. There’s some ego engagement here with a situation where this person is risking it all—family, marriage, livelihood, reputation—just to be with them. For someone with object of desire self-consciousness, the role of an affair partner is an enormous libido spiker.

But object of desire self-consciousness can play out no matter one’s gender and gender expression. Here, affair partners can get curious about what it’s like to be wanted so badly that somebody would take such a huge risk for them. What does that do to their sexual desire? What might be a more aligned way for them to play with this energy that involves less risk and harm?

Redo of a childhood wound. As Esther Perel says, “When we seek another in an affair, it isn’t always our partner that we’re turning away from but the person we’ve become. We’re not looking for another person as much as another version of ourselves.” The betraying partner seeks something in the affair partner’s gaze. Even if they don’t understand what the betraying partner seeks through their connection, they feel their power. And power can be intoxicating. It can feel like an antidote to early experiences of feeling powerless, ignored, and unimportant.

I think of our families of origin as our original love classrooms. It’s where we learned who we are and what relationships should be like. Can the affair partner get curious about what they might be trying to master or understand by repeating an old, family story? Sometimes the family of origin wound that draws someone into being the affair partner is about craving specialness. If a person always felt like they came second fiddle to an older sibling or a parent’s career or a parent’s addiction, being the affair partner feels familiar. And when a wound isn’t healed, familiarity is equated with safety. So even though being second choice is painful, this dynamic might feel familiar, and paradoxically comfortable.

Alternately, maybe they were the special one, the chosen one, the golden child. Being the Golden Child isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It comes with a lot of pressure, and often, it also means they were put smack dab in the middle of their parents’ secrets, carrying the emotional load of things they shouldn’t have had to carry. Here, being the affair partner feels familiar. They’re drawn into this strange and special place of someone else’s drama.

Alongside the thrill of infidelity is the chaos and danger of it all. Instability is built into an affair. For those who grew up in homes where there was a lot of unpredictability, this feels familiar (and therefore, once again, paradoxically safe) to their nervous system.

Moving into Alignment

The growth edge for affair partners is learning how to work with their nervous system so they can build a capacity for true emotional safety and consistency. And then, eventually, it’s consistency and wholeness that become their new normal. For affair partners who can get clear on how they’ve resolved their cognitive dissonance and unpack what the draw has been for them in being an affair partner, moving into wholeness and alignment with oneself becomes a far more accessible option. Here are concrete action steps affair partners can take:

Do the hard, right thing. The hard thing for the affair partner to do is say, “I’m stepping away from this for my own sake. I’m stepping away so you get the space you may need to figure out what you want to do about your marriage.” And that’s the right thing to do because in stepping away, the affair partner is saying something powerful and healing to themselves: I deserve alignment. I deserve peace. I deserve wholeness. I deserve to be in the sunlight.

This isn’t about giving anyone an ultimatum. The affair partner can even say to the betraying partner, “Listen, if at some point you’ve ended the relationship, grieved it, gained understanding of what’s going on, and figured out your integrity, then perhaps we can talk! I can’t promise I’ll wait for you, but I’m wishing you well from a distance.”

When the affair partner does step away, a big shift will likely happen in the primary relationship. The affair partner has been what couples therapist Terry Real calls a “misery stabilizer.” Their presence has likely siphoned off some of the betraying partner’s unhappiness and contributed to homeostasis. In stepping away, the affair partner has disrupted the system.

Hold firm boundaries. The betraying partner is going to need time and space to wrap up that relationship, grieve, and feel their way into themselves again. The transition from an affair to an above-board relationship is very difficult. Holding a clear boundary—”I don’t want to hear from you until you’re fully out of the other relationship, you’ve done your own healing work and I’ve done mine”—is the only vehicle that holds the possibility of a future relationship.

It’s hard to do this. When I work with infidelity, I often pull from an addiction lens. The energy and excitement of secrecy is a neurologically compelling brew. The affair partner’s work is to do the next right thing and then the next right thing after that. They can accumulate minutes, hours, and days where they’ve practiced sobriety from the affair dynamics with firm, clear boundaries.

Write yourself a letter. As the affair partner steps away from the relationship, I might encourage them to write themselves a letter. They can write about their understanding of what in their history may have set them up to become an affair partner, and why they decided to step away. They can offer themselves compassion, reminding themselves that they forgot how whole they already were, not that they’re inherently bad.

They can write about what it’s like in their body to abstain from lies and from being next to somebody who participates in lies. If the betraying partner reaches out to them, or they feel the urge to reach out, the affair partner can reread this letter, reconnecting with the reasons they’ve made the choice to step away.

Grieve. Self-compassion opens us to grief because we can’t grieve from a place of shame or defiance. We grieve from a place of reckoning with our humanity and vulnerability. There’s plenty of grief to go around: for how the affair partner lost themself, for how they participated in something that likely did a lot of harm, even for the fact that maybe they didn’t know better. From grief, they can figure out next steps. Grief has a way of being incredibly clarifying.

Get support. Infidelity is common, but we don’t have a lot of publicly shared stories about infidelity or recovering from it. Affair partners need to have one or two people who can hear their story and see their humanity, whether a therapist or a trusted friend. They shouldn’t carry this alone; that’s how shame grows.

Fill the void. Ending and stepping away from an affair leaves a vacuum. There’s space inside of the affair partner, not only in the form of time—of the hours and days they used to spend with the betraying partner—but also an emotional void from all the ways the relationship served them. Because affairs are built on thrills and secrecy, it’s important to explore how to fill this void with things that are adaptive and nourishing but still carry the energy of novelty and palpable thrills. This might be playing a sport, dancing, or being adventurous and creative in some other way that’s inspiring and exciting.

Affair partners deserve wholeness, love, and embodiment. And they deserve support in widening their lens of understanding so they can move forward with clarity and self-compassion.

This article was adapted from an episode of Alexandra Solomon’s podcast, Reimagining Love, originally aired in 2024.