Everyone You Cheat With Is a Downgrade
When you're with someone for a long time, whether through a relationship or marriage, it's natural to feel saturated, bored, even unsatisfied. Every issue takes on outsized proportions, every minor argument spirals out of control, and before you know it, even talking to them starts to feel difficult. Sure, you course-correct, but this remains a recurring theme in every relationship.
This continues for as long as you live, regardless of who you're with. But when you meet someone new, when you're showered with more attention and care than you're accustomed to, when you feel more understood than you thought you were in your current relationship, it's natural to feel drawn to them.
This feels natural, but it isn't. It's incomplete, because there are no stakes. You aren't answerable to her. There are no expectations between you two. So everything feels effortless, serendipitous. But if you think about it, every time you decide to cheat on your partner for someone else, you're settling for less than you think. Barring a few exceptional situations, this holds true almost universally.
We seek out others because we want to feel better about ourselves, because we crave those butterflies in the stomach. There's nothing wrong with that need. But imagine choosing someone who, despite knowing your relationship status and presumably being in some relationship of her own, still chooses to go along with you. What does that say about her, from your perspective? And what does that say about you, from hers?
Someone who seeks novelty outside an existing relationship can never be reliable. What's to say they won't replace you with someone more romantic, more novel than you? And what's to say you wouldn't do the same to her? That's why people who cheat in relationships are almost never happy. Instead of resolving what they actually want, instead of working through the relationship, they choose escapism. This is the worst thing you can do.
That doesn't mean you never find someone better by looking elsewhere. There are rare, exceptional cases where you're genuinely in a bad relationship and someone shows you the light, someone with whom you finally feel like a better human being. In that case, your first duty is to end the previous relationship and lend legitimacy to the one you've chosen.
Affairs are more common than we realize, more common than we're willing to admit. But understand this: every time you choose someone over your wife or your long-term partner, you're choosing a lesser version of love. Because if someone can choose you over their partner, they can just as easily discard you for someone else. It never stops.