Cheater cheater

First time then second time then third time then ...

The first time Jonathan cheated on his wife, he felt terrible about it.

It was a mistake, he acknowledged. It was wrong to have done it. He struggled with his guilt, and he even thought about confessing what he’d done.

But then he decided that doing that would be selfish, more about unburdening himself than making amends.

Besides, Jonathan told himself, this had been a one-time thing. An aberration. He’d made a mistake, but he wasn’t going to repeat it. He’d spend a lifetime making up for it.

The second time Jonathan cheated, he felt badly again.

Clearly, something was wrong, he thought. In his heart, he knew he wasn’t normally the kind of person who cheated.

But he had to admit that he was dealing with powerful forces.

Whatever it was that had driven him to cheat — attraction, lust, boredom, anger, whatever — yes, the cheating itself had been wrong, but it was just as important to be honest about what was behind it all.

He thought to himself: I’m not exactly the first guy who ever cheated. The entire course of human history is full of stories like these.

The third time Jonathan cheated, he felt a little less badly.

Put this transgression against all the positive things that he’d done in life, he realized, and on balance he was a good person. He wouldn’t let it define him.

Plus, there were at least three people involved here: Jonathan, and his wife, and the person (or people) with whom he’d cheated. Jonathan wasn’t saying everyone was equally culpable, but they were all adults making adult complex decisions and responding to adult circumstances.

Besides: WHY ARE YOU ON HIS CASE ABOUT THIS?!!!

OK, this seems about the time to take a step back from Jonathan and take a step toward science and research.

Because the whole scenario above is meant to demonstrate what a psychological study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships says happens to men who cheat — specifically where their minds lead them.

Cassandra Alexopoulos, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, surveyed 1,514 male users of the highly controversial website Ashley Madison, which is literally set up to help married people have affairs.

About 425 of the men Alexopoulos surveyed agreed to a second survey a month later.

Apparently, these men were quite forthcoming about how often they used the site, and how often they “engaged in various online and face-to-face behaviors with someone other than their primary romantic partner.”

In short, the pattern of behavior that I tried to describe with our apocryphal story about Jonathan (to be 100 percent clear, I made Jonathan up to prove a point; he’s not based on anyone in real life) is exactly what she saw.

Among the kinds of things the men in her research told themselves, she wrote:

• “Being unfaithful never hurt anyone.”

• “I feel reenergized for the first time in a long time.”

• “This me is the real me.”

Perhaps it’s a matter of people trying to compartmentalize their cheating behavior against the rest of their lives.

Or perhaps, as Alexopoulos told the website PsyPost, “telling yourself, for example, ‘This new relationship makes me more exciting or fun,’ seems to allow cheaters to reduce their feelings of discomfort.”

I hope it’s clear that I’m not encouraging anyone to cheat. (Alexopoulos wanted to be clear that she didn’t create the study to send that message either.)

Additionally, it’s fascinating to note that men who engage in deception and cheating in their relationships (the study only covered men) might also quickly engage in self-deception.

Whether it was Aristotle or Will Durant or someone else who first said, “We are what we repeatedly do,” that’s one of the most cited quotes of all time because it rings so true.

Maybe people who cheat in one part of their lives are more likely to cheat in another, as well. Maybe people who cheat in business and professional relationships are just as likely to tell themselves afterward that it wasn’t as big a deal as it seemed.

And maybe that makes it a little easier the next time.

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7 other things worth knowing today

• Ukraine launched unprecedented drone strikes deep inside Russia. Around 40 Russian military planes — most of them strategic bombers — were reportedly hit in the attack. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said 34% of Russias strategic bombers were hit, specifically planes used by the Russian military for air strikes on Ukrainian cities. There were no casualties in the attacks, the Russian ministry of defense said. (Axios)

• The FBI is investigating what officials are calling an antisemitic attack in Boulder, Colorado, during a weekly gathering of Jewish community members. Six people were injured, according to Boulder police. The suspect, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, used a makeshift flamethrower and threw an incendiary device into the crowd and also yelled “Free Palestine,” FBI Denver Special Agent-in-Charge Mark Michalek said Sunday during a news conference. (CNN)

• Poland is on a knife’s edge as exit polls show a near tie in presidential runoff. A first exit poll showed liberal Warsaw mayor Rafał Trzaskowski with a slight lead over conservative historian Karol Nawrocki, but two hours later an updated “late poll” showed Nawrocki winning 50.7%, more than Trzaskowski with 49.3%. Both men claimed to have won in meetings with their supporters in Warsaw. (AP)

• How a decade-old patent dispute could upend Uber’s business. (TechCrunch)

• The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine. This is sort of a counterpoint to the lead article on last week's Free for ALL Friday. (CNN)

• Finding their religion: why Gen Z are turning to faith. (The Financial Times)

• Counterpoint: Why incels take the “Blackpill”—and why we should care: A growing number of incels are NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training). That should concern us all. (ArsTechnica)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Art Institute of Chicago on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.