Reasons We Lie in Love

There is a particular kind of person in love who is highly liable to attract our unbounded hatred: the person who – though they have a partner, often a kind, tender and beautiful one at that – nevertheless feels compelled to look around, often online, for hours, for alternatives. A person who is capable of laying on a cosy dinner with their partner, asking them about their day, disclosing a few things about their own, sharing news about their mother or sister and then, when the partner has gone upstairs to have a bath and finish a presentation, of picking up their phone and continuing a conversation with one of nine people they’re currently pursuing on an app.

It is hard not to let outrage subsume us. What pitiful flotsam. How miserable that a decent partner should be innocently unwinding in another room, looking forward to cuddling their beloved (hoping one day to marry them and perhaps even have a child with them), while, a few metres away, the numbskull is telling someone else (equally in the dark) how much they’d like to lie in bed in a hotel room, reading them extracts of a favourite book. It seems an affront to everything we could have hoped for from love when we entered adult life; an apogee of amorality and spinelessness.

The outrage is easy to understand. It’s also very unhelpful – if we set ourselves the challenge of trying to work out why people do what they do, as opposed to what we hope they could do, in order to seek a route out of the worst of their behaviour.

How a Fear of Abandonment in Relationships Drives Betrayal

The standard explanation focuses on lust. The deceiver is motivated by horniness. They’re cheating because, due to a malignly addictive personality, sex with one person isn’t enough.

The real answer might be stranger. They are doing this because they are – chiefly – extremely worried. And what they are worried about – counter-intuitively – is that they will be let down by the partner they are letting down. They are cheating with nine other people in order to mitigate their sense of acute danger that they are going to be cheated on, or at least violently disappointed, by the partner they are hoodwinking.

They have picked up their phone as a form of defence against their partner’s occasionally offhand manner, occasionally delayed messages, occasionally brusque responses. Other people are being called in as a form of emotional hedge, as protection against a perceived risk of devastating disappointment, as a highly curious way to mitigate a terror of abandonment. The additional candidates are ways of saying, in effect: you can’t hurt me, I don’t mind when you don’t reply to me, I’d be safe if you were to find someone else, I don’t have to be upset with you when you seem distracted, I have alternatives were you to turn on me.

If some of us are frightened enough to behave like this, it’s generally because what we fear in the present has already occurred in the past. We are extrapolating from grim experiences. We don’t trust now because we were let down then. We are driven to keep multiple options in play to be sure of preventing any recurrence of the kind of dependence we once endured at the hands of one or two people who hurt us very badly.

Small children have nowhere to go if mummy were to turn sarcastic and distant. Were daddy to scream and start throwing the coffee table across the room, there wouldn’t be alternatives. Were a parent to move in with a colleague and start a new family in another country, there would be no option but devastation. From such experiences, conclusions unconsciously form: you must never fully trust in anyone’s promises. Deception is rife. You cannot securely place yourself in the hands of any single person. You must protect yourself from the follies and viciousness of the few by reliance on a shifting array of the many. You must download some apps. At the slightest sign of disappointment or ambiguity, look elsewhere and say, in effect: never again. Never again will I wait and hope, never again will I tie myself to someone who could ruin my world on a whim.

Towards a More Honest Response to Fear

That’s why we’re telling a minibus-load of other people that we care about them: because there have been a few arguments; because the partner was forty-five minutes late calling; because there hasn’t been sex in fifteen days; because they were notably unfriendly or at least offhand at the party… We’re trying to contain anxiety in the only way we know how.

None of this is an excuse. To move on, we might become more attentive to the exact moment when we can no longer resist picking up our phone. It’s when the partner has gone on a business trip; when we mentioned we’d love to go on an outing and they kept not responding to the hint. It’s not when we are horny; it’s when we are overwhelmed by doubts we are too proud to admit to. There would – we can come to see – be alternatives: to do our partner the honour of calmly telling them how worried we actually are. To verbalise our fears rather than act out a clumsy flight from them. To say to them and ourselves, in effect: loving someone is horrifying to me; every day brings new questions and vulnerabilities, it scares me so much that I cannot have complete certainty; I’ve not learnt how to sensibly master how risky love feels, and in some ways necessarily is. I don’t want to betray you; I am trying – like an idiot – to find a way to safety.

None of it makes the shiftiness remotely decent; it might nevertheless help to know that betrayal may at times disguise a highly confused, highly hurtful search for a way out of a legacy of betrayal – a pattern often rooted in a profound fear of abandonment in relationships, and in the painful attempts people make to shield themselves from the dangers they once knew too well.