In reading through a book in my library, I came across a short quote that I underlined. I’m one of those people who mark up books as I read them, and this was too good a quote to go unmarked.
The quote was, “Romantics cannot be persuaded by logic.” I cannot count the times I’ve encountered situations where this quote was proven.
This is one of the frustrating things about when your spouse cheats. When the cheater is in their ‘affair fog’ or dreaming about the romantic side of the affair, using logic gets you nowhere fast.
At those times, the cheater is surrounded by romantic notions. They’re listening to their emotions and their heart rather than facing reality. Romance is good for selling Hollywood movies, but lousy for solving real life problems in marriages.
They got into the affair with sexual and romantic notions, not logic. The affair doesn’t make sense largely because it’s not driven by logic.
While the cheater continues replaying their fantasy in their head, they’re hard to approach. They may even react angrily at you interrupting their fantasy with your logic.
They don’t want logic, they want a good fantasy or emotional high. They don’t want you to kill their buzz.
If you wonder whether they are mentally ill or just stupid, the answer in this case is neither and both. They aren’t thinking using facts. Instead they are being driven by their emotions. They’re in search of satisfaction and ignoring logic along the way.
Logic involves reason and facts. Had the cheater looked at logic and facts, the likelihood of them cheating would be different.
It’s not surprise that the ‘romance’ part of your brain is different than the ‘logical side’. The sides are wired different and process experiences differently. Those different sides have different languages.
This is one reason I often recommend using brain hacks that circumvent their defenses when doing interventions with cheaters.
This is also the reason you don’t understand how they’re thinking. They are processing the events concerning the affair very differently than your brain does.
These differences can be overcome. Overcoming them means doing things differently it also means that both of you will be going outside your comfort zone when it comes to the affair.
For the cheater, I have made the video, “Help for the Cheater: Starting the Road to Recovery”. It guides the cheater through the challenges associated with ending the affair and starting the recovery process for both of your lives.
Overcoming cheating requires changes in behavior and thinking. Changing one without changing the other only invites further problems later on.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
