To stop having affairs, you have to do two things at once: close the door on the current affair completely, and go after the feeling your affairs have been helping you escape, which is usually an old, heavy sense of not being enough.
Willpower and promises rarely hold on their own, because the pull lives in your nervous system, not in your values. The pattern stops when you stop running from yourself and get real help staying with what you feel.
If you keep promising yourself the last one was the last one, tell Figlet honestly what the affairs give you. It’s an AI coach that’s there at 2 in the morning, or right now, and it won’t shame you.
Look, I want to sit with you for a second before we get into the “how to stop” part, because that question is actually two questions hiding inside each other. There’s “how do I stop the behavior,” and underneath that is “what the hell is happening inside me that got me here in the first place.” And if we only answer the first one, you’ll stop the affair and find a burrito, or work too much, or drink, or find the next affair. Because that’s what we do. We’re incredibly creative about finding ways not to feel what’s happening inside us.
Here’s what I know from working with couples where affairs have happened. The affair was never really about the other person. It was about you running from yourself. Running from something inside you that felt intolerable. Maybe it’s that you feel like a disappointment. Maybe you feel alone even in your relationship. Maybe you feel like you’re not enough, or like no one really sees you. And somewhere along the way, going elsewhere for comfort became the solution your nervous system landed on.
An affair, a burrito, a hot dog, working too much, drinking. These are all the same move. They’re all ways of saying “I cannot tolerate the reality of what it’s like to be me right now.”
So the real question isn’t just how to stop the behavior. The real question is, can you learn to stay with yourself?
That means staying with the terror. Staying with the feeling of being a disappointment. Staying with the loneliness or the shame or whatever it is that’s been driving you out the door, literally or emotionally.
And here’s the thing I want you to hear. You cannot go over it, under it, or around it. You have to go through it. And the astonishing thing is, when you actually go through it, when you stop running and you sit in the reality of what’s happening inside you, it actually changes. It becomes something you can live inside of instead of something you have to escape from.
Now, can you do this alone? I’m going to be honest with you. This is very hard to do without a guide. Someone who isn’t going to buy into your agenda to feel better fast, and who isn’t going to buy into your partner’s agenda to feel better fast either. Someone who can hold you in the discomfort long enough for something real to shift.
Why You Can’t Stop Having Affairs
Which pattern is running your relationship?
Take the free three minute quiz and meet the creature behind the cycle you keep getting stuck in.
If you’ve had more than one affair, you already know the cycle. You end it. You feel a wave of relief and a wave of shame. You promise yourself, and maybe your partner, that it’s over. For a few weeks or a few months you mean it completely. Then a hard stretch comes, and you find yourself back in a parking lot with your phone, wondering what is wrong with you.
Nothing is wrong with you in the way your shame says. You are not a monster. But something is running underneath the behavior, and until you can see it, you will keep obeying it.
What each affair gives you
Your body has two questions running underneath every close relationship. Are you there for me? Am I enough for you? If both answers are yes, your nervous system rests. If either answer has been no for a long time, something in you starts scanning the horizon for somewhere the answer might be yes.
An affair is where the answer is yes, for a while. It gives you some mix of these:
- Aliveness. The playful, desired, easy version of you that got contracted and scared inside a deep love comes back to life with someone new.
- Escape. For a few hours there is no mortgage, no history of letting anyone down, no look across the kitchen table that says “you did it again.”
- Borrowed worth. Someone wants you, so maybe you aren’t the failure you feel like at home. The trouble is that borrowed worth runs out, and your body goes looking for the next loan.
- A way around conflict. Instead of bringing the loneliness or resentment home and risking the fight, you take it somewhere it can be soothed without ever being said.
None of that is a free pass. You are still responsible for what you did with the scan. But you cannot stop a behavior you don’t understand. If you want to go deeper into the wiring, I wrote about why you keep cheating on someone you love.
The dance at home that sets it up
Most of the people I see who keep straying were caught in a loop with their partner long before anyone crossed a line. I call it the Waltz of Pain. One partner reaches with an edge, protesting, asking why they never feel prioritized. The other retreats, feels like a constant disappointment, and disappears into work or the phone or the garage.
If you’re the one who keeps having affairs, you were very likely the retreater, carrying a story that sounds like: I can never make her happy. Nothing I do is enough. So when someone outside the system looks at you with easy warmth and no accumulated disappointment, your nervous system lights up in a way it hasn’t in years. It feels like oxygen. You mistake that oxygen for love. It’s actually relief.
And the wound underneath usually didn’t start with your partner. The not-enough feeling was probably installed decades earlier, by a parent whose approval was conditional, or absent, or drunk. Your partner just happened to be the person whose disappointment finally landed on the exact bruise.
Why willpower keeps losing
Willpower lives in the prefrontal cortex, the thinking, planning part of your brain. Attachment threats live in the limbic system, which fires long before the thinking brain gets a vote. When your partner rolls her eyes, or your boss humiliates you, or the loneliness at home hits a certain pitch, your body drops into the same alarm it felt as a small child. And that alarm wants comfort. Fast.
If you’ve already carved a pathway to someone else, your body will pull toward the pathway that worked before. Willpower is trying to argue with a fire alarm using a legal brief. It does not stand a chance. That is why white-knuckling usually buys a few months of fidelity and then fails.
The faces change, the hunger doesn’t
If you’ve had affairs with several different people, notice this: the faces changed. The hunger didn’t. New is intoxicating, and a stranger’s attention lands right on the empty spot. That isn’t because the other person is more beautiful or more interesting. It’s because they’re new, and they’re giving the exact answer that has been missing to the exact question that has gone unanswered.
It also doesn’t last. You’re dating their Representative, the polished version of a person, and they’re dating yours. Two highlight reels. The therapist Stephen Betchen made a related point in Psychology Today: over time, the lover often turns out to share the very traits of the spouse, because the same unconscious forces that drew you to your partner are drawing you to the next person. Switching partners won’t change the pattern. Working on the wound will.
Maybe you feel alone even in your relationship.
Do you know you can get personalized answers to all your questions from the same wisdom that wrote this article, right now?
Ask anything about your own situation and get an answer immediately. Keep asking, think it through, work out what to do next.
No credit card required. Your first 10 messages are free.
Ask Figlet about stop having affairs commit.
Is It Sex Addiction?
Many people with a pattern of affairs ask me this, sometimes hoping for a diagnosis that explains everything and sometimes terrified of one. “Sex addiction” is a contested label. It is not a diagnosis in the DSM-5, the manual most American clinicians use. The World Health Organization’s ICD-11 does include compulsive sexual behavior disorder, which describes a persistent failure to control intense sexual urges despite real harm and repeated attempts to stop.
It isn’t a diagnosis I’d hand anyone from an article, but serial infidelity can work like an addiction. Early infatuation runs on the same wanting chemistry, and an affair can become the pathway your body pulls toward whenever the alarm goes off. That is why stopping looks a lot like recovery: no contact, sobriety from the habit, and work on what it was soothing.
Whatever you call it, the label is less important than the function. If your third-party habit is a person, porn, alcohol, or anonymous hookups, honest sobriety from it is part of the work. If the behavior feels out of your control, a clinician who specializes in compulsive sexual behavior is worth seeing alongside an attachment-focused therapist.
The Honest First Step: Stop Measuring the Betrayal
People sit on my couch and say things like: it didn’t mean anything, it only happened twice, it wasn’t really an affair. That isn’t malice. It’s shame, measuring the square footage of the betrayal and trying to prove it was small. As long as you are measuring, you are not stopping.
The honest first step is to name the pattern plainly, to yourself first: I have had more than one affair, and I have not been able to stop on my own. No technicalities. No “we were going through a rough patch.” Just the truth.
Then watch what happens next, because the shame will hit like a truck. “I’m a piece of shit. I don’t deserve anyone.” That sounds like remorse. It isn’t. It’s the Compass of Shame, making the whole thing about your own suffering so you don’t have to sit with the damage you caused. Shame, when it gets loud enough, doesn’t look for repair. It looks for exit. And the nearest exit is often the very thing you swore you’d stop.
I call the inner experience the Cocktail of Shame. Right now yours is probably 100 percent “I feel bad about myself.” The mix we need is 20 percent “I feel bad about myself” and 80 percent “my heart is breaking for what I did to you.” Guilt says, “I did something that hurt you,” and guilt can move. Shame says, “I am the mistake,” and shame collapses inward.
How to End the Affair You’re In Now
If you’re searching “I can’t stop this affair,” you probably have someone in your life right now who you keep going back to. Here is what’s usually happening. That person has been regulating your nervous system. When you cut off contact, the alarm you had been medicating comes roaring back, and you feel worse before you feel better. That is the hardest week, and it’s the moment most people fold.
So the affair has to actually end. Not fade. Not “we’re just friends now.” Not a slow withdrawal where you keep one foot in the door. You cannot rebuild a house while one wall is still on fire. That means:
- Blocking the number and deleting the accounts, including the second phone or the hidden app.
- Telling the other person, in writing, in two or three plain sentences, that there will be no further contact. Then sending nothing after it.
- No last conversation to explain. Every one of those is a bleed.
- Creating real distance if they are at work, even if that means changing teams or jobs.
If you notice yourself negotiating the terms of the ending, that isn’t closure. That’s the loop keeping a spare key. I go through the full process in how to end an affair and save your marriage.
Should You Tell Your Partner?
This is a decision to make with a therapist, not a search engine, and I want to be balanced about it, because disclosure is painful and destabilizing. But here is what I believe from my clinical work. Secrecy corrodes the bond even when your partner doesn’t consciously know, because your nervous system knows, and it shapes how you show up. A secret is also its own back channel. As long as it exists, part of you is still living the double life.
Secrets run on shame, and shame is what keeps people underground. I worked with a couple I will call Cormac and Grace. There was no affair. Grace had been telling Cormac she was staying late at the nursery where she worked, or visiting her sister, when she was actually driving down to the beach after work to sit alone in her car. Cormac came in furious, with a case laid out like a prosecutor. She sat rigid against the far armrest, ready to be sentenced.
When I asked her what happened in her chest when he asked where she had been, she said it went freezing cold. Her throat closed up. She felt like a little kid about to fail a test she had already failed a hundred times. Somewhere on the highway she would realize she could not go home yet, because home meant being weighed and found short. So she drove to the beach, and when he asked, her body picked the answer that would get her through the next ten minutes. She was hiding in what I call the basement of shame, and the lie was the door she pulled shut behind her.
Your affairs are not her beach, and I’m not shrinking what you did. But the mechanism is the same. Once you go underground, you cannot come up honestly, because coming up means admitting you went under in the first place. Cormac had never heard her describe it like that, and the room changed the moment she said out loud what was happening inside her. Your partner cannot grieve what they do not know happened, and you cannot be genuinely close to someone who is loving a version of you that does not exist.
When a client tells me about an affair, I give them three doors. Tell your partner yourself, in your own time and your own words. Let me help you tell them, in session, with me holding the room while it happens. Or we end the couples work, because I cannot keep sitting in a room built on a foundation I know is rotten. Most people choose the second door, and I think it is often the wisest one.
A few things matter enormously: safety, timing, and not confessing just to unload your guilt onto them. If there is any risk of violence at home, get safety support before anything else. I walk through how to approach it in should I tell my partner I cheated.
Build a Relapse Plan Before You Need It
You will not stop a pattern of affairs by hoping the urge never comes back. It will come back. The question is whether you have somewhere else to go when it does.
Know your alarm
Look honestly at the hour before each affair started, or each time you went back. Lonely, criticized, bored, ashamed, humiliated at work, a few drinks in on a work trip? That is the alarm you were medicating. Most people with a repeated pattern find the same two or three states every time. Write yours down.
Name the pull before it becomes a secret
Everybody gets crushes, and the crush itself is not the problem. The moment a crush becomes a secret relationship, your nervous system has decided, without ever consulting your rational mind, where the alive version of you now goes. The healthiest thing you can do is name it early, to your therapist or, when it’s safe, to your partner: “I notice a pull toward someone.” That single act of transparency can stop what would otherwise become the next affair.
Close the access points
Dating apps, the burner email, the DM thread you keep reopening, the colleague you “just” have lunch with. Remove the doors you have walked through before. Offer transparency without being asked: the phone, the passwords, where you’ll be and when you’ll be home. If transparency has to be extracted from you, the concealment reflex is still running, and the concealment reflex is what allowed every affair in the first place.
Have a person to call
When the urge to reach out spikes, don’t argue with it. Call a therapist, a friend who knows, someone who will hold your humanity without co-signing the affair. Then sit with the alarm and let it move through your body. It passes, but only if you stop feeding the loop.
The Work You Have to Do on Yourself
If you keep having affairs, there are two pieces of work, and you need both. The first is yours alone. Individual therapy is where you find the shame story that was installed early and made adult love feel like a job interview you were failing. Look for a therapist trained in attachment work, IFS (Internal Family Systems), or EFT (Emotionally Focused Therapy).
That work is slow and somatic. It is the practice of feeling the not-enough feeling in your body without immediately reaching for something to make it go away. It is going and finding the younger, hungrier, ashamed part of you that was driving the car, and giving that part what it actually needed, which was almost never sex or attention from a stranger. It was to be seen, held, and told the truth about its own worth.
The people I’ve watched actually stop have three things in common. They closed the door completely, without a back channel. They stopped using shame as a substitute for repair. And they did this inner work instead of hoping the next promise would hold.
Rebuilding Your Marriage After a Pattern of Affairs
The second piece of work happens with your partner, if they know and you’re both trying. Find a couples therapist trained in affair recovery. In most of my work, nobody is the villain and the system is the problem. After an affair I pause that framing for a season, because the injury isn’t symmetrical. One person dropped a bomb. The other was standing in the explosion.
That season is One-Way Repair. You stop defending. No more “it wasn’t that bad.” You say it plainly: “Yes. It was that bad. I broke your reality and I lied to your face. I see how badly I hurt you, and I am not going anywhere while you feel it.” That isn’t one conversation. It’s hundreds, over years.
With repeated affairs, expect your partner’s body to need more evidence, not less. Every past promise you broke is a reason for their nervous system to stay on guard. When they bring it up again, they are not attacking you. They are checking. Are you still with me? Do you still get it? Innocent trust doesn’t come back. What can come back is earned trust, what I call the proof of work of love: showing up, again and again, through the hardest months, and choosing them anyway.
Only later, once the injury has been held, does the work turn to the Waltz of Pain that created the vacuum in the first place. With repeat infidelity especially, I strongly recommend not doing this alone, because you have both already tried that, and the pattern won.
What If You’re Not Sure You Want to Stay?
Some people keep having affairs because part of them has already left, and they haven’t said it out loud. That deserves honesty too. Don’t make the decision from inside the affair. The person you’re seeing is offering you a highlight reel, and a choice made while your nervous system is being soothed by someone new is not a clear choice.
If one of you is leaning out and the other is leaning in, discernment counseling exists for exactly that moment. It is a short process, usually one to five sessions, with the goal of clarity rather than repair: you either move toward a respectful separation or take divorce off the table and commit to the work.
And if you’ve come to believe monogamy isn’t what you want, that is a legitimate thing to explore. But ethical non-monogamy runs on clear communication and boundaries, which is the opposite of secrecy. The honest move is to say so and let your partner choose, rather than taking the choice away from them.
What to Do Tonight
Start small. Tonight:
- Write down the alarm. What was happening in your body in the hour before the last time? Lonely, criticized, bored, ashamed? Name it on paper.
- Close one door. Block one number, delete one app, or log out of one hidden account. One concrete door, closed tonight.
- Tell one safe person the truth. A friend who knows, or a therapist you book first thing tomorrow. The pattern feeds on being alone with it.
- Ride one wave. When the urge to reach out spikes, set a timer for ten minutes, breathe, and let the alarm move through your body without acting on it.
- Go to sleep without telling anyone a lie tonight. That counts.
Common Questions
Can a serial cheater change?
Yes, people change, but I want to be honest about the odds. A 2017 University of Denver study (Kayla Knopp and colleagues) found that people who had cheated in one relationship were about three times more likely to cheat in their next one. That is a real risk, not a sentence. Change comes from closing the door, doing repair, and doing the inner work, not from promising harder.
Why can’t I stop having affairs even though I love my partner?
Because love and attachment hunger are not the same nervous system event. You can love someone deeply and still carry a starved place inside the bond, and the relationship that matters most is often where all your fear lives. When someone else lands on that starved place, the body responds before the values do.
Is serial cheating an addiction?
It can work like one, though “sex addiction” is a contested label and not a DSM-5 diagnosis. Affairs can become the pathway your body pulls toward whenever the alarm goes off. If the behavior feels out of your control, see a clinician who works with compulsive sexual behavior.
How do I stop an affair with someone I love?
End it completely: blocked, deleted, a short written no-contact message, and no last conversation. Expect to feel worse for a few weeks, because that person was regulating your nervous system. Get support for that withdrawal instead of going back to the source.
Should I tell my partner about past affairs?
Make that decision with a therapist, with attention to safety and timing. In general, secrecy keeps part of you in the double life and corrodes the bond even when your partner doesn’t consciously know. Disclosure is painful, and it also creates a shared reality from which real repair becomes possible.
How long does it take to stop wanting to cheat?
The pull toward a specific affair partner usually loses intensity within a few weeks of complete no-contact, though the alarm that made you vulnerable will still fire. Wanting to feel wanted isn’t the problem. Rebuilding the primary bond and doing your own shame work quiets the pull over months, not days.
Can a marriage survive multiple affairs?
Sometimes, yes, but not with the trust you had before. It takes a fully closed door, One-Way Repair over a long season, and visible, consistent proof of work. Your partner also has every right to decide they cannot do it again, and that is not a failure of forgiveness.
Stay With Yourself
You are not the worst thing you did. You are a person whose nervous system found a bad solution to a real problem. Close the door, face what you did without collapsing into shame, and go feed the hungry part of you the truth instead of a lie.
What I’d want to know, if you were sitting across from me right now, is what is it that you cannot tolerate feeling? Because that’s where the real work is.
If you want to stop the cycle of affairs for good, tell Figlet honestly what draws you back, without judgment.
Figs is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 16+ years of experience working with couples. He’s the co-founder of Empathi, host of the “Come Here to Me” podcast, and author of an upcoming book on relationships and the systems that shape how we love.
Explore More Topics
Keep Reading
Every couple has a pattern they cannot see. Find yours.
In love, each of you is a Relentless or a Reluctant, which makes you one of three kinds of couple: Relentless and Reluctant, two Relentless, or two Reluctant. The free quiz reveals your creatures and the cycle they fall into together. About three minutes.
No signup needed to start.
The Relentless
The Reluctant
