The 3 Types Of Cheating + How They Each Affect Your Relationship

Cheating is cheating, right? I mean, if you make a commitment to monogamy and then you break it, you’ve cheated, and the specifics of what you did, who you did it with, and what you felt when you were doing it don’t really matter, do they?

Well, yes and no.

There are three basic categories of infidelity, and betrayed partners may or may not feel more deeply wounded depending on the type of cheating.

Sexploration is purely sexual cheating, with no emotional component. Usually this involves anonymous sex and/or casual hookups. You get off and go home. Sometimes cheaters who engage in this sort of “sport f*cking” don’t even feel like they’ve cheated, because there was no emotional connection.

Some cheaters have a sex partner (or several sex partners) that they see regularly but only when convenient. They may even have an occasional formalized date—like dinner and a show—before they hop into bed together. Usually, these sexual partners are liked but not loved. In other words, there is friendship and hot sex but not any sort of deep emotional connection.

These are typically longer-term relationships in which the partners feel a deep emotional connection (i.e., love). Sometimes these relationships were never intended. The two parties were simply going about their business, being nice to people and making friends as they went, not worrying too much about those friendships because one or both were already in a committed relationship.

All cheating hurts. And typically it’s not the extracurricular sex that causes the most pain. Instead, it’s the lying and the keeping of secrets. In other words, long-term, committed partnerships don’t usually end because one partner had sex with someone else; they end because he or she repeatedly lied, covered up, and kept secrets about that behavior.

Generally speaking, an emotionally connected affair is more painful to your betrayed spouse than a one-night stand. This is because, from your betrayed partner’s perspective, longer-term affairs undercut everything that happened in your relationship while the affair was taking place.

Essentially, if/when your mate learns you’ve been sleeping with someone else for the last decade, he or she wonders, “All those times that you told me you loved me, and that you loved our kids and our life together, did you mean any of it? Or was it all just a lie?”

So, as you can see, there are many factors that can make sexual infidelity “worse.” That said, all cheating is painful to your betrayed partner. And all cheating will strain your relationship. Furthermore, most of the time—and I can’t stress this enough—it’s typically not the sex that’s most upsetting to a betrayed partner. It’s the constant lying and the keeping of important secrets.

As such, the process of healing from infidelity is typically focused as much on restoring relationship trust as on stopping the cheater’s sextracurricular behaviors.