Cheaters As People Pleasers

Cheating isn’t just about breaking agreements, it’s also about withholding information. When someone cheats, part of what they’re doing is preserving their partner’s idea of who they are. Rather than having a hard conversation about their wants - rather than disclosing things that would almost certainly be upsetting - they lie.

To a people pleaser, a partner’s difficult feelings are interpreted as a personal failing. What’s more, those difficult feelings often feel wholly unsafe. I’ve never been a fan of the term “people pleaser” because it doesn’t really speak to the origins of these behaviors. In most cases, people pleasing is a protective and/or trauma response.

People pleasing, or fawning, is a means of avoiding conflict in order to maintain safety. When these behaviors are severe, they speak to a pattern that began in childhood - in environments where conflict was terrifying. Where caretakers demonstrated unpredictable and/or violent behavior. This could range from a parent who would randomly fly off the handle, to a child being subjected to overt physical abuse. We’re talking about households where honesty would be punished, and where any failure to meet expectations was met with rejection. Households where love operated conditionally at best.

Do you see how calling this “people pleasing” feels a little trivial when we better understand the root of these behaviors?

And sometimes that trauma, that lack of safety, is echoed in relationship. Because we choose partners who trigger our wounds. Sometimes the people pleaser chooses a highly critical partner - a hard to please person - because that feels familiar and presents a role the pleaser knows how to play.

It’s important to note that the partner I’m calling “highly critical” has their own history, their own trauma narrative that’s informing their behaviors too. Criticism is a mechanism of control, and control is an expression of anxiety.

And so a fraught dynamic emerges. Both partners feel the distance and growing conflict between them, even if it’s not explicitly discussed. Sometimes this is where the pleaser partner might go outside the relationship - where they might seek to “please” someone else when it feels like they can’t succeed with their existing partner. What’s ironic is that the partner who cheats in this dynamic might genuinely feel less empowered.

And I want to bring the larger, societal framework into this too. Because there’s a cultural script that tells us a violent reaction to being cheated on is somehow acceptable. The man punching a wall, the woman smashing dishes. Like Ancient Romans at the Colosseum, we rejoice when reality TV stars viciously tear each other apart in a betrayal plot line. We romanticize and excuse violence under these specific conditions, and these conditions only.

But that’s still violence. That’s still an unsafe environment. And if we’re trying to understand how honesty breaks down in a relationship - how one partner becomes someone who lies and withholds rather than speaks - a volatile reaction to difficult information is part of that story.

We cannot invite honesty without cultivating the conditions for it. We don’t get to respond with rage, and then wonder why our partners don’t disclose difficult truths.

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