Infidelity and Fidelity: What Are They and How Do They Look?

Loyalty and trust are the bedrock of relationships, particularly marital relationships. When that is broken there is a lot of fear, anxiety, and sorrow to work through.

Talking about infidelity is hard. It involves painful emotions and complicated situations. Often it comes with wondering about the inverse. Even fidelity and infidelity have a spectrum. Understanding how to be a faithful partner involves more than just not having an affair outside of your marriage.

What is fidelity?

Fidelity is the quality of faithfulness or loyalty. Fidelity is a quality that is valuable in many parts of life and is essential to establishing trust in marriage.

Let love and faithfulness never leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart. – Proverbs 3:3, NIV

How To Practice Fidelity

There are four key pillars to practicing fidelity in your relationship.

Honesty: Tell your partner the truth. If you are running late let your partner know. When you mess up take your share of the responsibility. Don’t hide parts of yourself or pretend to be someone you are not. If you are uncomfortable in a situation, be forthright about that.

Clear communication: Let your partner know what you need. Are you overwhelmed at work? Are the home responsibilities causing tension? Do you want your partner to offer solutions or just let you vent? Is there a form of social interaction that you need or one that stresses you out? Being clear about your needs and preferences will help prevent conflicts before they come up in the first place.

(To be clear, neither of these things is a free pass to be critical of your partner. These skills require that both of you engage with love and compassion.)

Attentive listening: This involves your eyes and your memory, not just your ears. Notice when your partner seems tired or frustrated. Remember their favorite movies, foods, and other preferences.

Keeping promises, especially the small ones: When you say you will do a task, whether it’s making a phone call, doing the dishes, or anything else, follow through. When your partner knows they can trust you with the little things, they will trust you in bigger things. Proving yourself a faithful partner is a daily endeavor that covers all areas of life together.

Facing Your Fears of Infidelity

This is an upsetting experience. From anger to sorrow, the range of emotions is intense and complicated. Often there are more questions than answers.

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices – mint, dill, and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law – justice, mercy, and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. – Matthew 23:23, NIV

It can be easy to hyperfocus on things that aren’t real issues, to make mountains out of molehills. It is also easy to try to avoid mountains by focusing on molehills. If you are facing infidelity in your relationship, there is a lot of work to do as an individual and a couple.

First things first, be clear about what infidelity is happening.

What Is Infidelity?

While it is common to associate marital infidelity with an extramarital sexual or romantic affair, there are a few other ways for a partner to be unfaithful to their spouse. There are a few types of infidelity:

Physical: When a physical or sexual connection occurs outside of the marital relationship.

Emotional: Emotional intimacy with another person outside of the marital relationship. This can occur without physical intimacy, yet may cause more pain than a sexual relationship

Cyber Infidelity: In the age of social media, it can tempting to form relationships online with no real-life component. Whether it’s as impersonal as pornography or using forums to be intimate long distance, infidelity can occur.

Financial and/or Career: Whether a partner hides money or has debt, perhaps in secret, or is just openly flagrant with spending, it is unfaithful to the needs of the relationship. When a partner consistently chooses work over the relationship, they are expressing where their loyalty lies. Marriage partners need to have similar goals for finances and be supportive of careers as a team.

Addiction: Addictions are complicated for many reasons. When a partner has an addiction, they end up choosing the comfort of substances or objects over the comfort of a healthy relationship.

When any of these things take precedence over your spouse, infidelity is occurring. It may start small, seemingly innocuous. Infidelity can be hard to recognize until it is so big that you don’t even know where it started.

Causes of Infidelity

Infidelity is not a one-and-done event. There is often a mixture of things that happen which lead a person into making choices that lead to infidelity.

• Lack of affection or being emotionally unavailable.
• Feeling lonely or neglected by partner.
• Fear of intimacy, perhaps as the result of underlying trauma.
• Avoidance of conflict (this can look like trying to appease or trying to shoulder all the family burdens on your own, rather than working together).
• Seeking change or variety.
• Commitment issues.
• Resentment.
• Self-esteem/body issues.
• Ego-boosting.
• Not taking care of past trauma and other mental health issues.
• Shutting your spouse out of crucial decisions (parenting, job change, etc).
• Prioritizing friendships over your spouse.

A combination of any of the above could have led to choices of infidelity. So how does one recover a relationship in the wake of those choices?

Building and Rebuilding Trust

Emotional maturity is a significant factor. Learning how to communicate well takes time. Being in love on your wedding day or even being best friends does not guarantee loyalty. That trust is earned over the days, weeks, months, and years of being together.

Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in love. Honor one another above yourselves. Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality. – Romans 12:9-13, NIV

If that trust has been broken, healing is a process that will often need outside support and encouragement. There will be hurt to process, anger to express, and often a long history of issues that need to be addressed to restore the relationship or move on to other relationships.

Counseling For All Stages

No matter what stage in a relationship you are in, there could be great value in counseling. A third party can bring insight and objectivity to a highly emotional relationship

Premarital counseling: The beginning of a relationship is as good a time as any to begin building trust with each other. A counselor may be able to help you avoid common pitfalls, and look beyond the moment to establish habits for the long-term.

Couples counseling: Maybe you didn’t have a chance for premarital counseling, but you can still go to couples counseling. Your marriage does not need to wait for disaster to strike before bringing in guidance. A healthy relationship is strengthened by the willingness of the couple to talk and listen to one another in the presence of an objective party.

Rebuilding the relationship: If you have found yourself in a relationship that needs repair, a counselor can help you both uncover the issues at play and rebuild a healthy relationship. Some couples choose to go forward together after infidelity, while others may not.

Recovering from infidelity: Infidelity may bring about the end of a relationship. Such individuals will need the encouragement and support of a counselor to heal and not bring that trauma into other relationships.

Whatever stage you are at, schedule a visit today, and we will help you find a counselor who can help. There is support for you as an individual and for your relationship. Call today to find out more.