Does Everyone Cheat?

We’re almost getting used to hearing about politicians who cheat on their wives. It seems crazy for them to do this when they have so much to lose. Yet, they continue to cheat.

It’s not just politicians, either. Cheating is rampant. You probably know friends who’ve cheated…or been cheated on. Maybe both. You may have cheated. Whether physical or emotional, cheating is on the rise.

For whatever reason, the largest percentage of the population still has expectations of exclusivity in intimate relationships. We still want fidelity. We’re just not good at it. Some estimates put 80% of relationships as having one or both mates cheating. This may be arguably a high figure and, understandably, hard numbers aren’t easily yielded. Still, the big question is why?

The wronged individual almost always wants to know this. Why did the infidelity happen? Why did this person cheat? Some people wonder if they’ve caused their spouses to step out on them. Are they, in some way, responsible? Did they not do something they should have done? Or do something they shouldn’t have done? Both the need to understand this kind of breach and the difficulty doing so is haunting.

Infidelity leaves a stain that’s hard to remove.

There are a bunch of answers to these questions. Most of them are intricately individual, but some things are universal. Cheating is a sign of prior trouble in the committed relationship. To some, this feels like blaming the victim. Others think this is offering an excuse to the cheater. Neither implication is true. However, if there weren’t trouble, of some sort, in the relationship, the cheater wouldn’t have cheated. Most people don’t want to believe this. They are so hurt by the betrayal that they struggle to look objectively at the condition the relationship was in before the cheating happened. Please don’t misunderstand, I’m not saying that the cheating is in any way excused by the relationship having issues. Relationships always have issues of some sort. It’s the character-building part of relationships. Many folks deal with these without getting into an emotional or physical interaction with someone else. Relationship conflict is not an excuse.

But cheating doesn’t occur in happy relationships.

It sometimes occurs in relationships that the cheated-on mate thought was happy, but they’re usually misinformed or uninformed. Their significant other wasn’t happy. People who cheat use phrases like “it just happened” and “we weren’t looking to get involved” when they’re talking about the affair. They’re just as delusional as the cheated-on mate. Somewhere, someone made a choice.

Cheating is a sign of prior trouble in the committed relationship. Individuals in emotionally-connected relationships, where conflicts are resolved, don’t cheat.

Again, this is not an excuse. But relationship conflicts can be resolved, although no one is saying the process is easy. You can even survive an affair with the relationship intact, if everyone is invested in making this happen. You can. Only, not if you don’t deal with the issues that weakened the relationship initially. If you just try to forgive and hope it won't happen again, you're fooling yourself and just limping forward, with nothing learned.

Learn from the trauma. The hard part about this process for the betrayed mate is talking about how he or she contributed to the relationship estrangement. When you’re wronged, it’s hard to look at how you contributed to the problems before the infidelity. After all, you weren't the one getting naked and talking dirty to someone other than your mate. But you have to look at what wasn't resolved before this. You need to see your part in whatever was happening in the relationship. This is your power in this mess. It's what you can change, if you decide to stay. This is the only hope of getting the relationship on a healthy track.

Cheating is never, ever, a good answer, no matter what the relationship problems. But, one way or the other, you can survive.

College Smart

So, you’re supposed to get a college degree in order to make a decent living. Right? If you don’t want to work at McDonalds—nothing against those folks(they’re saints to put up with what they have to put up with)—you’ll need a profession. General opinion is that you need to go to college to get, at least, a two-year degree.

A college degree in any field was once considered a ticket to working for big bucks. This is no longer the case.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go to college. Higher education provides you with more choices and, statistically, more income. Go to college, but be smart about it. There are individuals who are artists, performers or really great plumbers. College isn’t probably as vital for them as, say—someone who wants to do research in neuroscience. Most people need some kind of training in order to achieve their professional goals. College is the logical choice.

It’s important to ask college recruiters questions, but the most important person for you to interview is yourself. There are current college myths you need to recognize. You need to think about what your college education will prepare you for.

What career will fit you best? This isn’t always obvious. You probably have relatives, friends and teachers weighing in on this one. It’s easy to be blinded by the perceived prestige and power of a profession. What you really need to ask is will you enjoy the work that this career will entail everyday. Will you go happily off to work as a lawyer, arguing for a living? You may make serious money as a litigator, but lawyers handle tons of paperwork and phone calls, too. Will you enjoy that? Will you be happy doing this job?

Will you make enough money? Is this kind of job going to enable you to live the kind of life you want (and afford to put your kids through school, as well as, save for retirement)? It’s hard to know what’s enough money for each individual. This is a question you must ask yourself. Then, you need to be honest about what you’re willing to do to earn that income. And, again, will you be happy? You might make a mint in business, but this will be meaningless, if you don’t like your job.

Will attending a prestigious college help you? Once you decide what you want to be, you have to ask yourself if spending the money for a degree from a big name school is worth it. Will going to this school really help you get to know the “right people” and thus, end up making your professional life easier? You need to weigh whether these advantages are worth the college loans you may have to take out. There is a lot a debate on this subject.

Then, when you graduate, will you be able to live comfortably and pay off your loans? This is a really important question. You might be drawn to the prestige of a degree from a name university, but you need to ask yourself if your eventual job—teacher, social worker, theater stage director—will earn you enough money to pay off your college loans and still manage to live. A social work degree from Boston College gets you the same job as a social work degree from a state school. You may argue that the education is better, but that’s generally not the case.

Never think this college thing is simple…and that’s not even including tough professors and 8 a.m. classes. College is a pretty big endeavor. You’ll spend your days reading dense textbooks, writing papers and learning math. This is great if you love math, and not so much if you don't. You’ll have to earn this degree(diploma mills aside). You want the degree to be in an area you enjoy.

The last big question you need to ask yourself--Are there jobs available for your degree in the field? This is a really important thing to explore. You may love psychology and find the classes fascinating, but a four-year degree in psychology prepares you for little besides graduate school. Some degrees are just the first rung on the ladder. Others, such as history and sociology, may offer tremendous insights, but have to be used in a creative way. There’s no obvious jobs for some degrees.

Then, again, you could teach. The world needs enthusiastic, engaging teachers. Make sure that’s the kind you’d be.

Never Give Up

You can change your mind and decide chasing a dream isn’t worthwhile, but giving up because you doubt yourself is failure on a large level.

Just recently, Randy Pausch, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and author of The Last Lecture, died of pancreatic cancer. One significant advice in Pausch’s final lecture was the recommendation to go after your dreams with a spectacular effort. He even awarded his students—who’d strived the biggest and failed—an award. It’s not necessarily reaching the goal that brings the greatest rewards. The striving-after is the important part. We discover brilliance in ourselves in this kind of pursuit.

Never doubt, however, that this can be a challenging, complicated and even, brutal, undertaking. Attempting to make your dreams reality adds depth, texture and quality to your life. It teaches you vital lessons.

The first lesson might be how to decide when to give up. Sometimes letting go of a dream can help you move forward to even more satisfying endeavors. No one can tell you, though, when to give up on a dream. This is an incredibly personal decision and should not be made out of despair. Before changing your direction, you need to ask yourself if the pursuit of your goals adds to your life, even though you've not yet reached these. Frustration and despondency are reasonable feelings in the midst of chasing after longed-for goals. The biggest decisions in life need to take emotions into account, but decision is best made on a logical assessment.

The hard part is deciding the reality of a pursuit, really assessing the possibilities. You may have a dream that doesn’t depend on your efforts. If your goal involves something completely random—like winning the lottery—your success at this will be very much out of your control. You can pour lots of money into buying lottery tickets, but even this doesn’t significantly increase your chance of winning. The attainment of some dreams, though, depend a great deal on your efforts. The summer Olympics are just ahead of us. These athletes have made achievement in their sports their overriding priority. They have been driven. They’ve devoted their lives to this.

Of course, talent also plays a big part in getting to this level.

You may not strive this high, or in this arena, but maybe you’re pouring effort into earning a college degree. This may be complicated by your holding down a full-time job and raising kids. Your dreams are very personal to you. You’re striving for a specific position at work or to run a marathon or write a novel.

Pursuing dreams is a vital part of growth.

You may want to redirect your pursuits. Deciding to pour your focus into being really good in your purchasing job or developing your ballroom dance skills to your best level, dreams and goals are about striving for personal growth.

Without hope, we perish. Going after your goals and dreams keeps you alive spiritually. It may not seem like the challenges that come with your endeavors are healthy and survivable(failure feels crappy). Sometimes going after what you want seems foolish. Other days, it gives you a reason to reach higher. It's important not to give up on yourself. You can achieve, even though doing so is hard.

You may change the direction of your efforts, but don’t stop striving.

Taking the Drive-Thru Hostage

Let’s talk about passive-aggressive power. Lots of people feel powerless and angry about it. To be honest, powerlessness breeds anger. Whether with your supervisor at your job or in your relationship with your mate or just in general, you can feel like nothing you do makes a difference.

This is often the thinking behind destructive, illegal behavior. If nothing you do in a positive vein seems to change your life experience, you tend to do the negative thing that gets you the most bang for your buck. This is why inner city youths stray to the dark side. Everyone needs to feel they have power in some way. If you can’t be the best, you’ll find a way the best way to be the worst.

Look around you, most of the human behaviors that drive you nuts can be traced back to the individual’s feeling of powerlessness.

I was once held hostage in a fast food restaurant’s drive-thru, not with a gun, but with a car that blocked the way. If you’re one of the millions who occasionally gets food from McDonalds or Taco Bell or Jack-In-The-Box, you probably know the structure of the drive-through. A lane with a curb on both sides runs along one side of the fast food restaurant. At the beginning of the lane is a speaker—a squawk box—into which you speak your order. A pimply kid inside the restaurant takes your order, tells you how much it’ll cost you and directs you to drive around to the pick-up window.

On the hostage occasion, I once sat two cars back—blocked in by curbs and landscaping and the cars that kept pulling up behind—while the person at the front of the drive-thru refused to move. Maybe they hadn’t been given mustard. Maybe they were over-charged. Apparently, there was something about their order that wasn’t to their liking. For over thirty minutes, the driver refused to move, blocking the drive-thru. Trapped, hungry people behind him fumed, occasionally honked their horns and swore dark consequences on his head.

I’m sure the fast food manager and the employees were going nuts. The driver blocking the drive-thru clearly wanted to force them to hear him, to pay attention to his complaint.

Have you ever driven down a side street, only to have to slow to a stop when an individual--obviously aware that you were there--strolled slowly across the street? This is a form of passive aggressive power. The individual crossing the street, ignoring the traffic right-of-way, is gambling on a near-certainty. You’re not going to run him down. You’re going to sit, fuming, while the jay-walker enjoys a brief moment of power.

It’s probably all he or she has.

Human beings need a sense of personal power. You need to feel like something you say or do makes a difference. Even when the situation is very, very small. People who feel powerless engage in bizarre, seemingly-pointless displays that they can impact others in some way.

Power.

It is a vital need and can lead the seekers after power to do despicable things…like going below the speed limit in the left hand lane while cars pile up behind.

The next time you find yourself tripping over an individual making a passive-aggressive power play, before you give that person a middle-finger salute, remember this may be the only way he feels he can impact the world.

Feel some compassion while you're swearing at the delay.

A Sense of Their Limitations

As parents, we want everything wonderful for our kids. And they are amazing. They say the funniest things. They figure out tough situations that we’d never expected them to be able to deal with. They get great grades in math when we suck in math. They are beautiful, intelligent creatures.

But we lie to our children if we tell them they can do anything.

The desire to remove limitations is understandable. You may not have achieved your desires…possibly because some adult told you to “get serious” about your future. Maybe you majored in accounting when you wanted a career in music or you settled for a path in business because someone told you that biology was too hard. You’d never make it through medical school.

Maybe you’ve been there for your kids (like grown-ups weren’t there for you). You want to believe that this has made a big difference. You want your children to struggle less than you have. But don’t let yourself believe they won’t struggle in life. Struggle is a part of the human experience, an admittedly sucky part, but still a reality. If you are human, you will struggle. No matter how good your parents were or whether you drove a decent car and went to a good college.

Kids particularly can’t be certain of achieve something that depends on others, as well as they’re own efforts. Some things they can't make happen, no matter how much they want them to. Relationships, for instance, can only be successful if both individuals put forth significant effort. This is just a reality. Personal development involves recognizing personal limitations and areas that need growth.

This kind of growth is a life-long endeavor. We’ll never run out of ways to improve ourselves. It is the effort, the putting forth energy toward developing oneself that needs to be prized, not the reaching of goals. Sometimes you can’t make a situation or a relationship work. Sometimes there are limitations.

It is understandable to want your kid to pursue their dreams. If you did go after what you wanted and ended up achieving it, you may also tell your children they too can achieve their greatest goals. It's the going after goals that will enrich their lives, not necessarily the attainment of them all. Striving for something desired is a good and healthy thing. Knowing they might not reach their goals is invaluable knowledge. Knowing this failure doesn't make them lousy people and that life can still be good--maybe will be the better for what they've learned through failure--this is the important stuff.

Many things can be achieved through hard work. Just don’t forget to mention the hard work part and that, no matter how hard they work, some things will not be achieved. This doesn’t mean life is worthless or not fulfilling. Some dreams are a disappointment, once reached. Some people have unrealistic goals.

Kids need to see that striving for something doesn’t mean automatic success and they need to recognize that failure in a pursuit doesn’t mean worthlessness. They need to keep plugging away.

Don’t lie to them. Life is challenging and frustrating and can be very fulfilling. Failing is a part of being engaged in the process.

When Infidelity is the Answer

If you’ve ever been cheated on, you might want to answer “Never!” to this question. But a lot of people are being unfaithful to their partners and they’re not all terrible people with no morals. Some are just confused and making unfortunate choices. In some situations, cheating can seem like the best thing to do. But it will most likely lead to heartache, life disruption and tremendous guilt.

Short-term relief leading to long-term regret. So, why are so many people cheating. Infidelity must seem like the answer to some people in some situations.

Leaving just doesn’t seem possible right now.(You don’t really want to leave. You just want to feel desired.) When you’re in a committed relationship, a marriage or a long-term dating situation, and there are issues, you can feel unhappy a long time before you’re ready to walk out. “Just walk out the back, Jack” (as Paul Simon said so clearly) can seem harsh, but feeling unloved and conflicted leaves you vulnerable to sex-on-the-side.

You don’t really want your marriage to break-up, but there are problems. When there are unresolved issues in a relationship, and they’ve been that way awhile, you tend to feel disconnected from your mate. Then, having someone else who thinks you’re hot/smart/funny can seem really refreshing. You may end up doing the dirty with an extra-curricular person without planning it. Most people don’t plan to cheat.

You have a life you don’t want to leave (kids, position, money, in-laws you love, all of the above) Divorce disrupts everything. Even your work can get thrown off track when your personal life goes to hell. Even if you don’t feel really loving towards your spouse, you like parts of the life you’ve crafted together. Things you don’t want to give up. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t find something that feels like love on the side.

If you left, your mate would kill himself. (At least, that’s what he’s said when you’re fighting) When life with your mate has gotten complicated, unhappy and hard, you might want out. You want someone different who listens. Someone who doesn’t make you want to scream. Still, break-ups can be difficult, particularly when one half of the couple threatens to take his life. Guilt can keep you in the shell of a relationship, but it doesn’t always keep you out of someone else’s bed.

You love your spouse—you don’t hate your spouse—you’ve always seen the two of you together…but things have been bad for a while now (or there’s a lot of sizzle with the other man/woman. You haven’t felt this hot for someone in a long time) Relationships fall apart from the inside and sometimes you get used to really dysfunctional patterns. You get used to your partner not understanding you or screaming that you don’t understand him. The new guy at work likes you and thinks you’re funny. You find yourself thinking about him a lot and texting him all the time. Soon, you find yourself making out with him. It just happened, you say, like you were magically transported—naked—into his arms.

It doesn’t mean anything. Just an itch to be scratched. It won’t hurt your mate unless he/she finds out. Only it does mean something. It means your current marriage isn’t working. It means you’re avoiding dealing with issues. That’s what infidelity is—avoidance on a major scale. Cheating doesn’t fix anything. It only complicates an already difficult situation. You may tell yourself you’re staying for the kids…staying because your mate needs you. Heck, you may be waiting for your spouse to finish college, your kids turn eighteen or until his psychiatrist announces him cured. Whatever you tell yourself, infidelity only makes the waters murkier.

Don’t cling to the delusion that you’ve found your soul mate. Relationships that stemmed from one or both partners cheating have an even higher divorce rate. Maybe once a cheater, always a cheater is too narrow a view. But once you’ve broken vows, it becomes easier to do it again…unless you’ve dealt with your personal issues and/or those in the relationship.

Work on the relationship you're in. Deal with it, one way or the other. Don't stray out into darker pursuits because it only makes matters worse.

When You Hate the Kid You Love

Don’t tell your kid, you’ll never be disappointed in him. You will be. You are. When the child you’ve nurtured, the kid with a limitless future and a hundred joyful gifts, sells himself short, you’ll be upset, sad and angry. When he doesn’t go for the goal he wants because he’s convinced he can’t achieve it, you’ll be disappointed. When he gets in a relationship that only brings him grief, you’ll be frustrated and saddened.

Loving someone doesn’t mean always liking him.

You want only the best for your child and while life unavoidably brings bumps, some bad, ugly things can be avoided. You’ve lived long enough to know this. You may not have had people watching out for you the way you watched out for your kid. You’ve invested yourself in a thousand ways. Was it all for nothing? Did it matter at all?

A heart-warming card on Mother’s or Father’s Day just isn’t enough. You want the kid to take care of herself, to respect herself. All those lessons you taught her can’t have been a total waste. It’s not the kid’s thanks you’re looking for (although that’s nice to hear). You want her to live well. Make smart choices. Take care of herself.

You have hopes.

Then your kid does something really stupid, makes some choice you’d thought he was too smart to make. Some choices bring massive pain. Who would want their child to make those choices? Who wouldn’t be disappointed?

It’s not about a lack of love. You love this kid with every fiber of your being. When the kid hurts, your heart cracks open. The more you love, the more you hope for that person …always for the child. You want him to be smart, to see the choices that will lead him down painful roads in life. You’d thought he would have learned from his earlier experiences. The ones you carefully let him have when he was younger.

In a loving relationship, knowing how to let go is terribly important. Your child gets to determine her own course. Read the Unsolicited Advice Column that defines What Real Love Looks Like —letting your child discover her own path is more loving than telling her how to live.

Sometimes he’ll get it; he’ll believe in himself. He’ll realize the relationship he’s in has only more bad stuff ahead. He’ll realize he’s not giving himself the best shot professionally. Good things will happen, too. But don’t lie to yourself…failure is an option. Your kid may fail, may make—probably will make—foolish choices.

You won’t like the kid then. You may not get how she can make those choices.

You just hope the kid learns from it, wrings every ounce of learning out of those unhappy choices. All you can do is hope, because telling your child what to do—when she or he is an adult—just puts up walls. Don’t do it. Don’t think your kid needs to be told what to do. Even if he’s making stupid, foolish choices—spending more money than he has, not investing in your grandchild the way he should—don’t tell him what to do.

Even if you don’t like your child, you have to let her figure life out herself. Hopefully, she will. And then you’ll like her again, but maybe not now….