Understanding Why Affairs Happen: A Guide for Couples Therapy

Infidelity remains one of the most challenging issues couples face, and therapists often struggle with how to help partners navigate the aftermath. A recent framework offers guidance by categorizing affairs based on the underlying motivations that drive them, providing therapists with a roadmap for more targeted treatment.

The Importance of Understanding Motivations

When an affair comes to light, the immediate focus is often on the betrayal itself. However, understanding why the affair happened is crucial for three key reasons: helping to end ongoing affairs, preventing future infidelity, and creating a coherent story that both partners can understand and work with during healing.

The Woolley motivation typology divides affairs into three broad categories and seven specific types, each requiring different therapeutic approaches when combined with Emotionally Focused Therapy, a treatment method that has shown effectiveness in helping couples recover from infidelity.

Three Main Categories of Affairs

Relationally Driven Affairs

These affairs stem from problems within the primary relationship. They include protest affairs, where someone engages in infidelity as a reaction to feeling hurt or abandoned; come and get me affairs, where the goal is to make a partner jealous and more attentive; and burned out affairs, where someone has lost hope in the relationship and uses the affair to help them leave.

One of the unique challenges with relationally driven affairs is that both partners often have wounds from before the affair occurred, in addition to the trauma of the betrayal itself. This can lead to hopelessness about whether things can improve. Therapists need to balance addressing the infidelity with acknowledging the relationship problems that existed beforehand, while being careful that the unfaithful partner doesn't use those problems to blame their partner.

Romantic Escape Affairs

When life becomes stressful and someone doesn't turn to their partner for support, they may escape into a romantic affair. The excitement and secrecy provide a powerful distraction from work problems, financial stress, or other difficulties. These affairs can sometimes continue for years, with the person going back and forth between relationships.

The key to healing from escape affairs involves helping the unfaithful partner become aware of their emotional needs and learn to address stress openly rather than through escape. They need to eventually turn to their primary partner for comfort instead of seeking relief outside the relationship.

Intrapsychically Driven Affairs

These affairs are rooted in deeper psychological issues, often stemming from past traumas or disconnections. They include hedge fund affairs, where someone maintains backup relationships because they believe others will inevitably abandon them; power player affairs, where sex and power become disconnected from love and vulnerability; and compulsive affairs, characterized by disconnected sexual encounters used to numb emotional pain.

Intrapsychic issues typically require addressing past traumas, and individual or group therapy may complement couples work. The goal is to help the person experience corrective emotional experiences with their current partner that can heal deeper wounds.

General Principles for Treatment

Beyond understanding motivations, several general recommendations apply to treating infidelity. Complete and honest disclosure is typically essential for healing, though it should focus on the betrayed partner's healing rather than alleviating the unfaithful partner's guilt. The therapist needs to confirm whether the affair has truly ended and help terminate any ongoing contact with the third party.

Managing shame is also important. People who have been unfaithful often feel shame, which is a disconnecting emotion that shifts focus away from their partner's pain. Therapists can address this by framing the actions as destructive while affirming that the person is not fundamentally bad, and that their distress actually indicates their actions conflict with their deeper values.

Betrayed partners often become obsessed with details of the affair as they try to rewrite their relationship history. While some information is necessary, focusing solely on details without addressing the emotional and attachment meanings can hinder healing. Therapists help shift the focus to what the affair meant in terms of trust, safety, and feeling loved.

The Role of Attachment

Research has found that all seven types of affairs relate to insecure attachment styles, meaning people who engage in affairs often have underlying fears about connection and abandonment. The therapy process involves not just stopping the affair, but helping both partners develop more secure ways of relating to each other.

Creating safe emotional connection takes time, particularly after betrayal. The unfaithful partner needs to truly understand their partner's pain at an emotional level and show deep remorse. The betrayed partner needs to experience this understanding. Both partners must develop a clear story about what led to the affair and what will prevent it from happening again.

This framework for understanding affair motivations fills an important gap in how therapists approach infidelity. While Emotionally Focused Therapy has proven effective for healing the emotional wounds of betrayal, understanding the specific motivations behind each affair can help ensure it has stopped, make sense of why it happened, and prevent future infidelity.

The recommendations come from both clinical experience and existing research, though outcome studies specifically testing this typology have not yet been conducted. As therapists continue working with couples facing infidelity, this motivational framework offers a structured way to tailor treatment to each couple's unique situation, increasing the chances of successful healing and relationship repair.


Woolley, S. R., & Koren, R. (2025). Using the Woolley motivation typology to heal infidelity with emotionally focused therapy. European Journal of Mental Health, 20, 1-10.