You are a young adult who has just found out that your mom or dad is cheating and you are not sure how to feel. Or, maybe you have known for awhile but are only just starting to realize that the affair has affected you at all. Or, your romantic relationships are a mess and you are starting to wonder if it could have anything to do with your parent’s infidelity. 

Why is everything so cloudy and hard to figure out?

It’s not you. Figuring out if and how a parent’s infidelity effects you and your romantic relationships is no small task, for three reasons. 

Culture Squelches Exploration

When a parent cheats the family’s focus moves reflexively to the parents and their needs. Often there is so much emotional fallout that the betrayed parent struggles to function normally. On top of this, there are the very real logistical concerns of if and how the couple will stay together or spilt, and how the family will fare financially. Amidst these two priorities, how you feel as the child often gets shoved aside. 

Western culture tends to focus on the couple when there is infidelity. Children, extended families, friends and communities are largely left to their own devices. The cultural message seems to be: it’s not really your problem, get over it and move on with your life.

So, in order to help your family and fit in with your culture, that is exactly what you do. Put whatever feelings you may have to one side, and move on. For some kids this works just fine. For others, not so much. 

Often, the first sign that you have not actually put everything aside and moved on is…

It looks like it is someone else’s fault

While children who grow up with cheating parents are more likely to cheat themselves, they are also more likely to be cheated on. If, for example, you are a heterosexual woman whose father cheated on your mother, it is more likely that you will attract a man who cheats on you.

When these men cheat on you, it is easy to fall into the pattern of, I didn’t do anything wrong, he cheated on me! Or, All guys are dicks. Indeed. A person’s choice to cheat on you is not something that you can control, and is not your fault. 

The better question to ask is, why are you interested in guys who make those choices?

There is no easy or uniform answer to this kind of question. It involves looking more closely at what you are attracted to in a person, physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. It may mean going back through your boyfriends with a magnifying glass to see what they have in common, or when the relationship went wrong. 

It also means examining what you believe about relationships, based on what you learned from your parent’s experience. In this example, perhaps you learned that women are destined to have to stay with men who cheat on them. Or that the only way to have good sex is with someone unreliable. Start asking yourself if these thoughts are true for you.

Even after staring the exploration process, it is completely normal to stumble because…

Relationships are hard

When I was dating in my 20s, I flip flopped a lot between believing that everything I was doing was about my mom cheating, and that I was acting completely independently of what I learned about relationships from my parents. The truth, as it usually is, was somewhere in the middle. My point is that sometimes problems in relationships are just normal problems. It is hard to be vulnerable with someone, and to know when to kiss them, and to know if they are ready to commit. Or if you are. 

Research shows one way that adult children cope with a parent's infidelity when they are in a relationship is to focus on the ways that their partner is NOT like their cheating parent. To continue with the example above, you might focus on all of the ways that your boyfriend is not like your dad, as a way to reassure yourself that your are safe from your mom’s fate.

I certainly understand using this technique, as I did it myself. It means that you are still comparing your relationship to your parent’s, and could mean that there is more fear or misunderstanding for you to work through. Sooner or later, understanding that your parent’s infidelity effected your life deeply means allowing your partner to be who he is, rather than focusing on who he is not. 

Give yourself a whole lot of grace. Figuring out that part of what is going on with your love life is about your parent’s affair can be hard to see, and even harder to cope with. Keep being honest with yourself, examining those relationship messages that you got from your folks, and remember that relationships are hard for everyone.