Are There Times When a Relationship Is Particularly Vulnerable to an Affair?
After an affair, couples often want to understand why it happened when it did. A marriage may have survived years of demanding careers, financial stress, young children, sexual dry spells, family problems, and ordinary periods of disconnection without either partner being unfaithful. Then something changes, sometimes during a period that did not seem especially troubled from the outside.
There is no particular stage of a relationship when an affair becomes inevitable, and research has not identified a predictable sequence of life events that causes infidelity. Studies instead point to a combination of individual, relationship, and contextual factors. Relationship satisfaction, sexual desire and compatibility, attitudes toward infidelity, attachment, opportunity, and the availability of alternative partners have all been associated with infidelity, although the strength and consistency of those associations vary considerably across studies.
Major transitions deserve attention because they can change several of these conditions at once. Becoming a parent can alter sex, sleep, responsibilities, and time together. Professional success or failure can change someone's sense of identity and status. Illness and loss can bring mortality into immediate focus. Travel or a demanding new position can create extended time away from a partner and sustained contact with someone else. Understanding what changed around the time of an affair can help explain why a previously maintained boundary became easier to cross.
Becoming Parents
Few transitions reorganize a couple's daily life as thoroughly as the arrival of a child. Sleep decreases, responsibilities increase, privacy becomes scarce, and partners may have considerably less time for sex, conversation, or each other. Expectations about childcare and household responsibilities can also become sources of resentment when what happens after the baby is born differs substantially from what either partner anticipated.
Research has consistently found changes in relationship satisfaction during the transition to parenthood, although the effects vary considerably among couples. A meta-analysis of 37 studies found small average declines in relationship satisfaction from pregnancy through the first year after birth, while more recent research following 1,433 couples found substantial variation: 38.7 percent remained highly satisfied and stable, 51.3 percent began highly satisfied and experienced a small decline, and 10 percent experienced a much larger decline from an initially lower level. Relationship doubts before the birth were among the factors associated with the more difficult trajectory.
Parenthood therefore deserves attention in understanding the circumstances surrounding an affair, although declining satisfaction after a baby should not be treated as an explanation by itself. Many couples experience significant strain during this period without infidelity. The more informative inquiry concerns what happened within a particular relationship: how responsibilities changed, whether resentment accumulated, what happened sexually, how supported each partner felt, and whether either person began seeking attention or validation elsewhere.
Career Success, Failure, and Changes in Status
Professional transitions can affect far more than income. For someone whose identity has been closely tied to achievement, losing a position, being passed over, selling a company, retiring, or discovering that a long-pursued achievement feels unexpectedly empty can change how that person understands themselves.
Success can create its own changes. A promotion may bring status, travel, admiration, greater independence, and new professional relationships. Sudden wealth can alter social circles and opportunity. A founder who sells a company may have financial freedom for the first time while losing the work, urgency, and identity that organized daily life for years.
In After the Affair, Janis Abrahms Spring includes changes in status and professional failure among the circumstances worth examining when couples try to understand why an affair occurred. Her clinical framework is useful here, although research does not establish career transition itself as a general cause of infidelity. The relevant question concerns what the transition changed for the individual and the relationship.
Consider someone who has spent twenty years building a company and sells it at forty-eight. From the outside, the transition looks entirely positive. Internally, the person may have lost the structure, authority, challenge, and recognition that occupied most of adult life. Attention from someone new may become particularly compelling during a period when an established source of identity has disappeared.
A similar process can occur after professional failure. Someone who feels humiliated, diminished, or uncertain about their competence may become unusually responsive to a person who makes them feel interesting, capable, or desirable. That context can help explain the timing of an affair while leaving responsibility for the decisions that followed exactly where it belongs.
Illness, Loss, Aging, and Awareness of Time
Serious illness, the death of a parent or close friend, physical changes, sexual difficulties, and aging can alter a person's sense of time. Questions that were previously abstract become harder to avoid: How much time do I have? What have I done with my life? Is this the person I intended to become? What experiences have I missed?
Spring discusses illness and death among the events that can form part of the context surrounding an affair. Clinically, these periods are worth examining because they can affect identity, sexuality, dependency, and a person's awareness of their own mortality. The research does not support treating grief, illness, or aging as direct causes of infidelity, so the connection has to be understood at the level of the individual rather than assumed from the event.
For some people, attention from a new person during this period can provide reassurance about attractiveness or vitality. For others, the relationship offers temporary distance from illness, caregiving, grief, or an identity they have begun to experience as constraining. Understanding that function can provide useful information about what the affair was doing psychologically for the person who had it.
Distance, Opportunity, and a New Person Who Is Frequently There
Affairs require opportunity, and opportunity is partly determined by circumstance. Research examining extradyadic sex has found associations with the availability of alternative partners and opportunities to conceal the involvement, while broader reviews of infidelity research identify contextual factors as one part of a much larger picture.
Work can create particularly favorable conditions for emotional and sexual boundaries to change gradually. Two people may spend long hours together, travel together, solve difficult problems together, exchange increasingly personal information, and receive recognition from each other that their partners rarely witness. A connection that began entirely within professional boundaries can become more personal over time without either person identifying a single moment when the relationship changed.
The progression matters because affairs do not always begin with an explicit decision to have one. A person may permit a private conversation they would conceal from their partner, begin sharing marital frustrations, look forward to messages, extend a business dinner, or create opportunities for additional contact. Each decision changes the boundary slightly, making the next one easier to rationalize.
Looking backward at those decisions can be more informative than asking when the affair officially began. The relevant history includes when secrecy began, when the person recognized the attraction, what boundaries were relaxed, and what they told themselves as the relationship became increasingly difficult to describe honestly at home.
When the Primary Relationship Has Been Deteriorating
Relationship factors do appear in infidelity research. Lower relationship satisfaction has been associated with extradyadic involvement in some studies, and research using predictive models has identified interpersonal variables including relationship satisfaction, love, desire, and relationship length as important predictors of both online and in-person infidelity. The findings vary across populations and do not permit a conclusion that dissatisfaction causes affairs.
A deteriorating relationship can nevertheless provide important context. Partners may have stopped having sex, accumulated years of resentment, withdrawn from one another, or become reluctant to raise problems because every discussion ends badly. Someone outside the relationship may then provide attention, ease, admiration, sexual interest, or conversation that has become scarce at home.
The condition of the marriage belongs in the investigation because a couple trying to remain together will eventually have to address it. Responsibility for the affair remains with the person who chose to cross the agreed boundaries of the relationship. An unhappy marriage and an affair are related questions that require separate examination.
This distinction is particularly important for the betrayed partner, who may otherwise hear any discussion of marital problems as an argument that they somehow caused the affair. A relationship can have serious problems for which both partners bear responsibility while one partner bears responsibility for responding to those problems through deception.
When Alcohol or Other Substances Are Part of the Picture
Spring also identifies substance use as something worth examining around the time of an affair. Alcohol and other substances can affect judgment, inhibition, memory, and decision-making, and substance use may occur within a larger pattern of impulsivity, avoidance, or difficulty regulating distress.
Here again, the chronology matters. Was heavy drinking already increasing? Did the affair occur primarily in settings involving alcohol or drugs? Was substance use part of the social relationship with the affair partner? Did intoxication facilitate an initial boundary crossing that was later continued while sober? Was the person already using substances to manage stress, loneliness, shame, or dissatisfaction?
Substance use may explain part of the sequence without accounting for the decisions that continued after the initial event. A single intoxicated encounter and a six-month concealed relationship present different questions about intention, repetition, and responsibility.
Transitions That Change How Someone Sees Themselves
Some of the most important transitions are difficult to identify from the outside because the external event matters less than the change in identity that accompanies it.
A person becomes a parent and no longer recognizes their previous life. Another becomes an empty nester and begins reconsidering decisions made decades earlier. Someone reaches the professional position they spent years pursuing and discovers that achievement has not produced the satisfaction they expected. Another loses a parent and becomes acutely aware of aging. Someone who has always been needed by other people suddenly has fewer demands and does not know what to do with the freedom.
During periods like these, attention from another person can become attached to a version of the self that feels newly available. Someone may feel more sexual, spontaneous, admired, powerful, interesting, or independent in the other relationship. Those experiences can become extremely compelling when they contrast sharply with how the person has been experiencing themselves elsewhere.
That distinction can be important when trying to understand the intensity of an affair. The attachment may involve genuine feelings for the other person while also being connected to the experience of oneself in that relationship. Asking what the affair partner provided is therefore only part of the inquiry. It can be equally useful to ask: Who did you get to be when you were with that person?
Understanding Why It Happened When It Did
When couples examine an affair, “Why did you do it?” is often too broad to produce a useful answer. “I was unhappy,” “we had grown apart,” “I was drinking too much,” or “I wasn't myself” may contain some truth while explaining very little about how an attraction became a concealed relationship.
A more complete account examines several things at once: what was happening in the person's life, what was happening in the primary relationship, what the outside relationship provided, which boundaries changed first, how secrecy developed, and how the person justified each successive decision to themselves.
Research supports this broader approach. Reviews of the infidelity literature describe interacting individual, interpersonal, and contextual factors rather than a single reliable explanation for why people become unfaithful.
This kind of examination can also help distinguish circumstances from decisions. A new baby may leave a couple exhausted and sexually disconnected. A professional failure may leave someone hungry for admiration. A death may provoke an unsettling awareness of time. Frequent travel may create opportunity and intimacy with a colleague. Those conditions may help explain why attention from another person became particularly powerful at a particular moment.
The remaining questions concern the choices that converted vulnerability into betrayal: when the person recognized that a boundary was changing, why they continued, what they concealed, what they permitted themselves to believe, and what would have to change for them to respond differently under similar circumstances in the future.
Understanding those questions gives a couple something more useful than a single explanation for the affair. It identifies the conditions and decisions that made the affair possible, which is essential information for determining whether the relationship can be made safer going forward.
Regina Abayev, JD, LMFT provides couples therapy in Hermosa Beach and online throughout California, including work with infidelity, betrayal, disclosure, trust, and relationship repair. More on why trust takes time to rebuild after an affair, or request a consultation.
