Why do people have affairs, indeed? This is an age-old question asked by many, particularly onlookers from the outside, who are shocked when a couple in the community announces their impending divorce, following a marital rupture. The cause: an extra-marital affair. These onlookers are often dumbfounded by the development, as in their view the two shared a “happy marriage.”

More often than not, individuals who go down the path of pursuing an affair do not wake up and say, “I’m going to destroy my marriage.” Rather, it is the result of an action that happens before they realize it consciously. Agoura Christian Counseling can provide support in understanding the underlying causes and guiding couples through the process of healing and rebuilding their relationship.

The subconscious, of course, has been driving the action, and unhindered by any moral intervention, will achieve its desire at any cost. Such is the strength and power of our fleshly desires, as described in God’s Word:

…but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death. – James 1:14-15

Why Do People Have Affairs?

Every relationship is unique, and it is difficult to pin down an exact response to the question: why do people have affairs? Counselors who see couples who are dealing with the aftermath of an affair might put it down to one or a combination of the following reasons:

Affairs as an escape from the mundane.

Any couple having been married for a while will lose that initial spark that brought them together in the early days of dating and the “honeymoon period”. Everyday life, bills to pay, sleepless nights with babies, and other stresses, can cause a marriage to fall into a rut.

This boredom and mundanity can lead to the door being opened toward a novel and exciting experience, particularly when a colleague or community member shows interest in a spouse who quite enjoys the ego boost.

Forbidden fruit.

Marriage is God’s good plan for a man and woman to bring each other joy and companionship, and the means from which to build a solid foundation for a healthy family structure. If this is so good, then why do people have affairs? As sinners, we have a natural bend toward desiring that which does not please God.

While we long to be upright, moral citizens, the reality is that it is only God’s grace that makes us right before Him, and while we are on this side of heaven, we will be tempted to fall into sinful patterns. An extra-marital affair takes place when we buy into the lie that somehow, forbidden fruit is sweeter and more satisfying than what is allowed to us.

Loss of connection in the relationship.

While affairs still occur regardless of the strength of a couple’s marriage, the reality is that when either spouse experiences a deficit in their “love tank”, they will be more prone to seek fulfillment and affirmation outside their marriage. These relational deficits can occur due to poor communication, which is the lifeblood of a healthy couple; lack of affection; a lack of physical intimacy; or a loss of emotional connection.

An affair does not necessarily have to end in divorce. If the transgressing spouse is prepared to repent and leave the extra-marital relationship, and commit to working on their marriage, and the spouse on the receiving end is equally committed, an affair can in some instances bring a married couple back to a stronger space. This would likely be more possible by attending counseling sessions, such as those offered by Agoura Christian Counseling, and a devotion to prayer and receiving God’s help.

Every marriage goes through troubled waters at some point. Sometimes the struggles a couple faces come from outside their relationship or control. One of the partners might get laid off from work, placing enormous financial pressure on the couple and their family. In other situations, the marriage may be rocked by infidelity by one or both spouses, which calls the foundation and future of the relationship into question.

Whether from external or internal issues, whether it’s illness, finances, growing apart emotionally, struggling to conceive, grieving a significant loss, criticism from outside parties, or any other reason, a marriage can go through trying times and cease to thrive. At such times, the best avenue for relief is to seek the Lord in prayer.

Whether these prayers are prayers for yourself, your friends, or prayers for your parents who are going through a tough time in their marriage, the Lord is an ever-present help and source of comfort. Agoura Christian Counseling can also offer spiritual guidance and support, helping individuals and families find peace and healing during challenging times.

Prayer can take many different forms. We get many different examples of prayer in the Bible. Our prayers can be poetic like the Psalms or jarring and raw like the cries in Lamentations and some of the Psalms; they can be lengthy like Solomon’s prayers over the Temple, or a short, straightforward, and simple, “Lord, save me!”

At its root, prayer is a cry from a creature to the Creator, an appeal to the Lord for intervention in our situation. Whether you are simply feeling overwhelmed, or perplexed and at your wit’s end, angry or saddened by how things are going, we are reminded “Give all your worries and cares to God, for he cares about you” (1 Peter 5:7 NLT).

We come to God with faith that God is able, “through the mighty power at work within us, to accomplish infinitely more than we might ask or think” (Ephesians 3:20 NLT). We look to God trusting that in his wise timing and his way he will intervene on our behalf in our situation.

Prayers for marriage restoration.

Below are a few prayers you can pray either for yourself or for people whose marriage needs restoration. As we pointed out earlier, prayer can take many different forms. Sometimes, all we can muster is, “Lord, help me.” And that’s fine. Prayer isn’t about ceremony and long words. God knows what’s in our hearts, and simply opening ourselves for him to search us and minister to us is a huge step.

The prayers below come from several places on the internet. Most of them are sourced from Scripture, and they can function as a guide for your own prayers. Take what works and make it as personal as possible. You can pray these prayers by yourself, with your spouse, or in community with others.

Prayer for a marriage headed toward divorce.

“Heavenly Father, I come to you with a heavy heart. My marriage is in trouble. My spouse has filed for divorce and has fallen out of love with me. Your plan for marriages was for them to thrive, and not end in divorce. Please restore our marriage. Revive our marriage and make it flourish beyond what it was before.

“Bring us back together as a couple and do your work on each of us from the inside out. Give us the strength to find our way back to one another with an open heart, mind, and soul. Please God, bring restoration to my marriage. The vows we gave each other, let us yearn for them and each other once more. Have mercy and pour your abundant grace upon us, Lord.

“Lord, we have hurt each other in so many ways, but we have also hurt each other by refusing to forgive one another. Lord, I’ve tried my own way but realize I can’t do it on my own. My God, help us forgive each other and heal our hurts. We pray this in the mighty name of Jesus, Amen.”

Prayer over troubled finances.

“Dear Heavenly Father, I come before you to ask for your miraculous blessing and healing over our marriage. You are a remover of obstacles, and Lord we pray over our walk as husband and wife and in our walk with you, asking you to make us stronger and a better husband and wife.

“May the words from our mouths be full of encouragement and seek to build one another up. Remove any spirit of bitterness, blame, or criticism toward one another that may dwell within us. We ask for your hand of blessing over our financial situation, and we trust you for our provision. In the name of Jesus, we ask and pray, Amen.”

Prayer to draw closer to God and each other.

“Dear Lord, I believe you are working in my life and in my spouse to reconcile us back to you and each other. Lord, stir my spouse’s thoughts with the same good and loving thoughts that existed when our love for each other was still budding and strong. Let my heart and that of my spouse burn in love for you and each other, as at the beginning. Lord, rekindle our love for one another.

“Wherever my spouse needs understanding to be drawn to you, Father give them that understanding. May our love for you grow within us both, and Lord, please heal each one of our emotional wounds and cause our hearts to be drawn towards each other. Lord, we’ve tried and done what we can, and have come to the place now where we don’t know what to do.

“Lord, I ask you that if there is a way, please show us the way and what to do. I ask you to show us the next steps we need to take to restore our marriage. I ask you to deal with my heart, with any selfishness, apathy, or pride, or anything in me or in my spouse’s heart that is not pleasing to you. I ask you to reveal anything to us that we are not seeing for ourselves.

“I believe Lord that you are the Way, the Truth, and the Life. We’ve lost our way. We need your Way, your Truth, and your Life. We’ve lost our first love for each other. We need You. We need you to restore us; I ask you to restore us and to help us find the way back to each other and you again. In Jesus’ name. Amen.”

Prayer to rebuild trust.

“Heavenly Father, you are the one who created marriage and brought us together, and it is your will that we be reconciled together and that our love for each other grows, blossoms, and becomes stronger, no matter what has happened between us in the past. Give us hearts that are open to forgiveness; help us to live in a way that is pleasing to you and that fosters trust between my spouse and me. Lord, some things are hard to rebuild once broken.

“We trust that with you, even the things that are dead can be brought back to life. Lord, heal our marriage of its brokenness. Let this healing start with me. Lord, have mercy on our relationship and rebuild the trust and honesty that has eluded this marriage. In Jesus’ name, we pray, Amen.”

Prayer to remove bitterness, anger, and other negative emotions.

“Father, deliver me and my spouse from the lack of forgiveness, hatred, anger, and bitterness that is poisoning our hearts and minds and is undermining our relationship. Fill up every space in our hearts with your peace, love, joy so that we do not give way to negative emotions that would draw us apart. Lord, teach us to treat one another with dignity, love, and respect.

I ask for grace and emotional strength to avoid the use of anger and unforgiveness as a weapon to fight against my spouse. Help me to be slow to speak and slow to anger, but quick to listen to my spouse. I pray that we will no longer allow our emotions to work against us and drive a wedge between us, in Jesus’ name. Amen.”

Prayer for strength to work through differences.

“Lord, thank you for the good work that you have started and have always done in my marriage. I ask for the strength to stay courageous and strong in your promises as you work things out in our marriage. It’s tempting to give up, but I ask that you replace every negative feeling with love and help us to work through our differences.

I refuse to give up or yield quickly to alternatives such as divorce or separation. I will not be discouraged or lose heart even if it seems like nothing is happening and our efforts at restoring our relationship aren’t yielding fruit. Your word is greater and surer than any other power. So, I choose to trust in you and to keep working on my marriage and our differences. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”

The Lord calls us to pray because it helps us recognize our limits as human beings and draws us in trust to come before God and submit ourselves to his will and purposes for our lives. These and other prayers allow us to let the Lord minister to and strengthen us. We pray, but we also act. Prayer is one way we can offer support for friends going through a tough time in their marriage.

Christian marriage counseling.

It is one way for us to address the problems in our marriages. Encouragement toward and support through couples counseling is another way to stand in the gap for a couple with a troubled marriage. If you’re looking for marriage restoration, pray, but also seek the help of a trained marriage therapist, at Agoura Christian Counseling, to give your relationship the support and opportunity for flourishing it needs.

Infidelity is a gut-wrenching experience to go through. It can take many forms, such as physical and emotional affairs. A physical affair will likely involve sex while an emotional affair can be conducted online or in-person but without sexual intercourse. An emotional affair is problematic because an inappropriate emotional attachment is formed with a person who is not your spouse, undermining your legitimate relationship.

Many people are caught entirely unawares by their spouse cheating, but others may suspect that something is going on because their spouse has been acting out of character. Infidelity does change a person’s behavior, and they may show signs that an extra-marital relationship is going on.

Signs may point to something, but if you don’t have a complete picture, those signs could easily point to other things. While your spouse may display all the signs listed below, that may not necessarily mean they are cheating, though it likely indicates there’s something wrong in the relationship.

The signs of cheating can look different in each relationship, so follow your gut because you know your spouse better than anyone else but proceed with caution. If you do find that they’re cheating, reach out to a trusted person or a counselor at Agoura Christian Counseling for empathetic support.

9 Signs of Possible Infidelity

Below are nine signs of a cheating spouse:

1. Secrecy

If your spouse starts exhibiting secretive behavior for no plausible reason, that may signal that they have something to hide like an affair. If they start putting passwords on their computer or phone that weren’t there before, and they refuse to share them, that’s a red flag.

If they begin leaving the room to take phone calls or reply to texts, or they never leave their phone in a room, begin deleting text messages, and clearing their browser history, all of those are possible signs. If you find that your cloud sharing has suddenly been turned off, and they no longer use shared family devices, this secrecy may add up to something they don’t want others to see, and an affair is one possibility.

2. Increased hostility

If your spouse is acting differently toward you by being short or hostile toward you, that too may be a sign that something is happening. When someone has an affair, they direct their emotional energy toward the affair. As we have finite amounts of emotional energy, that means the marriage is being short-changed, and that sometimes manifests in them losing their temper more.

Additionally, when someone is having an affair, they may begin shifting blame onto you to justify their behavior. They’ll become more critical of you because in their minds they are trying to justify what they’re doing – if there’s something wrong with you, the thinking goes, then they aren’t in the wrong for looking outside the marriage.

3. Decreased intimacy

Due to the emotional energy they are putting into the other relationship, they have less energy to pour into your relationship and emotional connection. They may become less vulnerable and available to you and your needs, and this may indicate a shift of focus. If you find that you’re losing communication with your spouse, whether it’s a failure to respond, listen to you, or even fight with you, that may point to infidelity.

4. Unexplained financial transactions 

Between gifts, hotel rooms, gas spent on extra trips, and other out-of-the-ordinary expenses, infidelity is expensive. If you also find that you’re fighting more about money, or if you find charges on your credit cards or withdrawals from your savings, and your spouse can’t explain or justify them, that may spell trouble.

5. Anxious friends

When infidelity happens, usually you may be the last person to find out about it. Your spouse’s friends may know what is going on, and when you talk with them, they may be anxious around you for no obvious reason, or they may avoid you altogether.

6. Unexplained absences

If your spouse begins to be absent without a reasonable explanation, that too may point to something being wrong. This may include being unreachable via phone without legitimate or plausible reasons, suddenly having an altered schedule such as spending extra time at the gym, working late, or having meetings and business trips when they never had those before, or their work doesn’t seem to call for it.

They may start arriving late or blowing off commitments altogether. They may start a new hobby that takes them away for hours on end, but if you ask them about it and show interest in it, they may be vague about things or seek to dissuade your interest in what they’re doing. The reason for this is that just as much as infidelity costs money, it also takes time. When probed, they may have flimsy excuses or no reasonable explanation for being absent more than usual.

7. Changed appearance

As human beings, we all have the ability and the desire to change and improve ourselves. We take up new interests or may decide to get healthy and in shape. All of these are legitimate and don’t point to infidelity as the cause. Depending on your spouse, the sudden interest in looking good may be an unexpected occurrence that is questionable.

If they take a sudden interest in their appearance and looking attractive (by getting a haircut, new clothes, and fragrances, or working out), and they begin putting in extra effort when going to certain social events or work, but they don’t seem as bothered about the effort around you, that may deserve further scrutiny.

8. Changes in sex life

An affair can cause changes in your sex life, and more, less, or different sex may indicate something is afoot. You may begin having less sex with your spouse because they are having that need met outside the marriage. On the other hand, you may also begin having markedly more sex because they are trying to cover up their affair.

Your sex life may also become different, with your spouse becoming adventurous and wanting to try new things in bed because they may be learning new tricks in the course of the affair. If you find you have a sexually transmitted infection and you haven’t been unfaithful, that too may point to your spouse cheating on you.

9. Lies, deflection, avoidance, and blameshifting 
If you mention the topic of infidelity, and you find your spouse getting angry, doing whatever they can to change the subject, shifting blame onto you and accusing you of cheating, or avoiding the subject altogether, something may be going on with them. Guilt is a powerful thing, and people will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid admitting to their actions when confronted.

When all is said and done, there is no definitive way to know if your spouse is cheating by the signs. The signs of infidelity are often subtle, and they will vary in each relationship and individual. Your spouse may be showing all the above signs, but there may be an explanation other than an affair.

Alternatively, they may not show any of these signs but be having an affair. If your gut is warning you that something is happening, that’s something you shouldn’t ignore, and an honest conversation with your spouse may be in order. If the signs, lies, and stories stop adding up, that may indicate that something is up, and you need to begin asking.

If your spouse is having an affair, don’t walk this journey alone. Find a trusted friend, pastor, or a trained and certified therapist at Agoura Christian Counseling with whom to share your concerns. Should you choose, seek relationship therapy together with your spouse or alone before you decide to end your relationship.