Do We Have to Support Betrayed Partners as a Moral Class?
Monday, June 21, 2025.
A Gentle Essay for the Era of the Kiss Cam, the Comment Section, and the Weaponized Sympathy Vote
Let’s say it plainly and with love: getting cheated on feels like getting hit by a bus driven by someone you made dinner for last night.
It’s confusing. It’s cruel. It’s humiliating.
You go to sleep thinking you’re in a marriage and wake up in a courtroom of public opinion, with strangers in the jury box and TikTokers posting analysis videos of your last Instagram carousel.
So when the world sees a betrayal—say, a Coldplay kiss cam moment between a C-suite executive and someone clearly not his wife—the internet does what it does best.
It organizes itself into a moral army. It chooses sides.
And almost instantly, the betrayed partner is crowned: Saint of the Week. Patron of the blindsided. Keeper of virtue. Defender of vows.
But should we be doing this?
Do betrayed partners deserve automatic unconditional moral elevation?
Do we owe them our uncritical support just because they were the one left in the dark?
In a word: no.
In several more words: not unless we’re ready to flatten them into caricatures, ignore the actual emotional mess of long-term relationships, and assign sainthood like it’s a raffle prize handed out after a trauma fund-raiser.
The Myth of the Noble Betrayed
There’s something almost medieval about how many Americans react to infidelity.
One partner strays, and we rush to assign roles from the morality play: Betrayer, Betrayed, and the Temptress/Tempter, depending on the gender and how good their hair looks in the leaked footage.
But real relationships aren’t church dramas.
They’re long, meandering novels with weird middle chapters, unresolved plot threads, and a few deeply questionable metaphors.
And most of the time, when an affair happens, it’s not just about sex or even about deceit. It’s about disconnection. About unmet needs. About two people slowly drifting apart in the same house while the Wi-Fi still works.
The betrayed partner may have been kind. Or cruel.
They may have been emotionally available. Or checked out for three years.
They may have done everything right—or they may have been silently punishing their spouse with disinterest and routine contempt. But once an affair occurs, none of that seems to matter. They become a symbol, and symbols don’t get examined. They get shared.
Sympathy Is Not a Strategy
Supporting someone who’s been betrayed is basic human decency.
That’s not up for debate. The pain is real.
Studies show that infidelity often creates trauma-like symptoms, including obsessive rumination, hypervigilance, and dissociation (Roos et al., 2019). People can lose their homes, their kids, their self-respect, their sense of what was ever real. That kind of pain needs acknowledgment.
But acknowledging pain is not the same as granting moral immunity.
When we sanctify betrayed partners en masse, we start confusing sympathy with sainthood.
We treat their pain as proof of their righteousness. We imagine they were perfect partners—attentive, loving, communicative—and the straying spouse just decided one day to set fire to everything and make out with someone during “Fix You.”
It’s tidy. It’s satisfying. And it’s often wrong.
Betrayal Is a Symptom, Not a Biography
One of the hardest things to accept—especially if you’ve ever been betrayed—is that cheating doesn’t always happen because someone is evil.
Sometimes it happens because someone is empty. Or bored. Or numb. Or desperate.
Or afraid to speak up for what they actually need, so they chase a version of themselves through someone else’s approval.
That doesn’t make it okay. But it does make it human.
Esther Perel, who’s become the unofficial poet laureate of the adulterous, argues that affairs are often less about the person you’re running to, and more about the person you stopped being (Perel, 2017). They are existential pivots. Emotional jailbreaks. Terribly timed wake-up calls.
So when we say “support the betrayed partner,” we have to ask:
Support them in what?
In healing? In truth-telling? In burning the cheater’s clothes on the front lawn? In launching a thousand memes in their honor?
What happens when the betrayed partner doesn’t want to heal, but to punish?
What if they refuse therapy, refuse to reflect, refuse to imagine they played any part in the deadening of the marriage?
What if they want revenge dressed up as empowerment?
Do we still pledge our allegiance even still?
Infidelity’s Hidden Victims: Support The Children as a Moral Class
Here’s the part no one puts in the Instagram captions: infidelity often sets off a chain reaction of systemic instability. And in heterosexual marriages involving children, it is often the kids—not the lovers—who absorb the most invisible damage.
Research has consistently shown that interparental conflict, especially involving betrayal and deception, contributes to emotional insecurity and long-term attachment disruption in children (Cummings & Davies, 2010).
One large-scale meta-analysis found that children of divorce related to infidelity show elevated levels of anxiety, lowered academic performance, and difficulty forming secure adult romantic relationships (Amato, 2001).
This is where my provocative frame “second-degree child abuse” begins to surface—not as a legal category, but as another line of moral inquiry.
If a parent’s choices lead to chronic instability, emotional triangulation, loss of a caregiver, or a prolonged state of high-conflict co-parenting, we must ask: Does it qualify as emotional harm to the child?
Infidelity itself may not be abuse. But the handling of it can be.
Especially when children become messengers, mediators, or inadvertent witnesses to betrayal.
When a child has to comfort the crying parent, decode the silences, or overhear the whispered names of affair partners, they are not merely “resilient.” They are navigating an emotional asteroid belt.
As psychologist Jennifer Freyd’s (1996) research on betrayal trauma suggests, children may suppress or disassociate from awareness of parental betrayal to preserve attachment.
But that doesn’t mean they’re unaffected. It just means the harm hides deeper.
The Betrayer’s Humanity (Yes, Even Theirs)
Now comes my heresy:
Sometimes the person who cheats is actually more honest than the one who stayed.
They didn’t lie well. They didn’t keep pretending. They cracked under the weight of a role they could no longer play. They failed, yes. They wounded. But they acted out of a longing to feel alive, not out of malice. I know I’m losing some of you right now, bit hang on just a tad longer.
This is not to excuse betrayal. Only to say: don’t confuse apparent fidelity with emotional generosity.
Some people stay and punish. Some people stray and confess. The neat categories often collapse if you look closely with curiosity..
What Support Could Actually Mean
What would it look like to support betrayed partners without sanctifying them?
Give them space to rage, cry, and not be okay.
Don’t force them into the “strong single mom” or “glow-up queen” narrative before they’re ready.
Challenge them lovingly if they start weaponizing their victimhood.
Support their healing, not their hatred.
Remind them they’re still lovable, not because they were loyal—but because they’re human.
And, crucially:
Hold the betrayer accountable—without stripping away their humanity.
Hold the betrayed gently—without turning them into a symbol.
And hold the children first—because they never got a say in any of this.
Final Thoughts from the Cheap Seats
So no, we don’t have to support betrayed partners as a moral class.
We can support their humanity—messy, tender, furious, stunned—who are now facing one of life’s most bewildering rites of passage: realizing that love does not always protect you from being hurt by someone who once meant everything.
In a better world, we’d all learn how to grieve without seeking glory.
We’d sit with pain without turning it into PR.
We’d stop performing morality and start practicing reflection.
And perhaps we’d leave the kiss cams to catch actual moments of joy—not flashbulb betrayals in real time.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Amato, P. R. (2001). Children of divorce in the 1990s: An update of the Amato and Keith (1991) meta-analysis. Journal of Family Psychology, 15(3), 355–370. https://doi.org/10.1037/0893-3200.15.3.355
Cummings, E. M., & Davies, P. T. (2010). Marital conflict and children: An emotional security perspective. Guilford Press.
Freyd, J. J. (1996). Betrayal trauma: The logic of forgetting childhood abuse. Harvard University Press.
Perel, E. (2017). The state of affairs: Rethinking infidelity. Harper.
Roos, L. E., Dahlen, S. E., Padesky, C. A., & Pearce, L. A. (2019). Betrayal trauma and the shame of being broken: A psychological profile of betrayal survivors. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 32(3), 440–450. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.22399