Oana
Hello and welcome to episode 22 of The Feminine Uncut Podcast. I’m Oana, your host, and founder of Thefeminine.com, an online platform dedicated to women all over the world. Our mission revolves around a totally new paradigm of how you take care of yourself as a woman. Our belief is that if you acknowledge and include the feminine principle and the feminine practice in your daily life, you can totally transform the way you live.
Ioana
The way you love.
Oana
And the way you work. For the past 15 years, I’ve been a life coach entirely dedicating the last eight to empowering women, to trust their voice, follow their heart and embrace their womanhood with no fear and no shame. The feminine is the embodiment of my coaching method. It brings together tried and true body of work, exercises, and practices with the intention to meet all your questions and concerns and curiosities, self-care, sensuality, female sexuality, empowerment, relationships, sisterhood, and everything in between. We’ve been doing this Uncut podcast for a year now and it’s been a fantastic journey. We love it so much. Your questions and your challenging feedback and still the perfect incentive for our work. Why did I say challenging feedback? Because we’re going to tackle a very important hot topic, which is relationship survival affairs. This is one of the questions we received recently. So we’re going to really dive into cheating, why we do it, how we do it, and how we’re going to deal with it afterward or in the meantime. And Jeanna, of course, is here with me, hopefully bringing more questions to the table and helping me bring some light into the conversation she’s really prepared for today’s podcast.
Oana
I can tell you she has this inquisitive curious look in her eyes. Hi, Juana.
Ioana
Hi, Oana. Hi everyone. Short Disclaimer. I will be flipping some pages so if you hear the background noises because I printed a lot of articles trying to ask questions or give solutions to this whole messy cheating equation. And for example, I have an article from Glamour magazine a few days ago. It’s fresh, asking what causes infidelity to eleven men and women on why they cheated. So before reading some extracts from this article, I would like to ask you as a coach because I know you did and still do and probably will do because this is always going to be on the table as a subject. What’s your experience as a coach in the matter of cheating? Do women cheat less than men? Because this is a myth that women cheat.
Oana
I remember I don’t really want to answer this because I’m really a feminist at the core and it will be a bad answer for women. Women cheat more than men.
Ioana
Oh, okay.
Oana
Way more.
Ioana
I wanted to say ridiculously.
Oana
Way more.
Ioana
Okay, so we demystify in one sense.
Oana
It’s totally unbalanced, at least nowadays. I mean, in real grounded relationships like family and stuff, women do cheat more than men. First of all. I hate the word cheating and there are many types of cheaters. I’m not addressing that type of cheater who’s always a cheater and never really has the capacity to be in a relationship full depth so he can’t commit. That’s a type of psychological type of personality, a type of immature reaction to life. So I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about real people in relationships, having families, and going through the rough times of relationships. In those types of situations, women cheat more than men.
Ioana
I would like to go even through the immature type of cheating because I’m sure a lot of women and men who are listening to this podcast are not necessarily 40 years old and have 20 years of marriage. They are probably 18 19 20 years. So they are in the immature stage of their lives. But I’m curious about the differences between what triggers cheating in men and what triggers cheating in women. But before asking you what’s your personal take on that, I would like to read some extracts from the article I was telling you about just to have a picture. So why Men have cheated some men answered for the first time. Women were hitting on me, says a guy who is 28. Absolutely fantastic. So it’s very interesting. It’s not what it seems. Another answer coming from a guy who’s 29 is I was seeking something that I was not getting from my marriage, the opportunity to do something different in bed. John, 34 what we wanted out of our sex life was very different. Adam, 25 See, young people told you then why women have cheated. I needed a way to end it. We were emotionally incompatible to get my needs met.
Ioana
I didn’t feel like myself. I think there are more answers coming from women than from men. But long story short, is there for real any relevant difference between the reasons men cheat and women cheat?
Oana
Well, it’s the same difference between men and women because men connect sexually in the relationship and women connect emotionally. And if you look at the answers, men are looking for something sexual that they’re not receiving or they can’t explore with their partner. And women are looking for something emotional that they don’t have access to with their current partner. So the reason is different because we are different as men and as women. But I think that the motive behind both parties is that they can’t really find a way to explore what they need and what makes them whole as a person in the current relationship.
Ioana
At the same time, it’s true that the answers I just read reflect that, but I think this is also a myth because men start to be a little bit tired. If you really connect and have an honest conversation with them, they get a bit tired of being sexualized all the time and being accused between brackets that they do whatever they do only because they have sexual incentives, they have emotions toward their human beings, too. They love the whole Shabam. And in the same time, women start with this whole empowerment movement, they start having a sexual voice and expressing their sexual freedom. In this way, we are not only emotional human beings, we are sexual, too. So maybe can we look at this cheating conversation as a shadow of trying to express the other side of the nature of men and women.
Oana
Well, definitely. And I think for me, it even goes one step behind the premises. It’s totally not working, because as a coach, the words cheating, I have a problem with that. I have an issue with that beyond men and women and why they do it and how they do it. Because cheating is such a low-vibration, a bad word that doesn’t really describe why people engage sexually and emotionally with other people while being in a relationship. And how should we call it to cheat implies betrayal, implies lies, implies mistrust? Unless you do it as a profession unless that’s the only thing you do. You just promise women or men that you are going to commit, and then you don’t. And you’re just having this long list of affairs unless you’re in that category and you definitely need to heal something. Or on the subject, people don’t cheat. People try to express themselves and experience life. So I have a problem with the word cheating because it implies a lot of negative vibrations and negative experiences. And most of the time it’s not about the fact that we want to lie to the other. Most of the time we’re hitting that stage where we’re looking for somebody outside of the relationship after we’ve tried a lot in the current relationship to express ourselves more and the partner wasn’t ready to include us or accept us.
Oana
And there wasn’t really an opportunity for direct, honest communication. So we end up lying and causing betrayal. But most of the time we end up doing that because there wasn’t an opportunity for honest communication in the first place.
Ioana
Okay. I have a question that will help us get more real about how to call it in a healthy way and dismiss this cheating label. Let’s imagine I have had a relationship that’s going on for some years now, and I know that my boyfriend is cheating on me. I just know it for sure. I have the proof that’s not maybe or and if it’s true, how can I confront him in a healthy way without going to him and telling him, I know you’re cheating on me? I’m sure many women and men also find themselves in such a similar situation, and they don’t know how to address the issue. They cannot live with it, but they also don’t want to be very violent. Maybe they’re afraid, I don’t know.
Oana
They can live with it. That’s the first. They can live with it because they’re living with it already and they haven’t addressed it. So first and foremost, to tell it bluntly, they are living with it and they’re not taking accountability for that. And that’s the first thing I think in a partnership when somebody is cheating, you need to understand that there are two in the game. So unless you’re taking accountability for this, experience yourself, even if you play the victim and you play the victim and you may even be justifying yourself as a victim and it’s a valid justification, you need to take accountability for that experience happening for both of you in the same time. And not only that, you are experiencing the other side of it, but you are accountable for it.
Ioana
That’s the first thing I am the one who is not cheating.
Oana
Yes.
Ioana
And I am accountable because they accept it without addressing it. No.
Oana
You are accountable because it’s happening in the relationship. And everything that’s happening in the relationship, you are accountable for because Tango is always messed into. What does that mean? It means that for one reason or another, that person did that act of being with somebody else because there wasn’t a full space for him in the current relationship. And you’re accountable for the lack of space or for the lack of honest communication around the space. Whether you say, I’m not going to give that space to you. And now we have to deal with our relationship and we have to tell it the way it is, and we either want to end it or accept our differences and deal with them maturely. But most of the time before cheating, what happens is that partners are trying to find a way to communicate their whole needs and they’re not being met or they’re not being seen or they’re not being heard by the other. And then the action of meeting those needs somewhere else is occurring. That’s why you’re both accountable.
Ioana
So what I hear from what you’re saying is that before doing anything that involves the other, I should just have a conversation with myself and try to understand with myself why this is happening.
Oana
Yes. And also address it in the relationship.
Ioana
Yeah, but how? In a healthy way.
Oana
First of all, being accountable for that experience. Second of all, coming from a place of vulnerability, because if I really say, hey, listen, in this relationship, I don’t really experience, I have enough air to breathe, and I have needs sexually or emotional or psychological that are not met, and I don’t feel safe to talk them to you or I’ve addressed them to you and you just bluntly disregard them. And I’m not happy with it. I’m not happy as a whole person. I’m not happy as an individual. So I have to take accountability for my happiness. And that also can include finding my happiness somewhere else, which brings an opportunity for vulnerability but also for accountability.
Ioana
You just advised me, and that’s exactly what people are running from, being accountable and honest. It’s like if you can do anything, do anything that doesn’t evolve accountability. I’m just speaking in general. Not only in this kind of situation.
Oana
The cheating doesn’t come with the other person. The cheating comes first with yourself because you are cheating on yourself, thinking that finding your needs met somewhere else without addressing them bluntly and honestly in the relationship is going to be a solution, in the end, that’s going to satisfy you. Nobody is satisfied living a double life and that type of compromise that people end up into is a symptom of their incapacity, to do the work with themselves, to be in alignment with their own truth, in their whole wholeness.
Ioana
And if you feel fulfilled with living a double life, what does that mean?
Oana
I think you’re fulfilled with leaving a compromise and you’ve set it up that way and it works for you, that’s fine if it works for everybody else in the compromise. But most of the time, 99% of the time, somebody’s unhappy, one of the three people involved. And that’s fine too if they’re willing to be accountable for their unhappiness and take accountability, that they want to be unhappy. Because in the end, that’s a joke. That’s a hilarious joke. You are accountable either way. You are accountable whether you play the accountability and you are accountable whether you play being accountable. The question is what situation gives you more power and where do you have more freedom? Because funny enough, if you think about it, people cheat because they don’t feel free. But true freedom comes from you being accountable for your full needs and owning them in relation to others. So your cheating is just the compromise in the name of freedom. But it’s not actually freedom.
Ioana
This is such a conversation for adult people. I mean, you really have to never expect that. No, I expected that. I hoped for that, at least, because it’s not like I don’t have a very vast experience in cheating or being cheated. I want to remember I had an experience when I was in sophomore year, I was 19 or 20, something like that. And I had a relationship with a guy that was extremely convinced that I was cheating on him. But I didn’t even know what that word meant at that stage. So he was crazy jealous of a ghost because I wasn’t cheating on him in any way. And it was such a traumatic experience for me that I was condemned for something I didn’t even think of doing, not something that I did from that moment on. I said I won’t be able to do it because it’s such a burden that it’s so easier saying it and putting an end to what you started and what’s not working. So my question is I try to ask the questions not from a personal experience this time, but from a lot of conversations, I hear around me, from people who went through different kinds of either cheating or being cheating or being cheated or thinking about cheating.
Ioana
But before getting to the accountable attitude and to accountability, which let’s be honest, involves growing up and that’s a process and you cannot get there overnight. Just saying, starting today, I’ll be accountable. There’s a lot of emotion involved in this, whatever you want to call it situation. And I’m going to quote Esther Perel because she’s like this girl, it’s from one of her books, The State of affairs. And I will start my question with this quote because it gets to how you can deal with the emotional part of I’m trying to avoid this word, but I don’t know how many you can help so embedded. How can you call cheating if you don’t call it cheating?
Oana
Well, looking for having an extra conjugal relationship.
Ioana
Having an extra something, it’s too complicated. So she says adultery. Look, she gave us the answer, adultery. Adultery has existed since marriage was invented. Yet they come together. Yes. This extremely common act remains poorly understood around the globe. The response I get when I mention infidelity ranges from bitter condemnation to resignation acceptance to cautious compassion and outright enthusiasm. So there are a lot of various kinds of emotions involved in this infidelity adultery cheating conversation. And let’s be honest, 90% of the people just are enraged or plunging into bitterness and depression, which is not leading you anywhere. How can we tap into the right kind of emotion before getting to accountability?
Oana
By accepting all emotions that show up and understanding that our actions hurt and impact the other if we’re the cheating part if we are cheated. Also, again, understand that what other people do, we don’t have control over it so we can suffer from it, or we can choose to be at peace and accept what is happening with the other person without going into suffering or drama about it.
Ioana
I ask this question because I think what makes us feel so bad and most of the time even worsens the situation is the feeling we insist on having. As I told you earlier the small story of my boyfriend is convinced I was cheating on him. I remember looking at him and he was like trying to convince himself I was cheating on him. And it’s not the act that made him feel so bad, but what he was putting is feeding his emotions.
Oana
Well, I think it’s a little bit more intense or more complicated than that. I’ve been in a threesome relationship in my life. It has happened to me once in a codependent relationship and I had to go through that and I actually went through that being very aware that I’m starting that I was aware that I was having it. I was aware when I ended it. One of the things that I’ve personally experienced is the type of emotion that code dependency with all these ups and downs are bringing is so intense that in a way you need a Ph.D. in meditation, which most people don’t have to really be aware and own those type of intense emotions because from jealousy to feeling betrayed to feeling light to hoping to be delusional, feeling worthy, feeling unworthy, the whole range that shows up in a relationship where you are constantly cheated or you are cheating as a punishment, that you are cheating. Those types of emotions are very intense and in a way, they’re immature emotions, but they are the emotions of our humanity and humanness. And if you really want to be raw as a human being and really want to explore yourself as a human being, that’s a curving lesson.
Oana
And it’s a growth process, staying there for too long and in an unworkable way for you, that’s the tricky part. But it’s very hard to put order into it, and it’s very hard to understand in the maze of these intricate feelings where you are, why you’re there, how you want to go about it, and when it’s time to end it. And for me, the only thing I wanted in this threesome experience situation, I found myself and for a while blocked myself into it. The only thing I personally needed was the truth. And the funny thing is that no matter how much I tried to have honesty in that treason in a way, because I was like, clearly that was happening. The other people weren’t ready for that type of honesty, although it was like in our faces like it actually happened in front of everybody’s faces. So people are not necessarily ready to step into the truth. And that’s the foundation of drama. The suffering doesn’t come from the fact that I have a partner and the partner is having a relationship with another woman. The drama comes from the fact that nobody wants to tell the truth about it.
Oana
Nobody wants to own the fact that that’s what they want, and they want it that way for a long time, and they want to compromise and they’re feeling absolutely fine with it. And if everybody would be honest, then maybe two women would come along who would be willing to play the same game and find it useful as well. And it will be Vicki Barcelona and Christy Barcelona, and it will be perfectly fine. It’s a bubble, but nobody has dubbed, I don’t know, bubbles work. We found our adulthood on bubbles, and they can work for a while. They can be temporary. I don’t know. I haven’t figured out the truth, the universal truth to happiness. Happiness is something that comes and goes. Bubbles can be part of happiness if you own the bubble. But that’s the problem. People don’t want to be honest, even if it’s obvious.
Ioana
Because you mentioned Vicky Cristina Barcelona. A lot of listeners write us because somehow they relate to the movie and book recommendations we make in this podcast. So when you said about Vicky Christina Barcelona, a movie came into my mind. It’s called The Affair. It’s serious actually, it’s not a movie and why it came into my mind speaking about the differences between men and women that we started the podcast with is that that movie is brilliant even for only one reason. It represents the story of an affair, obviously. But it’s half of the episode. It’s how his story and the other I know it’s on HBO, right? Probably on Netflix or something. There are two different stories. It’s amazing. She sees the actions and the situations in a way and he sees them.
Oana
That’s relationships. That is not just about affairs.
Ioana
Where it’s one of the most instructive things because it makes you at least see, if not really understand, that the same actions and reality, whatever that means, can be seen completely differently through the eyes of your eyes and your partner’s eyes. So if anybody is interested, it’s called The Affair and it’s serious. I’m not sure if it’s HBO or CBS or Netflix yet. And to stay a little bit, I think we’re approaching the end. But one last question, because I quoted Esther Perel and she’s famous, probably the most famous thing she’s known for is she said she repeatedly says that communication is not always useful because we don’t know how to communicate. And this cliche going around, it happened because you’re lacking communication. And she says no, maybe it happens because of the lack of communication, but communicating about it can even worsen.
Oana
The thing I totally agree with is my first marriage because I was married for ten years at the beginning of my romantic life from 18 to 28. And I was in a relationship with a much more older man, 15 years older. So he was like a full-grown man, like a Don Juan in his early 18s young period. So he had a lot of women in his repertoire. And then he fell in love. We fell in love and he became totally faithful. And one of the biggest things that we hit four or five years into the relationship was the fact that he was the only man I was with. And it felt outrageously unfair, not in relation to him, but in relation to my whole life in general because the idea of being limited that way was unbearable. So we started a series of communications, honest communications about my needs and where he was about it. And we set up an agreement to avoid cheating because I wasn’t necessarily willing to sleep with another man, but I wanted to have freedom and he was mature enough to understand that personal emotional need or psychological need.
Oana
And he told me one thing that I remember that simplified my whole existence for which I will ever be grateful. One of many things, because I’m grateful for many things about my relationship with this partner, with this man. He told me, you can go have sex with another man and in a way cheat, right? Because we work in an open relationship and it’s a difference. Open relationships actually include polygamy on both sides where that’s the type of people we are. We want to do it. It’s fine for us. No cheating means we’re faithful and something is obscured. But he said we don’t have to cheat on each other. We just make an agreement that we can have sex with other people with the Disclaimer that if you do that, you don’t come put that on me.
Ioana
I don’t want to hear it.
Oana
I don’t want to deal with it. I don’t even want to feel it in our relationship. So if you can own having sex with another man without disturbing anything in our intimate relationship, then you’ve matured and you’re able to own your personal relationship outside of our relationship. And that’s fine with me because it is your right. It was such a challenge. He raised the bar so high, and it took me like three years of coaching and talking with him and with my coach to even come close emotionally to be able to sustain that. And funny enough, that wasn’t the reason why our marriage ended. And I don’t think he ever cheated on me or had sex with another woman. I actually think he never did that. Like, I can even swear on his behalf. I can’t swear on any other man, but only you. I can swear. But even if he did it, Bravo to him, because I never felt it.
Ioana
He tapped into the accountability issue and he challenged you to be accountable. Yes.
Oana
And he told me this great thing, that’s your problem. It should be your problem and it should remain your problem. And don’t do it close to home so that everybody can find out accidentally because that’s still part of you being unaccountable. So it’s a very complex subject. It really depends on where you’re coming from when you do it. And how are you taking care of the other? Because I think the suffering comes from completely being oblivious to the fact that having sex with another person outside my relationship or my marriage affects both. The person I’m having sex with one night stand or an affair and my marriage and my children and the people around me affects everybody. So am I ready to do that and hold into my accountability or into my eyesight at least the impact I have on others? Or am I just doing that as selfish? I have my need. I have to take care of my need. That’s what I’m doing it. I don’t care.
Ioana
Yeah, exactly. You have to think. But generally, we don’t think when we are there, we don’t think. But I think you just open the possibility of another podcast, The Open Relationship, The Myth of Open Relationships. So I think this makes the subject of another podcast. But now we really have to end this episode. But please draw a short conclusion, including three I know this is tough but try to include three feminine principles that can really help you deal with cheating.
Oana
Stop looking from the perspective of cheating and look at it from the perspective of telling the truth, whether it’s your truth, his truth, her truth, or the truth of the relationship, and really go into the sacred space of the heart and ask for the truth. It may be very painful for you to go through that process but it will bring you freedom and it will give you the explanation, the real motive behind why this is happening in your relationship. The second is dealing with your own emotions. Don’t put them on the partner, breathe with them, meditate with them, work with them the feminine way, the way we’re teaching you. And third of all, when you’ve reached a place of owning your emotions and being neutral, as neutral as possible, talk to your partner from a vulnerable place not throwing guilt at him and charging him and condemning him, blaming him but really talk about your emotions, how you are suffering because that will open up an emotional space between the two of you and it will bring awareness to him about the impact of his actions on you and I think it will give you a different place and space from which to deal with this type of actions and it’s the same if you’re the cheater be neutral and own that from a vulnerable place with your partner.
Ioana
Brilliant. Thank you, Oana, and Amen.
Oana
Thank you too and just hop on and share and comment and give us new challenges on the subject. We’re definitely ready to take you to the next level.
