Why do Good people have affairs?
My Spouse Did Something Evil. She's Still a Good Person. Here's How Both Are True.
If you're in affair recovery right now, you've probably lived inside the same conundrum.
I believed I married a good person. Then my wife had an affair — something a good person wouldn't do. So now what? Either she isn't a good person, or she isn't at all who i thought she was. You're forced to pick, and neither option feels real.
That's the tension almost every betrayed spouse gets hung up on. How could you do this? What is wrong with you? I thought you were a good person. We draw these lines around what good people will and won't do, and an affair blows right through them.
In our newest podcast episode, Katie and I take that question head-on: why do good people do bad things? And what I've learned — through our own affair recovery and hundreds of other stories since — changed everything about how I see my wife, and honestly, how I see people in general.
Hurt people hurt people
Here's the sentence I'd put on a billboard if I could: all of my bad behavior in life came out of my hurts. Yours too, probably.
The bigger the injury, the worse the behavior. That's not an excuse — it's an landscape to help better understand, and there's a massive difference. An affair is evil. It's not good. It's the biggest offense you can commit against your spouse short of killing them: you made a vow, named the one thing you wouldn't do, and did it anyway. I'm not softening that.
But in hundreds of affair stories, I have never met a person who came in with the desire to hurt their spouse. I've never met someone who got married planning to trick their spouse into feeling safe and then cheat. What I meet, every time, are people who are deeply hurt — and who found a terrible strategy for dealing withe those injuries.
"Bad medicine" and why the strategy isn't the problem
We all medicate. Food, alcohol, work, pornography, shopping, gambling, affairs — I call them "bad medicine." Not because the thing itself is always evil (food is fine; working hard is fine), but because of why we're reaching for it and what it costs us.
Nobody has an affair because it makes them feel worse. In the moment, something medicinal happens — relief, a feeling of being wanted, proof that you're still valuable. The strategy almost always matches the injury directly. In Katie's case, the injury was she never felt valuable, particularly around her body and appearance — and the affair offered exactly that medicine, straight into the wound.
That's why just attacking the behavior doesn't work. You can white-knuckle your way off the bad medicine for a while, but if the injury is still there, you'll go back. Or you'll find a new medicine. Ask anyone who's ever said "I'll never do it again" and meant it.
The better question — the one that actually changes things — is why did i do this? Why do I keep doing this? What am I medicating? What did I come to believe about myself, and who taught it to me?
Curiosity instead of condemnation
Most of us were taught to beat ourselves up. Condemn the behavior, confess it, try harder.
But condemnation without curiosity keeps you stuck. "The devil made me do it" is the most common version I hear, and here's my problem with it: if you don't know what he said to you, how do you stop from being tricked again? In my experience, what he said was some version of "you're not good enough." And if you believed that before the affair, you'll believe it after — unless you deal with it directly.
You can't heal what you won't feel. That's true whether the healing comes through faith, therapy, journaling, honest conversation, or some combination of it all.
So is my spouse good or evil?
Both things are true, and that's the whole point. The action was evil. The person is good — injured, believing a lie about their own worth, obedient to the injury instead of the goodness God put in them. But good.
That distinction saved my marriage. Not because it erased what happened — betrayal trauma is real, and there are consequences — but because it gave us something true to work with. You can't rebuild trust with someone you've decided is a monster. You can rebuild with a hurt person who's willing to face the injury.
The healthiest people I know aren't perfect. They just believe they're valuable, so they don't need the bad medicine. That's available to you too — whichever side of the affair you're on.
Watch the full conversation
Katie and I go much deeper in Episode 2 — including the "rearview mirror" exercise for finding your own injury, why even good habits like working out can become bad medicine, and the question that changed everything for us: why?
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