Persevere or Revenge?

Imagine a person who is truly faithful to her partner and being faithful is a core value in her belief system. However, her partner turns out to be cheating on her. Three scenarios are imaginable for this person who’s been hurt by being cheated on:

1. Witnessed and experienced the pain that occurs to a cheated partner, this person discovers being faithful more valuable than even before. Therefore, she not only perseveres being faithful, but also puts it into action more rigorously and responsibly. This scenario requires this person to have high personal integrity and act consciously.

2. The pain of being cheated on is so deep and intense that this person finds revenge as the only way to overcome the pain. When the cheating partner is not accessible, this person replicates the cheating on her next partner to ease the pain on herself by feeling “even” inside.

3. The third scenario is the extreme case of the second one. In this case, the pain is so severe that the person urges to protect herself from any sort of such pains in the future. Not to go through the pain of being cheated again, she turns to a cheating partner herself. It’s similar to “escape forward” strategy: The act of moving forward misrepresents proactive act of victory; however, it’s indeed a passive act of escape.

Unlike the first scenario, the second and third scenarios are probably chosen, consciously or unconsciously, by weaker personalities who lack a solid belief/value system. The deviation of the action (cheating) from the internal value (being faithful) causes internal irritation, which tends to be reduced by this group of people by different justification mechanisms: “everyone does it”, “don’t be such a naïve”, “let’s be real”, “be smart and mature”, etc. The level of deviation from the values is closely related to the level of pain we experience.

This mechanism of breaking our values to protect ourselves from pain and regrets can be also traced in many other situations. For example, if a seller lies or hides the defects of merchandise, we may not hesitate to do the same thing to others when we sell it later although this behavior is against our values.