A couple sits across from you wanting to repair after an affair, but you’re not sure either of them, or you, agrees on what “infidelity” actually means. Dr. Talal Alsaleem built an operational definition for exactly this problem.

A couple sits across from you saying they both want to repair after an affair. What you don’t know yet is whether either of them, or you, actually agrees on what counts as infidelity in the first place.

That gap is what Dr. Talal Alsaleem spent his career closing. Fifteen years ago, as a new clinician building a broad clinical tool belt across populations, he opened a couples practice and found that over half of his caseload was arriving in an infidelity crisis, current or past. None of his existing training was built for it. That gap led him to create Systemic Affair Recovery Therapy (SART), and since then he has written three books on infidelity recovery and built a research base combining anthropology, sociology, evolutionary biology, and clinical case data.

Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Alsaleem on the Self Careapist Therapist podcast, where we discussed how he learned to define infidelity clinically, the three root causes behind it, and what a real apology actually requires.

Why Clinicians Need a Working Way to Define Infidelity

The first problem Alsaleem had to solve wasn’t treatment, it was definition. People define infidelity differently based on worldview, culture, and upbringing, and even researchers use inconsistent operational definitions from one study to the next, which makes the research itself hard to generalize. For a clinician, that ambiguity is a real liability: your own relationship contract and values cannot be the standard you apply to a client’s.

“The moment any person in this relationship outsources the fulfillment of those physical or emotional needs to somebody else outside this relationship without the consent of the partners, you’re breaching that contract of exclusivity, and that threshold is what defines infidelity.”Dr. Talal Alsaleem

This framing does real clinical work. It separates the therapist’s personal values from the assessment, and it gives a couple a concrete, negotiable thing to define together (how many partners, which needs, how exclusive) rather than an abstract moral judgment to argue about.

Why Most Couples Never Actually Had This Conversation

Alsaleem cites research finding that more than half of couples never explicitly discuss their exclusivity boundaries before a breach happens. Some couples negotiate the terms implicitly, some explicitly, and many never negotiate them at all. He traces the gap to two sources: modeling from family of origin (if a couple’s parents or grandparents never had this skill, it rarely gets transmitted), and cultural modeling from media, where relationships are portrayed through grand romantic gestures rather than the sustained, unglamorous work of maintaining trust.

That “grand gesture” pattern shows up again later in recovery. It is easier for an unfaithful partner to make one dramatic gesture of contrition than to do the sustained, tedious work of rebuilding trust day by day, which is one reason grand gestures alone rarely predict actual repair.

Three Root Causes: Relationship, Individual, and Environmental

Alsaleem organizes the etiology of infidelity into three categories, and treating any single one as “the” cause is, in his framing, a myth in itself.

• Relationship deficits. Unmet needs in the relationship do not disappear. They get fulfilled through a different outlet.
• Individual factors. Issues a partner brought into the relationship independent of it, including sex addiction, hypersexuality, trauma, or a condition that impairs impulse control, such as a manic episode in bipolar disorder.
• Environmental factors. Cultural norms (macro, like religion or nationality, and micro, like a friend group or family of origin) and relationship power dynamics. Alsaleem describes a “top dog and underdog” pattern: the partner with more power often grants themselves more relational rights and less accountability, while the partner with less power tends to avoid conflict and can eventually seek elsewhere the validation they are not getting at home.

He considers this three-category model his most useful clinical research contribution: it bridges sociological findings on culture and power with individual clinical case data, rather than treating infidelity as purely a relationship problem or purely an individual one.

Busting the “Once a Cheater, Always a Cheater” Myth

Alsaleem is direct that this myth has a kernel of truth, but it’s narrower than commonly assumed. The pattern holds mainly for a specific subset: unfaithful partners whose infidelity is driven by an unaddressed individual mental health issue, particularly Cluster B personality traits, which are especially resistant to change. It does not generalize to everyone who has been unfaithful, and treating it as universal leads clinicians to misjudge which couples are actually poor candidates for repair.

He also challenges the “midlife crisis” explanation, noting that midlife crisis is not a cross-culturally universal phenomenon, and what gets labeled one is often undiagnosed depression, anxiety, or general dissatisfaction repackaged as an acute excuse.

Why Men and Women Define Infidelity Differently

Research Alsaleem draws on finds that women’s definitions of infidelity more often include non-sexual intimate acts (hand-holding, hugging, gift-giving), while men’s definitions skew toward the physical and sexual. That difference also predicts how discovery lands: women tend to be more distressed by discovering an emotional affair, and men by discovering a sexual one.

The explanation Alsaleem finds most useful is the “double shot hypothesis”: each partner assumes their own threshold for how affairs typically progress. From a female perspective, a man is assumed not to develop feelings without a physical involvement already present, so an emotional affair implies both lines were crossed. From a male perspective, a woman is assumed not to become physical without an emotional attachment already present, so a sexual affair implies the same. In both cases, the discovered affair signals more than what was technically found.

The Two Recovery Milestones That Matter Most

Alsaleem’s SART model has seven recovery milestones. Two came up as the ones he leans on hardest in session.

Milestone two: getting the story. The betrayed partner’s most urgent question after discovery is what to do next, and they cannot answer it without a coherent narrative of what happened and why. Alsaleem’s clinical rule is to seek “the appropriate level of disclosure,” meaning every question from the betrayed partner gets evaluated for whether the answer will actually help them understand the type and cause of the infidelity, not simply satisfy curiosity that risks becoming a source of rumination.

Milestone three: acknowledging the impact. This milestone requires two things: does the unfaithful partner have a genuine emotional response to the damage caused, and do they intellectually understand that damage. Alsaleem is candid that not every unfaithful partner arrives with remorse already present, and part of his clinical job is to help them get there if it doesn’t surface on its own.

“You need to apologize for the specific damage that your action have caused. I’m sorry that, because of my infidelity, now every day you look in the mirror and you don’t like what you see.”Dr. Talal Alsaleem

A vague apology (“I’m sorry I cheated”) reads as insufficient because it does not demonstrate that the unfaithful partner actually understands the specific damage. A specific apology, naming the exact consequence, is what makes an apology land as real rather than reactionary.

Why Infidelity Recovery Cannot Happen in Individual Sessions

Alsaleem is emphatic on this point: infidelity recovery has to happen with both partners present, not through separate individual therapy. Even a fully honest, motivated client has blind spots, and part of the story that explains what happened belongs to the other partner. If the betrayed partner hears a conclusion secondhand (“my therapist and I decided you should…”) rather than watching the discovery happen in real time, it does not carry the same weight or credibility.

What Actually Counts as a Successful Outcome

Using SART, Alsaleem reports an 85% relationship-repair rate, well above the roughly 33% national average across treatment approaches. But he defines success more broadly than “the couple stayed together.” The other 15% of cases, where a couple reaches clarity that separating is the healthier outcome, count as a success in his model too, since the actual goal of infidelity recovery is helping people get unstuck and make an informed decision, not preserving every relationship regardless of what both partners actually want.

Links:
YouTube: https://youtu.be/9dXBWnKWu1M — “How to Heal Betrayal Trauma & Rebuild Trust After an Affair | Dr. Talal Alsaleem”

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6sfRSddv0RIJm9txZkLpLJ — “How to Define Infidelity Before it Ever Happens”

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/self-careapist-therapist-podcast-expert-insights-practical/id1821324484?i=1000791263252 — “How to Define Infidelity Before it Ever Happens”