Does 'Revenge Cheating' Work?

"It is very common, although not always a conscious deliberate choice or action," agreed Patti Britton, Beverly Hills sex therapist and president of the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists (AASECT).

Does Revenge Cheating Work?

While many affairs may be based on boredom with a current partner or legitimate attraction to another person, retaliatory infidelity is often something different. In these cases, the motive for the cheating may be an attempt to restore "balance" to the relationship.

But the question remains: is there any way that such a strategy can be beneficial to a relationship that is already in trouble?

"It seems to me that there are only a couple of ways you can consider it in any way beneficial — and I'm not saying that it's beneficial," said Dr. Jacqueline Olds, a psychiatrist at McLean Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Mass.

"One is so the aggrieved party does not feel so aggrieved because they made things equal," she explained. "It may make them feel as if they have given a person a taste of their own medicine.

"Another is that sometimes it allows each person to get the sense of feeling wronged out of their system, and often they both find out that the grass is not always greener on the other side of the pasture."

And to the extent that it helps someone turn the tables on an unfaithful partner, revenge cheating may offer some perspective on the damage that can be caused to a relationship through infidelity.

"I think that the advantage — if you could put it this way — of retaliatory infidelity is that it has the potential to help the initially unfaithful person gain some empathy for the pain created by the sense of betrayal, and helps put some perspective on what might be lost otherwise," said Dave Greenfield, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine.

But in most cases, relationship experts said revenge cheating is a dangerous gamble that usually does far more harm than good.