Tiger Woods, Brad & Angelina....Why do they do it?

Tiger Woods is all the gossip recently for admitting to "transgressions" while married, and he is hardly the first celebrity who seems to have it all and ends up having an affair. Before Tiger there was Charles and Camilla, Brad and Angelina...even the AMAZINGLY beautiful Halle Berry had infidelity in her marriage! To us it seems like these people had everything: Tiger is a world-class golfer and could marry anyone; Charles had Princess Diana for heaven's sake; Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston were the golden couple; and if Halle Berry couldn't keep her husband it couldn't possibly be about looks or sex. So the nagging question has to be this: "Why do they do it?"

Affairs are very rarely about looks or sex. I mean, look at Camilla and Princess Di--Prince Charles SURELY is not "trading up" in the looks department there so it couldn't be about looks! Yet somehow Charles just could not give up Camilla. Why? In a nutshell, it's because the Other Person (I call them OP) does things that KINDLE love at the same time that the loyal spouse (LS) is doing things to EXTINGUISH love. And we're all human--we tend to all do that. We get used to each other, the kids come, then the bills... and pretty soon we forget to take the time to do the things we used to do when we were dating.

The first thing I would say about the whole Tiger Woods affair--John Q. Public should give Tiger a break. We are not there and we do not know the facts, so to keep it on the rumor mill like this shows our worst tendencies, not his. Second, it is between him and his wife and family and it's none of our business! Third, we aren't there and we don't know the facts, so let's not assume that Tiger's the bad guy and his wife is somehow the victim. In my years of experience in this field what I've discovered is that this can happen to anyone if they don't guard themselves and that usually there was some sort of major relationship breakdown before this that set things in motion to get to where they are today. I'd say we should look at it like Tiger's hurting, his spouse is hurting, probably the other involved party is hurting, and now they have to go through all that in public too. In order to save their marriage, both parties will need to look at themselves, admit what they did to contribute to this mess, and then do the work necessary to change than and become a better person. If they both stop the actions that extinguish love and start again to do the things that kindle love--well honestly they could have a whole new, more intimate, more wonderful marriage!!