Crazy Belittle Thing Called Love

My boyfriend of five years has gotten super moody. He picks fights with me and even gets a little verbally abusive and condescending. I know he's a good guy, and I want to help him sort through his stuff, but I'm finding myself flirting with other guys and fantasizing about cheating on him. I am not the kind of person who cheats, and I feel terribly guilty even having those thoughts.

--Demeaned

Ideally, "I've never felt this way before!" reflects something a little more romantic than longing to tunnel out of your relationship with a sharpened spoon. I wrote recently about a cocktail of personality traits that are associated with a susceptibility to infidelity in a person -- basically those of a narcissistic, lazy con artist with all the empathy of a bent tack. That finding is from research by evolutionary psychologists Todd Shackelford and David Buss, who also studied the emotional circumstances in a relationship that might lead one of the partners to cheat or to want to (even if that person isn't some ethically bankrupt, empathy-deficient turdpiece). They found that there are two personality characteristics someone can have that make a relationship particularly miserable. One is emotional instability -- marked by mood swings and a gloomy obsessiveness about things beyond one's control. As Buss explains in "The Dangerous Passion," when emotional instability is paired with quarrelsomeness (and all of the ugly condescension, sniping, and emotional neglect that goes with it), relationships become "cauldrons of conflict." This, in turn, raises the odds that one's partner will seek solace in the, um, back seat of another. Part of being in a relationship is taking out the trash when it starts to overflow -- including the psychological trash spilling out of the dumpster that has become "you." Talk compassionately with your boyfriend about the need for him to start figuring out and fixing whatever's causing him to act out in toxic ways. Don't expect change at "Poof!" speed, but look for signs that he's taking meaningful steps to dig out of his emotional winter. Give yourself some time markers -- maybe the two-week mark, a month from now, the three-month mark. This should keep you from just blindly continuing along with a partner whose interests could be advertised as: Enjoys dive bars, French cinema, long screaming arguments on the beach, and staying up till dawn pondering the age-old question, "I KNOW YOU ARE, BUT WHAT AM I?!"