A Qualitative Study about the Reasons of the Extra-marital Relations(Case Study: Qurveh)

The extra-marital relations are one of the fundamental challenges of family life in the current era. The rate of divorce in our country has had an upward trend in recent years. According to family experts, often couples have mentioned unfaithful spouse as one of the divorce factors. As regarding to unpleasant consequences that extramarital relationships have for families and their children, the main goal of the present study is to study the affecting factors the extramarital relations qualitatively. To this end, 24 couples in the town named Qorveh - who had had unfaithful to their spouse and had referred to Welfare and counseling center- were selected by purposive sampling method and were studied with semi-structured in-depth interviews. Analysis of the data using a grounded theory revealed two categories of social and psychological factors caused the marital satisfaction and the extra-marital relations that they are respectively: forced marriage, attachment to spouse family and their involvement, attitude differences on gender roles, sexual and emotional dissatisfaction and suspicion. In other words, the mentioned factors provide context for dissatisfaction, loss of interest and understanding and in some cases the extramarital relations.