She Cheated On Me and Thats Not All - Dr. Aria | E56
Steven Bartlett (host), Dr. Aria (guest)
In this episode of The Diary of a CEO, featuring Steven Bartlett and Dr. Aria, She Cheated On Me and Thats Not All - Dr. Aria | E56 explores betrayed, Broken, But Calm: Dr Aria Rebuilds After Infair Affair High-performance coach Dr. Aria recounts discovering his wife’s year‑long affair and pregnancy with a colleague just two weeks before his previous Diary of a CEO appearance. Rather than reacting with rage or revenge, he describes a painstaking process of grief, radical self-awareness, and ultimately forgiveness toward both his ex‑wife and her new partner.
Betrayed, Broken, But Calm: Dr Aria Rebuilds After Infair Affair
High-performance coach Dr. Aria recounts discovering his wife’s year‑long affair and pregnancy with a colleague just two weeks before his previous Diary of a CEO appearance. Rather than reacting with rage or revenge, he describes a painstaking process of grief, radical self-awareness, and ultimately forgiveness toward both his ex‑wife and her new partner.
Drawing on Buddhist practice, psychology, and neuroscience, he explains how he cultivated an inner “eye of the hurricane” – observing thoughts and emotions without being ruled by them, and choosing integrity over ego-driven reactions. He details practical tools he used: allowing grief fully, writing reality-based reminders for his future emotional self, and consciously working toward forgiveness to “travel light” emotionally.
The conversation then broadens into a critique of conventional monogamy and marriage, exploring evolutionary, historical, and cultural perspectives and why modern relationship scripts often fail. Both men outline how they now think about commitment, space, sexual desire, and bespoke relationship structures instead of one-size-fits-all models.
By the end, Dr. Aria frames the betrayal as a brutal but transformative test of the very resilience and self-mastery he teaches, showing how staying true to one’s values in crisis can deepen compassion, clarity, and a more authentic sense of self.
Key Takeaways
Allow yourself to fully feel grief instead of bypassing it.
Dr. ...
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Handle one moment at a time to prevent overwhelm in crisis.
When faced with the avalanche of consequences—divorce logistics, finances, housing, future dating, family fallout—he chose to focus only on the current moment: “All I need to do is deal with this one moment. ...
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Create “wise self” notes to guide you when emotions spike.
In calm, clear moments he wrote down principles and reminders on his phone: e. ...
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Distinguish between your thoughts and your identity.
He normalises having intrusive, dark thoughts—fantasies of torturing the other man or ending his own life—without moral panic. ...
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Recognise how ego fuels rage and intensifies suffering.
The most intense anger arose when he fused the situation with his ego—repeating “My wife, my house” in the night. ...
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Forgiveness is primarily for your own freedom, not theirs.
After processing the raw pain, he deliberately pursued forgiveness for both his ex‑wife and her new partner because he “didn’t want to carry emotional baggage. ...
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Long-term desire demands space and authenticity, not just safety.
He realised he had become a “sanitised” version of himself—overly safe, stable, and dependable—losing the spontaneity and edge that first attracted his wife. ...
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Notable Quotes
“She said, 'I've been having an affair with a man from work.' And then she said, 'And that's not all… I'm pregnant with his child.'”
— Dr. Aria
“In that instant… I heard a whisper within me as if it was resonating from my heart: all will be well.”
— Dr. Aria
“How you get through this process is more important than how quickly you get through this process.”
— Dr. Aria
“I want to travel so lightly I could pass through the eye of a needle… I didn’t want to carry the weight of anger or resentment anymore.”
— Dr. Aria
“What if the same ingredients that lead to a long‑lasting, loving relationship—stability, dependability, safety—are the same ingredients that kill desire?”
— Dr. Aria
Questions Answered in This Episode
You describe hearing an inner voice saying, “All will be well” immediately after learning about the affair—what specific practices over those 10–15 years do you think most directly cultivated that level of trust, and how could a beginner start building it?
High-performance coach Dr. ...
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Looking back, are there subtle early signs in your marriage—shifts in intimacy, routines, or conversations—that you now recognise as precursors to the affair, and how would you advise someone to respond if they notice similar patterns?
Drawing on Buddhist practice, psychology, and neuroscience, he explains how he cultivated an inner “eye of the hurricane” – observing thoughts and emotions without being ruled by them, and choosing integrity over ego-driven reactions. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
You ultimately forgave the other man you never really knew; if he reached out to you today wanting to talk or apologise, what boundaries or conditions would you put around that conversation, if you’d have it at all?
The conversation then broadens into a critique of conventional monogamy and marriage, exploring evolutionary, historical, and cultural perspectives and why modern relationship scripts often fail. ...
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You argue that stability and safety can undermine desire over time; what are three concrete habits couples can adopt to maintain both deep security and genuine erotic charge in a long-term monogamous relationship?
By the end, Dr. ...
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If you were designing a ‘relationship education’ curriculum for schools based on your experience and research, how would you teach young people to question conventional scripts without swinging to the opposite extreme of cynicism or avoidance of commitment?
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Transcript Preview
You've made a great decision. And I say this as impartially as I possibly can, but this podcast is... it's really the reason why I started The Diary of a CEO. It's to hear these kinds of stories from these kinds of people, and I've got to be honest with you, I spent about a year asking this person to come on this podcast and have a conversation with me. Today's guest is Dr. Aria, and he's been on the podcast once before. He's a, a world-renowned high-performance coach and he works with some of the world's most accomplished athletes, actors, and everyone in between as they try and reach a mindset state that is conducive with success, with happiness, and with overall fulfillment. But he's not here to talk about that today. He's here to talk about something very, very different, something uncomfortable, something unimaginable. So without further ado, I'm Steven Bartlett, and this is The Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody is listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself. (instrumental music) Sometimes in life, you have these unbelievable, somewhat cruel coincidences that occur that it's hard to make sense of, and last time you came on this podcast, I would define it as, for me anyway, a pretty cruel coincidence because we had a conversation, um, to do with life generally and, and success and the mindset and psychology and all the things that you're an expert on.
(laughs)
And for whatever reason, that day-
(laughs)
... I decided that I wanted to spend 30 minutes talking about marriage, cheating, love, and asking you these, um, very personal questions about monogamy, which I've never done before with any guest ever, and which I really had no place or reason to ask you more than anyone else, and it just feels to me, for what we're gonna talk about in part today, that that was a bit of a cruel coincidence, and you know, one of the questions I asked you was, um, "Do you believe in monogamy?" And then I asked you, "Can you love someone and cheat on them?" And when I listened to that podcast back, I now noticed, um, why you laughed.
Yeah.
Because it wasn't a... You laughed, yeah-
Yeah.
... and it wasn't a normal laugh.
(laughs)
It was like a real belly laugh, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
Like a, a bit of a nervous belly laugh.
Yeah.
After we came off air on that podcast, you told me something.
Mm-hmm.
And, uh, it- it even gives me goosebumps now thinking about what you said, and it gave the whole team in the room who overheard our conversation goosebumps as well, so... After our 30-minute conversation about marriage and monogamy and cheating and love, what did you say to me?
Told you a story.
Yeah.
And that was, uh, about two weeks earlier. I'd been traveling back from London home, and I got out of the train station, and my wife picked me up, and we got into the car, and we had planned to go and have brunch at my favorite little spot. They do amazing Huevos Rancheros sauce. I was very excited.
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