It’s every woman’s worst nightmare: to find out that the man she loves has been sleeping with someone else. So what are reasons why men cheat? How could it have happened? Wasn’t he happy?
What does this other woman have that she doesn’t? How could he have hidden this from her? So what are the reasons that make men cheat?
There’s nothing that strikes fear and horror into a relationship like infidelity. It’s the “inexcusable crime,” the ultimate betrayal.
One in two relationships can’t survive it and crumble in the wake of guilt and anger.
So why do men cheat, then, if the consequences are so grim? Is cheating part of human nature, something that we can’t eradicate no matter how much we want to?
Is monogamy even realistic in a modern relationship?
These are tough questions that we must navigate for ourselves, but, to help you through the debate, here are some facts and reasons why men cheat women they love.
The Facts about Cheating (what makes men cheat)
According to a 2017 poll by MSNBC.com, 1 in 5 adults currently in a monogamous relationship have cheated on their partner, and 1 in 2 of us have cheated at some point in our lives.
That means only 4 in 5 marriages escape the taint of infidelity.
As you’d expect, men tend to cheat more than women. Twenty-eight percent of married men have had at least one affair, while only 18% of married women have done the same.
The only problem with these figures is that no one agrees on the definition of “cheating.”
Does looking at porn constitute cheating? What about talking about sex in an online chat room? Is flirting cheating?
Because of this ambiguity, it pays to discuss the topic with your partner.
He may think that it’s okay to visit a strip club or go out dancing with other women, as long as he’s with a group of friends.
You may think that some harmless flirting at work doesn’t do anyone any harm.
That’s why both of you need to agree on what constitutes a breach of faith before you accuse the other person of straying.
Women tend to cheat for very different reasons than men. Women have more “emotional affairs,” where they become very close emotionally with someone else and stop feeling as connected to their own spouse.
These affairs may start out innocently enough as friendships, but they soon evolve into something more.
For men, affairs are matters of the loins more than the heart. The thrill of illicit sex can liven up the boredom of a monogamous relationship.
Many men seriously doubt their ability to stay faithful to one woman forever, and they truly believe that having another sexual outlet is the only way they’ll be able to stay in the relationship.
Other men cheat because there’s a kind of sex they yearn for that they can’t get from their partner.
Some men find that, whereas they used to derive great pleasure from dirty sex with their wife, they just can’t do it now that she’s the mother of their children.
Instead, these men seek out prostitutes or other sexual outlets for their darker fantasies. These are some obvious reasons why men cheat.
Still other men find themselves going home with another woman because they’re just not happy at their own home.
Unlike their wife, their mistress treats them like the man they’ve always imagined themselves to be.
With her, they’re able to reawaken a part of themselves that had gone dormant – the part that was young, foolish, dangerous, free, and unfettered by the bonds of convention or society.
The affair makes them feel alive, sometimes for the first time.
One thing is for certain: it’s easier to conduct an affair now more than ever.
With all of us spending longer hours in the workplace, office affairs are on the rise.
Cheaters can cover their tracks with anonymous email accounts and pre-paid mobile phones.
Websites like AshleyMadison.com and MarriedDateClub.com make it easy for wanna-be cheaters to meet like-minded folk.
In fact, some affairs are conducted solely online through webcams and chat rooms, without either party ever having to meet one another in the flesh.
Don’t Miss: Why Men Pull Away After Getting Close (Serious Issues Revealed)
Can Your Relationship Survive an Affair?
Some experts argue that infidelity can serve as the shock needed to startle a dying relationship back to life.
When one partner has strayed outside the boundaries of the relationship, both partners have the opportunity to decide whether they should stay or go.
If they decide to stick with it, their renewed commitment to staying together and working through the crisis can actually bring them closer together.
However, it’s equally probably that cheating will destroy the relationship through a toxic breakdown of communication and trust.
Seventy-one percent of us don’t think that cheating is ever permissible, especially if the cheater is straying outside of a sexually-healthy relationship.
Nineteen percent of people who’ve been cheated on will end the relationship immediately, with no hope of reconciliation.
Another 22% will find it impossible to get over the feelings of betrayal, anger, and disgust, and will eventually end the relationship.
Regardless of whether they stay together, all couples will experience a massive upheaval after an affair.
It’s unfortunate that cheating usually occurs several years into an established relationship (the 3 to 5-year mark, to be precise). Having children together doesn’t seem to offer any protection.
The key to surviving infidelity is to get professional help.
It’s impossible to underestimate the havoc an affair will wreck on a relationship.
A counselor can help both parties work through their grief, guilt, shock, betrayal, and other difficult feelings.
Professional mediation can help a couple re-establish lines of communication and open up honestly to one another.
How to Keep Him from Cheating
You could write a whole book on how to cheat-proof your relationship – and many authors have.
If you want the full story on why affairs occur and how you can keep from being one of the unlucky ones.
Here is an Amazing program by world famous dating and relationship coach Michael Fiore.
You Can Watch The Free Video Here:
But if you just want some basic tips that you can put into practice right away, here are four things you can do.
TIP#1 Put the Computer Away
The internet has facilitated more affairs than any other piece of technology in history. But to blame the internet for affairs is misguided.
The problem is not the internet. If a person wanted to cheat, they’d cheat with or without a computer to facilitate it.
The real problem is the hours that a person spends in front of a computer communicating with strangers instead of their spouse.
For some reason, we think it is okay for our partner to go into a separate room and sit down at the computer under the guise of “work” and stay there long past the time that everyone else has gone to bed.
That’s not conducive to a healthy relationship.
Luckily, there’s an easy solution:
Put the computer in the living room.
Let your partner go on the computer as much as he wants, as long as he is in the same room as you.
If he has nothing to hide, he won’t mind. He may even prefer it, because he’ll be able to spend time with you in addition to surfing the net.
TIP#2 Don’t Get Complacent
Habit and routine kills even the most loving of relationships.
You don’t want to become that “old married couple” that does nothing but argue and nag.
If the daily grind is getting you down, do something about it!
Scheduling a weekly “date night” is a good place to start. Over and over again, clients tell me that having a regular date night saved their marriage.
These are nights in which the kids get packed off to the babysitter and you forget about chores or work or your problems.
Date nights are about rediscovering the romance that first attracted you two together.
Everyone’s relationship worked back when they were dating; that’s how they fell in love!
So recreate the conditions of your early romance.
Do silly things, tease each other, go out and do fun stuff together. It will be more than worth the effort.
TIP#3 Put Sex First
Charla Muller, a housewife from North Carolina, celebrated her husband’s 40th birthday by promising him sex every night for an entire year.
They did it, and she wrote a book about it called 365 Nights: A Memoir of Intimacy.
I’m not saying that you should have sex that often, but it’s definitely true that sex is “under siege” in most relationships.
A German study found that it took only four years of being in an established relationship for a woman’s sex drive to plummet, with only 1 in 2 women at that stage wanting regular sex with their partner.
Twenty years into the relationship, only 1 in 5 women desired regular sex.
That’s a problem, because male libido tends to remain fairly constant.
Women need to realize that they can have sex even when they’re not “in the mood.”
Don’t let a headache or “not feeling like it” be an excuse!
If you always waited until you “felt like it,” you could end up waiting a very long time.
But if you’re willing to indulge your partner’s desires, you’ll usually find that ten minutes of foreplay will arouse your body, even though you thought you didn’t want to have sex.
Another option is to literally make time for sex. Some couples actually schedule time for sex on their calendar.
Others have a weekly routine that includes sex every weekend night or weekend morning.
When you know that you’ll be having sex at a certain time, you find yourself anticipating it, and you can prepare in advance by wearing special lingerie or making sure your body is in top touchable condition.
TIP#4 Address Your Issues
Couples often fall into problems when they don’t talk about things.
We’ve all been in relationships where we know things aren’t good, we know we’re squabbling more often, we know we haven’t had sex in weeks, but we resent being the first to bring the problem up.
Make a pact to always be honest with one another.
No doubt, it will hurt to talk about your problems, and you may even feel like you’ve put your entire relationship at risk by speaking up.
But that’s the way relationships grow. Once you get through to the other side, your relationship will be much stronger than it ever was before.
We grow as couples by facing and working through conflict.
Ever heard the saying: “The hotter the fire, the stronger the sword”?
Understand that your “issues” are a gift to you: they’re the fire in which the steel of your relationship will be forged.
What to Do If He’s Cheating
I hope that you never have to experience infidelity for yourself, but 1 in 5 of us will.
You need to know what to do in case it ever happens to you.
Don’t assume that it will be obvious if he’s having an affair.
Only 2% of cheaters ever get caught in the act, and 2 out of 3 cheaters get away with it completely.
We often assume that our partners aren’t capable of that kind of deception, but if he’s having an affair you can already bet that there’s a side to him that you haven’t seen before.
If you search for information on infidelity online, you’ll find a plethora of websites promising to help you catch him in the act.
You can hire a private detective, install a software program designed to track his every keystroke, and even purchase a semen testing kit to find out if that white patch on his underwear is a sign of something sinister.
In my opinion, that’s going down the wrong path. Will catching him actually make you feel any better? What are you going to do once you have proof?
If you want to throw him out once you have evidence that he’s a lying, cheating bastard perhaps catching him in the act is the best option for you, but if you want him to stay (and not run off with this other woman), then you need to go down a different path, one geared towards saving your relationship.
Do you want to save your relationship? Do you want to keep this man? If so, here’s what you need to do.
Forget the affair. It’s is simply a red herring.
The real problem is that your relationship isn’t working. You wouldn’t be suspicious if you felt secure in your relationship.
You need to focus on healing the rift in your relationship, regardless of whether an affair is occurring or not.
Sit down with your partner and explain that you’re concerned about your relationship.
Maybe you feel like you’ve grown apart, or you’re not close anymore, or your sex life has waned.
Tell him that you want to make things exciting and fun again, like they were back when you were first dating.
Whatever you do, don’t blame him for the state of the relationship.
Although you may think that it’s his fault that you’ve grown apart, every relationship is a two-way street.
Accept responsibility for your half. Otherwise, if you launch into a criticism of him and the way he’s been acting, he’ll simply turn off and stop listening to you.
Decide together on some things that you can to do to make your relationship more fun again.
I’m not talking about couples counseling – that will be a big red flag in his mind – but rather fun activities like date nights, buying sex toys and using them, turning off the television and computer for one night a week, or spending more one-on-one time together.
His response will tell you whether or not there’s anything left to save in your relationship.
If he is willing to try and put some effort in, then you’ll know that even if he was having an affair, it wasn’t serious. It was simply his way of trying to fill the void he felt in your relationship.
But if he’s not willing to do those things, then chances are he’s emotionally invested himself elsewhere. He “left” your relationship long ago.
In that case, you need to talk about the future of your relationship. If it’s not working now, and he’s not willing to put any effort in, then maybe you’re not meant to be together.
Letting him go may be the best thing for you.
Infidelity Isn’t the End of the World
As deeply shaming as it is to be cheated on, there’s one thing that’s even worse.
Letting your life be ruined because of someone else’s actions.
Life goes on after infidelity. No matter how terrible it feels at the time, you will heal from it and move on. Infidelity will only ruin your life if you let it.
And the worst thing an affair can do to you is make you doubt yourself.
You can start to worry that you’re not “enough” for a man: you’re not sexual enough, not attractive enough, not young enough, whatever.
You can start to worry that maybe there’s something wrong with you.
Don’t ever let yourself feel responsible for his affair.
It’s not your fault that he cheated on you.
You didn’t make him do it. He chose to do it himself, and he has free will.
Sure, he may try to pin the blame on you, but the fact is that no one held a gun to his head.
You are never responsible for what someone else does – period. For example, you are not responsible if a man hits you.
Sure, he may say he did it because you made him angry, or you provoked him, but he made the choice to respond with violence.
Similarly, he may say that you drove him to cheat because your sex life was boring, but he made the choice to respond by having an affair rather than by dealing with the situation in a mature and adult manner.
Once you realize that it’s not your fault, you can get mad.
Being angry can actually help you make it through this terrible time. It can keep you strong.
Only later, once you’re feeling strong again, you may want to ask yourself why your relationship wasn’t working.
What created the opening for the affair to occur?
Maybe the two of you weren’t communicating, or maybe you weren’t available for one another emotionally.
Maybe you’d stopped having sex, or maybe you’d stopped spending much time together.
Maybe you were arguing a lot, or maybe you didn’t feel good about being together anymore.
I want to make it clear that relationship problems are not a justification for infidelity.
A mature man responds to an unsatisfying relationship by talking to his partner about it.
If the situation can’t be resolved, he ends the relationship before pursuing a sexual relationship with someone else.
For sexual health reasons, it’s imperative that you know if your partner is sleeping with other people, and vice versa.
If either you or your partner wants to sleep with someone else, then you need to discuss your feelings.
You might decide that the relationship isn’t right for you and end it. Who knows, a trial separation might just help you realize how good you had it together.
But ending the relationship is a necessary precondition of having sex with other people.
Nearly all of us – 96%, according to the MSNBC study – will eventually come face to face with temptation at some point in our lives.
We, too, will have to make some hard decisions, like what our boundaries are, how far is too far, and whether someone else would make us happier than our current partner.
Do YOU know what you’ll do? If not think about it.
I will stop here. If you loved reading this article on reasons why men cheat then you’ll also love this POWERFUL VIDEO PRESENTATION BELOW.
