We all think we understand menâs infidelity. From casual exchanges about celebrity cheating scandals in public spaces to private conversations about the state of our friendsâ unions to memes on social media, we position ourselves as adultery experts. A popular meme online likens menâs cheating to losing a $100 bill to pick up a $1 bill. The original poster, a man, explains that if you had $100 but saw a $1 bill on the floor, youâd pick it up, and then says, âThere ya go. Thatâs why boys cheat.â A woman comments that in picking up the $1 bill they lost their $100 and ends with âThere ya go. Thatâs why boys are stupid.â This is representative of our cultural understandings of menâs cheating. We see cheating as something inherent to most men (if not all); we see cheating as simply men being âgreedyâ; and we regard men who cheat as stupid. Once we know a man previously cheated, we believe we know all that matters. We brand him a âcheaterâ and villainize him. So pervasive is this belief that often when people learn the topic of this book, they exclaim, âPfft, I can you tell you why men cheat!â Self-proclaimed experts abound. They all reason no need for such a book or a study exists because they believe the reasons for menâs cheating to be settled.
The reality is that we likely know many men who participate in infidelity, men we like and admire and believe to be âgood people.â We just donât realize that they cheat. We may even look at their marriages from the outside with envy and admiration. These men are people we know, people whose company we enjoy. They are men who live next door, who work in the office two doors down, who take their kids to piano lessons, coach Little League, and open doors for their wives. The men we see doing all of those things are also the men who are logging on and hunting for a clandestine sexual partner to supplement their marriage. While we imagine affairs as something that happens between two people who played with fire by looking too long into one anotherâs eyes, the men in this study made a conscious choice to seek out an outside partner online. And they did so after years of muddling through marital dynamics that left them feeling unsatisfied, unsupported, downtrodden, and like âless of a man.â These men shared their unique perspectives and experiences, their feelings, their psyches, and their worlds. As much as you feel sure you know why men cheat, you likely donât have the first clue.
I conducted a yearlong investigation into extramarital experiences using a sample collected from Ashley Madison, a niche online dating site catering to married individuals seeking an outside partner. I collected rich interview data from 46 men between the ages of 27â70 located across the United States. Thirty-seven men (80%) in the study detailed dissatisfaction with the relational management in their primary partnerships. The men described emotionally unsatisfying primary partnerships, which lacked the level of praise, validation, and attention they desired. Most of the men mentioned having children. Thirty-five men (76% of the sample) reported sexless marriages. All of the men expressed discontent with the quality of their sexual lives within their marriages, specifically that they desired more sensuality in the encounters. Thirty-one men (67%) stated a need to remain in their primary partnership for the remainder of their lives. Among the other fifteen men, most expressed a desire to stay; only two men stated a plan to leave at some point in the future. All of the men in this inquiry created a profile on Ashley Madison to seek out an outside partner. Only three men were in the midst of their first affairs. The rest of the men reported involvement in subsequent affairs.
In their conversations with me about the affairs, these men spoke of a loss within their primary partnerships. These men spoke of a gradual slide over the years into feelings of emasculation, which they believed to be provoked by the state of their marriages. Men described sexual dynamics lacking sensuality and genuine enthusiasm on the part of their primary partners. They spoke of marriages where they no longer felt seen or valued. They believed their wives to be too âinto themselvesâ and too wrapped up in their own lives to expend any energy investing in the menâs concerns. They described their wives as disinterested in their feelings, their days, and what they had to offer as sexual partners. They reported that the loss of validation in their marriages made them feel like âless of a man.â Eventually, they concluded that perhaps another woman might see them as interesting, worthy of praise and attention, and perhaps even sexually desirable. They set out to find such a woman by logging onto a website and creating a profile. For them, participation in infidelity presented an opportunity for validation, and affirmation of their sense of themselves as masculine, attractive, and wanted.
The men believed that their affairs helped them manage their emotional life and emotional responses to their primary partners toward whom they often felt resentment. Developing relationships with partners who expressed excitement to see them, demonstrated sexual desire for them, and sincerely asked about the events of their day, their feelings, and their dreams provided a much-needed boost to their sense of self-esteem and sense of themselves. Our cultural tendency is to imagine that women cheat for âattentionâ and men cheat for sex, but these men challenge those assumptions. In my previous book, The Secret Life of the Cheating Wife, the majority of women reported participation in affairs for sexual pleasure. They reported their motivation as sexual pleasure and orgasms, plain and simple. However, both books show that we should resist the temptation to gender infidelity. The majority of women in my previous book participated in outside partnerships in an effort to outsource the sexual aspect of their primary partnerships, however, they described rich emotional intimacy within those primary relationships. Thus, there existed no need to seek an emotional connection with a third party. For the seven women in that study who reported primary partnerships devoid of emotional support, emotional intimacy, and emotional connection, they also outsourced the emotional component of their primary partnerships. Thus, the difference in the participantsâ goals for participation in outside partnerships depended upon the state of their primary partnership not the gender of the participant.
Socially, the navigation of sexual relationships and monogamy is often perceived as private, but the reality is that âinfidelity is a dynamic social process subject to influence by the context in which it is embeddedâ (Munsch 2015, p. 48). Looking at the practice of sexual non-consensual non-exclusivity among men involved in an assumed-monogamous primary partnership sheds light on intimate relationships as a whole. Examining what society frequently deems as deviant yields a better understanding of the average. Unpacking the dynamics of marriages where infidelity took place grants perspective on all marriages. Additionally, this study considers the experiences of menâs participation in infidelity, a behavior often perceived as solely focused on menâs sexual gratification. This sample of participants sought affairs to soothe the hurt feelings sustained in their marriages at the hands of spouses they believed to be disinterested in their lives, interests, and feelings. The purpose of this study was to investigate the experiences of meaning-making of men participating in outside partnerships, and to permit men to voice their lived experiences.
Importance of Marriage
The value of studying U.S. infidelity rests in the cultural importance of marriage in the United States. Though U.S. media representations present interest in marriage as specific to women, men highly value marriage as well. 2013 PEW Research Center data showed men report the desire to marry at the same rate women do (Cohn, 2013). Further, 2013 PEW data also revealed that men are more likely to remarry than women (64â52%). Cherlin explains, âGetting married is a way to show family and friends that you have a successful personal life. It is the ultimate merit badgeâ (Riccitelli, 2012, p. 205). Unsurprisingly, people list having a healthy marriage as one of their most important life goals (Karney, Garvan, & Thomas, 2003) and view having a stable, intimate relationship as essential to their happiness (Christopher & Sprecher, 2000).
The cultural attachm...