Does A High Sex Drive Ever Justify Cheating?
By: Katie Lersch: I sometimes hear from people who are struggling with how to process their loved one’s excuse for cheating. Many times, the cheating person will attempt to offer up some justification for the cheating that includes a flaw with the other person or with the relationship. It may be expressed as a need that is unfulfilled. Sex is often at the core.
I heard from a wife who said: “I have just found out that my husband has cheated on me twice with two different women several months apart. I am very close to kicking out of my house and out of my life. He is begging me to give him one more chance. When I asked him why he would cheat on me, he asked me if I really wanted to know the truth. I answered that of course I wanted to know the truth. Then he proceeded to tell me that his very high sex drive lead to his cheating. He says that I knew he had a high sex drive when I married him. I did know that, but I didn’t expect for him to cheat on me because of it. I believe he could have dealt with the issue in other ways. Who is right? Is a high sex drive ever an excuse for cheating?”
My Opinion: As a wife who has been cheated on, my answer is a resounding no. And that may be a little biased, but I had this opinion before my husband’s affair. This logic just has never held up for me because I don’t believe that there is any valid excuse for cheating. I believe that if you are going to have sex with someone else, you need to end the relationship that you are in first. There are no exceptions to this for me.
The High Sex Drive Or Sex Addiction Excuse: I concede that some people have higher sex drives than others. But if you are in a committed relationship, then you have an obligation to work this out with your spouse or partner before you betray them.
Along this same line of thinking, people will often use sex addiction as an excuse for cheating. I am not disputing that this condition exists. I am sure that it does. But again, it is your responsibility to get help rather than betray someone you have committed to love and remain faithful to.
If this logic were valid, then people who steal could use the justification that they stole because they had higher than normal need for items that they couldn’t afford with their own money. And people who lie could tell you that they have a insatiable need to make claims outside of the truth. Do either of these reasons make the stealing or lying right? No, they don’t. Everyone has their reasons for doing things that they know are wrong. But this doesn’t justify those actions.
Deciding Whether To Give Him Another Chance: Now that I’ve told my opinion on this topic (and I accept that yours may differ,) I can address this wife’s question about whether she should give in to his pleas for another chance. I could not make this call for her. This was a decision that she needed to make it because it was her life and no one else’s.
I can tell you that couples in this situation are able to recover, but in the vast majority of those cases, the cheating spouse accepts that the “high sex drive” excuse isn’t a valid one. They accept this and they don’t use that excuse any more. Instead, they either find a way to get their needs met within their own marriage, they compromise, or they seek treatment if their needs are out of the ordinary.
And the faithful spouse must be willing to work to restore the trust and to repair the marriage so that they are eventually able to let the anger and resentment go simply so that they can be happy and at peace again. As you might expect, this isn’t easy. It takes commitment and work. And moving past the hurt and betrayal is something that not everyone can do.
But to answer the question posed, no, I don’t think that a high (or low) sex drive is a valid excuse for cheating. I don’t think that any excuse that has to do with sex or any other topic is valid either. This is only my biased opinion of course, and I concede that sex is probably the most common reason that people give for infidelity within their marriage. So by no means is this a rare excuse. I just personally don’t find it to be valid and most people who have been hurt by infidelity agree. I am not saying that the high sex drive isn’t there and shouldn’t be dealt with. It should. But it doesn’t mean that you should cheat on your spouse simply because your needs aren’t being met. Frankly, no marriage is perfect and no one’s needs get fully met one hundred percent of the time. But compromise or finding alternatives is much preferable to cheating.
My husband had his own excuses for cheating, but I didn’t accept any of them. Once he figured out that excuses just weren’t going to work, he stopped making them and we began our recovery. If it helps, you can read the whole story on my blog at http://surviving-the-affair.com
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