Infidelity Articles By Katie Lersch

by: Katie Lersch: Having a husband or boyfriend who cheated is a big hit to your self-esteem. You begin to doubt your marriage and your ability to make your husband happy or to be enough. There are tons of old stereotypes that imply that if a man cheats, it’s because his wife doesn’t understand him, he’s not happy in his marriage, or his sex life at home is lacking. While I’m sure that there are men who cheat for these reasons, there are many other common reasons that men cheat, and many of them have nothing at all to do with the wife or the marriage. I’ll discuss some of the various reasons that men cheat in the following article.

Sometimes Men Cheat Because They Are Not Happy With How They Perceive Themselves: Often it’s not you that your husband isn’t happy with, it’s himself. Often adultery is nothing more than a band-aid on low self-esteem which is why you will often see affairs in times of a man’s personal crises, like after losing a parent, losing a job, or aging. In short, he feels that he’s lost something and he’s using the affair as a means to make himself feel more capable and strong. If he’s desirable and special to someone else who hasn’t witnessed his weaknesses, struggles, and shortcomings, then he can pretend that they don’t exist. It’s sort of like having a temporary blank slate or fresh start because often this woman doesn’t have the intimate knowledge of him that you have, and in his mind, at least right now, that appears to be a good thing.

He will often see the affair as a temporary diversion that provides relief to his anxieties. He will tell himself that no one needs to know about it and that since it doesn’t really mean anything to him emotionally, at the end of the day he can just pack up and go home without anyone being the wiser and without anyone needing to be hurt or affected. Yes, he may feel some guilt and when this all comes crashing down around him, he is likely going to be deeply sorry, but unfortunately, this thought process often doesn’t come until it’s way too late to change things.

Risk-Taking As A Way To Generate Excitement In His Life: Another trend that I often see is men who feel like their lives are in a slump or who have become bored with themselves and will then use an affair or cheating as a way to bump up the excitement level in their life. It’s sort of risk-taking as a way to instill some of the excitement and drama that they feel that they are missing out on. Often, by the time that the affair ends badly, they’d give anything to have their “boring” life back, but at the time of the infidelity, they’ll often tell themselves that this risky behavior makes them feel “alive” and that life is too short not to enjoy yourself and experience new things.

The Old Notion That Men Who Refuse Sexual Advances Aren’t Masculine: There is a small subset of men who tell me that although they were happy in their marriages and still loved their wife, they found themselves in a situation where another woman came on to them and they grew up with the notion that no man in their right man would turn down a desirable woman who is offering to leave no strings attached. Some men grow up in a culture that implies that turning down attractive women is a sign that they aren’t masculine or manly enough.

This is ridiculous of course and I don’t know many wives who would buy this, but many men have insisted to me that this is the reasoning behind their risking everything for a tryst outside of their marriage. Again, they are able to compartmentalize this and tell themselves that since the woman meant nothing at all to them, this shouldn’t affect their marriage or their wife.

The Role That Your Marriage Plays In The Affair: As I’ve said, there are countless men who had strong and stable marriages at home with a loving wife and a satisfying sex life who still cheat. And, if you ask those men what is so wrong with their wives that they had to go outside of the marriage, they will typically answer with something like: “Nothing at all. My wife is wonderful and my marriage was a happy one,” while they insist that the affair had nothing to do with the marriage.

Still, there are those men who play the blame game and they’ll say that their wife didn’t have time for them, didn’t make intimacy a priority, and had let the marriage grow stale. They’ll say that the mistress listens to them, appreciates them, and understands them, (while they are rarely able to see their own shortcomings as contributing to this process.)

 And while hearing this can make you defensive, almost every marriage has a few places where it is vulnerable. Is this an excuse to cheat? Absolutely not. But it does make sense to explore ways to identify and fix these areas if you want to save the marriage. And make no mistake, marriages can be solid and even sometimes better after an affair because it forces you to lay all of your cards on the table and to be brutally honest about places where your marriage could use some improvement.