Do you really think it’s the guilt that causes women to leave their husbands?
I think it starts with guilt. If they stop the affair, they feel guilt, but if they continue the affair, they postpone the guilt while mask- ing it with sexual highs. Eventually, many women (and men) leave their relationships to avoid the guilt of having cheated in the first place. They see their marriages as tarnished. If they stay with their
spouse, they have to think of themselves as a cheater. They only lose that label by starting a new relationship.
Some people really torment themselves with what they did and what it means—instead of simply viewing their indiscretion as a bad choice.
Although most of the women I talked to said they experienced tremendous guilt after they cheated, I think that many were misinterpreting the source of their guilty feelings. I think some were also confusing feeling torn with feeling guilty.
The women who cheated with married men usually continued their affair and stopped feeling guilty—guilty enough, anyway, to discontinue the affair.
Extreme, long-term guilt, however, seemed to be the norm for women who were having affairs with single men.
So, it was only the women who felt they had to make a deci- sion who expressed being consumed with guilt. These women didn’t want to stop seeing their affair partners. However, they knew that eventually their single lovers would meet someone else. So in actuality it wasn’t guilt as much as it was their fear of loss.
The women who cheated with married men stopped feeling guilty and decided they could have both the husband and the lover.
I believe the women who cheated with single men stopped feeling guilty for having cheated too. Many of them used feeling guilty as justification to continue their affairs.
They cheated, they were going to continue to cheat, but to make themselves feel better and look better in the eyes of their single lovers they needed to feel really bad about it.
The affairs between the women and their single lovers often consisted of sex and conversations about how guilty the women felt.
Some women said they sensed their single partner’s level of interest in them decreased when too much time went by without expressing their guilt or the problems they were having in their marriages. It seemed their expressions of guilt and problems eventually became more like lines they were using to keep their lovers hanging on. The women were playing a balancing act, similar to the balancing act men play with their wives and the women they’re cheating with, but with one difference. When forced to choose, women seem more likely to choose their lover over their spouse.
This is why some of the women experienced extreme ongoing guilt. Their ongoing guilt wasn’t due to their having cheated, or continuing to cheat, on their husbands. It was due to the women knowing that if they were forced to choose they would choose the men they were having affairs with over their husbands. This is obviously something that disturbs women. When women in com- mitted relationships become attracted to someone outside of their relationship they are forced to come face to face with their appar- ent lack of commitment.
No one would ever suspect that females have a tendency to be rather uncommitted to males. Females are often dedicated to their goal of getting a commitment, or to getting married.
They also can be quite committed to their marriages and families, but that does not necessarily mean they are committed to the men they are try- ing to marry or eventually do marry.
Since women have been taught that they want commitment, they seem to assume that their reason for wanting it is that they are naturally loyal and committed themselves.
But the suddenness with which women are able to transfer their loyalties from one man to another certainly indicates a lack of commitment on their part.
Most women are aware they have this tendency and they are often quite disturbed by it.
I think it’s one of the reasons women take such a long time to extricate themselves from their marriages. If women left their marriages at the same time they actually decided to leave their marriages they would not be able to deny this tendency in themselves. It would be too obvious to them as well as to everybody else.
