Women's Infidelity

http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/05/health/why-women-cheat-partner/index.html


The changing reasons why women cheat on their husbands
By Kim Brooks, The Cut

Updated 9:59 AM ET, Thu October 5, 2017


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Humans are now mostly monogamous, but this has been the norm for just the past 1,000 years.

Scientists at University College London believe monogamy emerged so males could protect their infants from other males in ancestral groups who may kill them in order to mate with their mothers.

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Scientists at University College London believe monogamy emerged so males could protect their infants from other males in ancestral groups who may kill them in order to mate with their mothers.

  • Some women turn to infidelity not as a way to explode a marriage but as a way to stay in it
  • Experts see these affairs as a subversion of traditional gender roles
One of the more interesting facts in Esther Perel's new book, State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity, comes near the beginning.

Since 1990, notes the psychoanalyst and writer, the rate of married women who report they've been unfaithful has increased by 40 percent, while the rate among men has remained the same.
More women than ever are cheating, she tells us, or are willing to admit that they are cheating -- and while Perel spends much of her book examining the psychological meaning, motivation, and impact of these affairs, she offers little insight into the significance of the rise itself.
So what exactly is happening inside marriages to shift the numbers? What has changed about monogamy or family life in the past 27 years to account for the closing gap? And why have so many women begun to feel entitled to the kind of behavior long accepted (albeit disapprovingly) as a male prerogative?


What counts as 'cheating' in the digital age?

These questions first occurred to me a few years ago when I began to wonder how many of my friends were actually faithful to their husbands.

From a distance, they seemed happy enough, or at least content. Like me, they were doing the family thing. They had cute kids, mortgages, busy social lives, matching sets of dishes. On the surface, their husbands were reasonable, the marriages modern and equitable. If these women friends were angry unfulfilled or resentful, they didn't show it.


Then one day, one of them confided in me she'd been having two overlapping affairs over the course of five years.

Almost before I'd finished processing this, another friend told me she was 100 percent faithful to her husband, except when she was out of town for work each month. Not long after, another told me that while she'd never had sex with another man, she'd had so many emotional affairs and inappropriate email correspondences over the years that she'd had to buy a separate hard drive to store them all.


What surprised me most about these conversations was not that my friends were cheating, but that many of them were so nonchalant in the way they described their extramarital adventures. There was deception but little secrecy or shame.

Often, they loved their husbands, but felt in some fundamental way that their needs (sexual, emotional, psychological) were not being met inside the marriage. Some even wondered if their husbands knew about their infidelity, choosing to look away.

"The fact is," one of these friends told me, "I'm nicer to my husband when I have something special going on that's just for me." She found that she was kinder, more patient, less resentful, "less of a bitch." It occurred to me as I listened that these women were describing infidelity not as a transgression but a creative or even subversive act, a protest against an institution they'd come to experience as suffocating or oppressive.

In an earlier generation, this might have taken the form of separation or divorce, but now, it seemed, more and more women were unwilling to abandon the marriages and families they'd built over years or decades. They were also unwilling to bear the stigma of a publicly open marriage or to go through the effort of negotiating such a complex arrangement.

These women were turning to infidelity not as a way to explode a marriage, but as a way to stay in it. Whereas conventional narratives of female infidelity so often posit the unfaithful woman as a passive party, the women I talked to seemed in control of their own transgressions. There seemed to be something new about this approach.



In The Secret Life of the Cheating Wife: Power, Pragmatism, and Pleasure in Women's Infidelity, another book on infidelity to be published this November, the sociologist Alicia Walker elaborates on the concept of female infidelity as a subversion of traditional gender roles.

To do so, she interviews 40 women who sought or participated in extramarital relationships through the Ashley Madison dating site.

Like The State of Affairs, Walker's text offers valuable insight simply by way of approaching its subject from a position of curiosity as opposed to prevention or recovery, and she investigates which factors led the women in her study to go outside their marriages.
Surely, one might think, a woman who would do such a thing must be acting out of a desire to escape a miserable marriage. And yet it turns out, this isn't always the case: Many of the women Walker interviewed were in marriages that were functional. Like the women I knew who cheated, many of the interviewees said they liked their husbands well enough. They had property together. They had friendships together. They had children that they were working together to raise.

But at the same time, they found married life incredibly dull and constraining and resented the fact that as women, they felt they consistently did a disproportionate amount of the invisible labor that went into maintaining their lifestyle.

One woman in Walker's book told her, "The inequality of it all is such an annoying factor that I am usually in a bad mood when my spouse is in my presence," and another said that while her husband was a competent adult in the world, at home he felt like "another child to clean up after."

Many of the friends I spoke to expressed similar feelings. "I shop and cook, my husband does dishes and empties the trash," one told me. "We each do our own laundry. But I've always been in charge of the 'calendar,' and what I didn't realize until recently is that in some way I'm in charge of managing many of our relationships.

My husband is a homebody and I initiate/plan almost all of our social endeavors. My mom got this phrase from her therapist: 'keeping the pulse of the household' -- this idea that someone has to be managing the emotional heart of your tiny community. I think women do that a lot."
And as Perel repeats frequently in this book, and in her previous one, little does as much to muffle erotic desire as this kind of caretaking and enmeshment.

"I think there's an incredible amount of deep resentment for women in America about divisions of labor," said sociologist Lisa Wade when I asked her to comment on this contradiction. "And what social scientists are finding now is that there is a correlation between equal division of labor and better sex."


No matter how much attention is paid to these issues, she told me, "these kind of cultural beliefs hang on a long time after they're relevant. They hang on in ways that are often invisible. A lot of women have tried to address these problems and have faced a lot of stubbornness from husbands. They feel there's no way to win this battle. So maybe now what women are deciding is that infidelity is a third way."



Of course, it's a "third way" that is not feasible for everyone, even if more women are taking it up, usually women who feel financially secure and independent enough to risk potential fallout. These women seem to be finding that no amount of sensitivity or goodwill on the part of their husbands can save them from the fact that in every arena, from work to marriage to parenthood, they're always doing more for less.

As Wade put it, "It's such a precarious balance keeping everyone happy, that for many women, to start a long conversation about her own sexual satisfaction seems like a bad idea. We now tell women that they can have it all, that they can work and have a family and deserve to be sexually satisfied. And then when having it all is miserable and overwhelming or they realize marriage isn't all it's cracked it up to be, maybe having affairs is the new plan B."


I tested this idea out on a few of the friends who had confided in me about their affairs, and most of them agreed. Twenty or thirty years ago they might have opted for divorce, because surely there was another man out there who could do better in this role, who could satisfy them completely. But a lot of these women are children of divorce. They lived through the difficulties divorce can create.

"Even now," all these years later, one told me, "Do you know what my most vivid memory of Christmas is? Driving through a blizzard up I-95 in the back of one of their cars, and then they'd pull over on the side of the highway and hand off me and my brother without speaking. That was our Christmas. Why did these people marry in the first place?"

Maybe that's the essential question, the question preceding those Perel explores in her book. Why do women still marry when, if statistics are to be believed, marriage doesn't make them very happy?
I confided in a friend once that, after 15 years of marriage, the institution and the relationship itself continued to mystify me. At the time I married, marriage had felt like a panacea; it was a bond that would provide security, love, friendship, stability, and romance -- the chance to have children and nice dishes, to be introduced as someone's wife. It promised to expand my circle of family and improve my credit score, to tether me to something wholesome and give my life meaning.
Could any single relationship not fall short of such expectations? Maybe these women were on to something -- valuing their marriages for the things it could offer and outsourcing the rest, accepting the distance between the idealization and the actual thing, seeing marriage clearly for what it is and not what we're all told and promised it will be.
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My friend told me she felt this way of thinking was the only answer, and the way she'd come to reconcile her feelings about the relationship. She said that she used to compare her marriage to her parents', who always seemed totally in love. "Until the end of my mom's life they were spooning together every night in a double bed ... not even a queen. But," she added, "they were awful and narcissistic, with very little to give to their children."

My friend felt she and her husband were much better parents, more involved and attuned to their kids.

"But often," she went on, "it can feel like my husband and I are running a family corporation together and that our emotional intimacy consists of gossiping about our friends and watching Game of Thrones. Sometimes I wonder if when the kids leave I should either (a) have a passionate affair or (b) find another husband. I may do neither, but it seems like (a) is more likely than (b). I don't have any illusions that marrying someone else will make me happy, not anymore."
 
Women cheat. Men Cheat. Too much carbs will make you fat... :dunno:

The fact that people even try to explain or understand why women cheat just goes to show you how twisted a view society has of them. You can explain it away all you want, but women are out here fucking for the same NON-reasons men are :dunno:
 
Women are the worst....

This is also some societal bullshit. It depends on the individual, some people are sloppy and some are not. What makes it societal, IMO, is your woman will feel justified searching all of your shit! Your phone, glove box, sock drawer, under your couch pillows, if a bitch like your pic on instagram the chick you're dealing with will go back 112 weeks on the bitches page, etc etc... bitches will search all of that shit, and society says it's ok and justified.

You on the other hand? Nah. If you go through her bag you're going to feel like a bitch and if you find out she's cheating BECAUSE you went through her bag she's going to clown you and call you all kinds of hoe and bitch ass niggas, she's going to tell her friends who will be EQUALLY appalled and think youre a feminine pussy for going through her bag. Bottomline your snooping gets you no brownie points, hers is socially expected.
 
This is also some societal bullshit. It depends on the individual, some people are sloppy and some are not. What makes it societal, IMO, is your woman will feel justified searching all of your shit! Your phone, glove box, sock drawer, under your couch pillows, if a bitch like your pic on instagram the chick you're dealing with will go back 112 weeks on the bitches page, etc etc... bitches will search all of that shit, and society says it's ok and justified.

You on the other hand? Nah. If you go through her bag you're going to feel like a bitch and if you find out she's cheating BECAUSE you went through her bag she's going to clown you and call you all kinds of hoe and bitch ass niggas, she's going to tell her friends who will be EQUALLY appalled and think youre a feminine pussy for going through her bag. Bottomline your snooping gets you no brownie points, hers is socially expected.

Sigh...What can we do man...What can we do.
 
Sigh...What can we do man...What can we do.

Pay attention. The only way she's getting away with it clean as fuck is if she's getting her pussy finessed by her work husband(they all have a work husband, the bad ones anyway). Dude at work is the only one she doesn't have to text to set anything up, she has to be there as well and they're both there at least 40 hours a week.

All that other shit is for the birds. They have a girls night at the club and niggas out here falling for that "Oh, my phone died" or "I only got home so late because I had to drop (insert friend's name) off and she had her girl (insert name) with her and her sitter was tripping so I had to drive HER home and she live all the way over in (insert far ass place)" fuck out of here. I can't even front, I've sat and watched bitches lie and just shook my head at how fucking terrible the lies were.

Here's the thing, if you're paying attention and you're attentive and all that shit then you'll notice the little shit, but most of the time niggas are too busy trying to run game so they can do their own dirt and end up missing the signs shorty is doing the same :dunno:

disclaimer: I'm not saying paying attention to your woman will prevent her from cheating.
 
You do know this could be said for men too?

Both genders cheat and men are the worst at it.

OP you sound bitter


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I knew YOU was gonna say that..... men are better cheaters! Women ALWAYS end up catching feelings or becoming overwhelmed with feelings / emotions when they getting fucked by multiple dudes & sucking different dicks & swallowing. :lol::roflmao: truth hurts. ijs.
 
Pay attention. The only way she's getting away with it clean as fuck is if she's getting her pussy finessed by her work husband(they all have a work husband, the bad ones anyway). Dude at work is the only one she doesn't have to text to set anything up, she has to be there as well and they're both there at least 40 hours a week.

All that other shit is for the birds. They have a girls night at the club and niggas out here falling for that "Oh, my phone died" or "I only got home so late because I had to drop (insert friend's name) off and she had her girl (insert name) with her and her sitter was tripping so I had to drive HER home and she live all the way over in (insert far ass place)" fuck out of here. I can't even front, I've sat and watched bitches lie and just shook my head at how fucking terrible the lies were.

Here's the thing, if you're paying attention and you're attentive and all that shit then you'll notice the little shit, but most of the time niggas are too busy trying to run game so they can do their own dirt and end up missing the signs shorty is doing the same :dunno:

disclaimer: I'm not saying paying attention to your woman will prevent her from cheating.
My exwife told me she went to the r kelly concert with her mother. Her mother didn’t go to the concert.

I filed for divorce within 2 days.
 
Pay attention. The only way she's getting away with it clean as fuck is if she's getting her pussy finessed by her work husband(they all have a work husband, the bad ones anyway). Dude at work is the only one she doesn't have to text to set anything up, she has to be there as well and they're both there at least 40 hours a week.

All that other shit is for the birds. They have a girls night at the club and niggas out here falling for that "Oh, my phone died" or "I only got home so late because I had to drop (insert friend's name) off and she had her girl (insert name) with her and her sitter was tripping so I had to drive HER home and she live all the way over in (insert far ass place)" fuck out of here. I can't even front, I've sat and watched bitches lie and just shook my head at how fucking terrible the lies were.

Here's the thing, if you're paying attention and you're attentive and all that shit then you'll notice the little shit, but most of the time niggas are too busy trying to run game so they can do their own dirt and end up missing the signs shorty is doing the same :dunno:

disclaimer: I'm not saying paying attention to your woman will prevent her from cheating.

True lol..You're right. Im one of those weirdos that notice when people change the structure of how they first describe things. Words may be different but structure should always stay the same. I told my stupid ex from years ago the same shit when the dumb bitch tried to tell me "he kissed me, i didn't kiss him" lol (this was high school shit). She would have people texting her and then go like "omg why does he keep texting me", i told that dumb bitch BECAUSE YOU GAVE HIM YOUR FUCKING NUMBER IDIOT and left her at the mall.
You're right, women may be good at lying but their lies aren't that great. I remember clearly this chick LIED so much to her BF about how we're just friends on the phone right next to me and i couldn't believe how dude accepted that bullshit story. The idiot then proceeded to knock her up a couple of months later, i guess to reaffirm his status. It all seemed so sad to me that she'd do that to him because he seemed like a nice kid. Funny part is that i wasn't even checking for her. She did all the work...Kind of made me think about all the dudes that are fathering kids that aren't theirs (def not my kid though).
 
Everyone isn't "wired" for longterm relationships? Shame and pride keep more people married than "love"? Legal "marriage" is a construct just like race? Stay single and fuck who you want when you want without guilt. Oh, and too many men get married just for the in-house pussy. I seent it!
 
Love these type of discussions, especially when they are done academically.

There are simple ways to understand behaviors of humans in monogamist relationships and there are complex/deeper understandings. I prefer both understandings.

From my observations, cheating in general is attributed for a human wanting more of something they aren't getting from there partner. I think what pleases me is the amount of justification people place on doing it and their feelings on why they do it. So what does cheating mean to a person? I'm sure if you ask multiple people you would get different answers.

The life of monogamy immediately takes something away from young relationships. The sacrifice of spontaneity for daily routines to maintain a certain lifestyle in a relationship kills interests over time. Add in the children factor and everything becomes that more complicated. Life without children can allow you and your partner to live life and have fun together. Diverted attention to the job or to children makes it easier for your partner to begin new relationships consciously or unconsciously.

Conflicted morals in doing why people think is right versus what they desire is only hypocritical in thinking when a person can not be honest with themselves or their partner. There is no thrill in honesty and being truthful only makes an individual have to look at themselves which many folks can't really face.
 
Some of yall cats told me years ago they stopped being worried about their wives were fucking, so I stopped being worried about it too.
 
I knew YOU was gonna say that..... men are better cheaters! Women ALWAYS end up catching feelings or becoming overwhelmed with feelings / emotions when they getting fucked by multiple dudes & sucking different dicks & swallowing. :lol::roflmao: truth hurts. ijs.
I was like what is this about then I saw the date.

It's not MY truth so there's no hurt here.
 
Women don't get caught nearly as much as men though.

many times its not the dude that fucks up, its the women he is cheating with catchin feelings and fuckin up the game...

most women today cheat with dudes , and dudes aint tryin to get all dramatic with it, they just enjoy the ego boost of fuckin somebody elses piece.

which I think is disgusting, how can you fuck someone when there is a great chance she just got finish blowing or fuckin her husband...

you going right behind him and kissing and fuckin her....

disgusting...

but I digress... the point is dudes normally dont catch feeling when they are the other man, they tend to play their role....

its normally side chicks that catch feeling and want the dude to choose up.. which most of the time he does and chooses to stay with his main chick..

then the side chick goes into payback mode... blowing up his phone when she knows

he is with his main piece

and many times callin the main piece to fuck the whole game up..:smh:
 
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many times its not the dude that fucks up, its the women he is cheating with catchin feelings and fuckin up the game...

most women cheat with dudes, and dudes aint tryin to get all dramatic with it, they just enjoy the ego boost of fuckin somebody elses piece.

which I think is disgusting, how can you fuck someone when there is a great chance she just got finish blowing or fuckin her husband...

you going right behind him and kissing and fuckin her....

disgusting...
And all you mention is why you don't cheat or play with people feelings.

And dudes do get dramatic and hide in bushes, show up at your job, wait outside your house and all the things you think men wouldn't do. Just as women do.
 
Women don't get caught nearly as much as men though.

.....And here's the reason why. Men don't tell. A married woman sleeping with a single man usually has to reason to worry about the single man getting out of line and telling her husband. Now on the other hand, a married man sleeping with a single woman has a lot to worry about.
 
And all you mention is why you don't cheat or play with people feelings.

And dudes do get dramatic and hide in bushes, show up at your job, wait outside your house and all the things you think men wouldn't do. Just as women do.

true if thats her main dude, if its a side piece, jump off or her work husband they rarily get involved to the point they want to fuck up her relationship not sayin it never happend before,

just saying the other woman blows up relationships waay more than the other men...

hence why men get caught more...
 
Can someone re up both of these books please? I know quite a few people that NEED to read this perspective! Thanks!
 
1) keep hold of your emotions by being self sufficient. cook your own meals, clean your own house, etc. never open yourself to becoming dependent on a woman 'doing things' for you, only so that she can threaten to take it all away if she doesnt get what she wants. you may do things for her, but understand that these things translate into leverage. develop leverage in her, but never allow her to do that for you.

2) lose the ego. the way into a man's heart isnt through his stomach. women know that the way into a man's heart is through his ego. they use this as a weapon.

3) thinking about companionship with a woman through the language of romance is a mistake. it is meant to confuse you and it inhibits understanding through placing the relationship into an irrational context. thinking about male/female companionship through the lens of power dynamics leads to much more predictable results.
 
NEVER put yourself in a position to care about what a bitch does with her pussy, when all the skill she has to have is to say 'yes' to new dick.

Let it be known that some women love the newness of strange dicks up in em. Will make excuses to hunt for that hotdog
 
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