First, watch this video of Michael introducing this lesson:
Audio of Michael reading the lesson below:
“Would he cheat on me?”
“Is he cheating on me?’
“Does he still want his ex girlfriend?’
“Does he think she’s sexier than me?’
–Secret Survey responses from women
—
Where was he?
Fiona had been waiting for hours for Martin to come home to her. She’d had said it was OK for him to meet up with his ex-girlfriend from college, but she hadn’t meant it. She hadn’t meant it all and now she felt like a fool. She’d plastered a fake smile on her face and tried to relax her shoulders and act like she wasn’t threatened. And ever since he’d kissed her goodbye she’d been miserable and tortured. Lost in her own mind.
Imagining him with that woman she’d only met once. The two of them tripping down memory lane at some hotel near the airport.
She couldn’t get it out of her head. She couldn’t shake it. The anger. The hurt. The suspicion. She pictured them, drunk and flirty and stumbling to that woman’s hotel room. She pictured Martin’s face buried in her neck. His hands on her waist. And the longer she waited the larger it got. Until a meanness built in her mind. Suddenly she wanted to call her ex-boyfriend Cliff. Invite him over. Give herself to him like he’d wanted for so long. Show Martin how it felt. Show that son of a bitch what it was like.
But she didn’t. She just sat on the couch with her fingers chasing each other and tried to breathe. In. Out. In. Out.
It went on forever.
And then she heard the key in the latch. His heavy footsteps on the stairs.
“Hey, babe,” he started to say as he put his briefcase down. But the sound died in his throat.
She scanned up and down his body like detective searching for clues.
All she could feel was a horrible anxiety. She looked for lipstick marks.
A guilty face. She walked over to him and inhaled the scent of him. Was that perfume she smelled? Was that a smirk on his lips? She reached for his cock and felt him stiffen against her palm. He was hers, dammit.
Hers.
—
This is one of those topics that gets me in trouble and floods my email inbox with a frothy mixture of righteous anger and thankful praise.
But hey, you gotta do what you gotta do. 🙂
In this lesson we’re going to talk about cheating and infidelity.
We’re going to discuss WHY men cheat on women (and why women cheat on men), what it means when a man cheats on a woman, what cheating actually IS, what goes through a man’s mind when he has the opportunity to cheat, and what you can do to make your relationship as cheat-proof as possible and keep the specter of cheating (and insecurity over a man cheating on you) from killing your relationship.
If you’re like most women it’s going to be a challenging lesson that will send a torrent of emotions through your whole body and challenge a lot of your ideas about infidelity, cheating, and even about yourself.
So take a deep breath. Whether you’ve been cheated on in the past (and I know if you have that the story at the beginning brought up a lot of emotions), have cheated on men yourself, or think the whole idea of cheating is kind of silly.
Before I get into the good stuff here, I need to cover a few bases about cheating so I know we’re all coming from the same place.
A Few Big Points about Infidelity and Monogamy:
Point #1: Cheating Sucks
If you’ve ever been cheated on you already know this.
Finding out makes you feel like you got punched in the gut. You feel betrayed. Violated. You feel like that man (or woman) ripped your heart out and fried it up with some onions for dinner. I’ve only been cheated on once (that I know about) and while I was able to forgive the woman for it and move on, it was a really unpleasant experience. I firmly believe that if you make a promise to be sexually monogamous with somebody, you should do everything you possibly can to keep that promise.
Point #2: Even Though Cheating Sucks, It’s Ridiculously Common
Between 30% and 60% of married people admit to cheating during their marriage. Those are stats for both men AND women (the stats for men are a few percentage points higher than for women, but women’s stats have been rising for years.).
And those are just married people. A whopping 80% of people admit to cheating on girlfriends or boyfriends at some point in their lives. Get any one of your friends drunk enough to tell the truth, and they’ll probably have some story about how they got drunk at a bar and made out with the hot bartender with the 12 pack abs. Most people don’t talk about it, but cheating is REALLY common.
Point #3: There’s Cheating and There’s… Cheating
I got a question on my Facebook wall recently from a woman asking me if I thought flirting was cheating. It sparked a big, long debate, actually, with some women saying that even the lightest flirtation was the death knell for a committed relationship and others sighing in exasperation.
Personally, I think that stopping flirting with other people (at least in a playful way) is downright deadly to a relationship. I deal with a LOT of men and women every day who talk about how dead they feel sexually and emotionally after a few years together. How they just don’t feel attractive to the opposite sex anymore, or how they feel suffocated by having to shut that flirty, fun, sparkly side of their personality down.
And relying on just one person to appreciate you emotionally and physically while denying that kind of energy from everybody else can really be toxic.
If you do your job right in a relationship, some non-serious flirting with other people can add a ton of energy and verve to your relationship.
Having a guy hit on you reminds him that you’re a beautiful woman worth pursuing. Having a girl flirt with him reminds both of you that he’s a dominant, attractive man.
Obviously, there’s limits on what’s acceptable flirting (and there’s a difference between flirting and seducing), but having insanely tight boundaries on your relationship can be suffocating to anyone.
There’s no set line on what really defines cheating. Is kissing cheating? Is flirting cheating? What about having a flirty conversation online? Is hugging a girl cheating? What about talking about something personal?
You need to define where your own line is. For the sake of this lesson, I’m defining cheating as having sex with somebody else.
Point #4: Human Beings Simply Aren’t Designed to be Sexually Monogamous
(See, I told you I was going to get in trouble.)
I’m in a happily monogamous relationship myself right now. But I still think the idea of “lifelong monogamy” is a crock of shit. (Look, you made me swear.)
Every piece of research I’ve read (not to mention a LOT of emails I’ve gotten from people beating themselves up for even being attracted to someone they’re not married to) tells me that human beings have NOT evolved to be monogamous.
In fact, our tribal ancestors were kind of sluts. And despite our iPads and cool cars and super-tight pants, we really haven’t changed that much.
Up until the dawn of agriculture (about 10,000 years ago) the whole idea of being monogamous and owning a man or a woman would have seemed pretty absurd. And if you study the few existing hunter-gatherer cultures still on our planet, you’ll see that they have much looser interpretations of what it means to be monogamous or committed to somebody.
(A great book to read on the topic of human evolutionary psychology and how we became the lusting, cheating, kinky creatures we are is Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan..)
Now, does that mean that we shouldn’t TRY to be monogamous? Not at all. If you want to be monogamous and if monogamy is important to you (for moral, religious, medical, or any other reasons) you have every right to pursue it.
But personally I think of monogamy the same way I think about flight.
The Wright Brothers failed to fly dozens of times before they finally got it right. They crash landed, busted up their bodies, and made their mom have repeated metaphorical heart attacks by insisting on strapping themselves into alien-looking contraptions and jumping off stupidly-high hills.
But nobody gets mad at the Wright Brothers for failing to fly. They just celebrate the fact that they eventually got it right (though with all the time I spend on planes, I kind of wish they’d gotten it wrong. I’m too tall for those damned coach seats.)
If you WANT to be monogamous then you should do the work that makes that possible, and you certainly shouldn’t damn yourself to hell if you fail. Because monogamy is HARD. And it gets harder the longer you do it.
And if you’re with a guy for a LONG time (and most of the women I talk to want to find a guy to be with FOREVER), the odds are that at some point in the next 60 years ONE OF YOU is going to cheat.
You can either bury your head in the sand about it or you can take a deep breath and accept it.
Whew. OK, now that we’ve covered the easy stuff, let’s get to the real meat =-)
So, Would He Cheat On You?
One of the biggest questions women had in the Secret Survey was “Would he cheat on me?” (Or “Will he cheat on me?” or “Is he cheating on me right now?” or “I found my boyfriend giving a naked golf lesson to my next door neighbor, do you think I have anything to worry about?”)
And honestly, if you ask me a question like “Would he cheat on me?” you get a really simple answer:
Yes. Yes he would, in the right circumstances. (And you’d cheat on him too in the right circumstances, even if the idea of doing so sounds absolutely repellent now.)
Does that mean he HAS cheated on you? Nope.
Does that mean he WILL cheat on you? Nope.
Does that mean he IS cheating on you? Nope.
But the fact is, humans are BAD at monogamy, sex (and sexual variety) is the pink frosting covered temptation of relationships, and since your biology WANTS you to sleep with more than just one person in your life, staying the course and staying monogamous is an incredibly difficult thing to pull off.
I Would Cheat on my Girlfriend. . . But I don’t Because. . .
I love my girlfriend. Honestly, I’m head over heels for her. She’s goofy, beautiful, smells amazing, is great at being there when I need her, makes me laugh, feeds me emotionally and intellectually, and does things to me in the bedroom that leave me giddy and dazed. I can see her and me being together for years to come (though I personally don’t believe in the “We’re going to be together forever” mindset. Trying to be together forever is a great way to ruin your relationship now.).
And you know what? Even though I’m desperately in love with this woman, I know myself well enough to know that I would cheat on her in the right circumstances. I know that if I was in a situation where the temptation was strong enough, all that love and respect I have for my girlfriend would pale in the face of that undeniable tractor-beam of lust.
I look at cheating the same way I look at cupcakes.
See, I’ve got a pretty bad sugar addiction. And there’s a place called “Cupcake Royale” right around the corner from my gym that calls to me like a siren. Every day when I’m finishing up my workout, my brain starts drifting over to cupcakes. Pink frosting. Chocolatey goodness.
As I do those last few burpees, or heft that last 350 pound dead lift I can feel it deep in the core of me. That craving.
I know that if I take a right up Pine Street toward my apartment that the temptation to go in and get a cupcake (and ruin all the hard work I do to stay in shape) will go right out the window. So in order to keep the promise I made myself about my diet, I don’t take a right up Pine Street. Instead I take an alternate route home.
And in order to keep the promise I made to my girlfriend, I make a point of never being alone in a room with a woman who I know wants to sleep with me.
So What Does this Have to Do with You and Your Relationship with Men?
Just that I’m not special as far as guys go.
All guys would cheat if they were with the right woman in the right circumstances and if they didn’t have enough willpower left to deny the cupcake. (And all women would cheat if they were hit on by the right guy, who pushed the right buttons, and if she was in the right emotional state).
And just like in our last lesson about why men LOOK at other women, if a man cheats on you it probably wouldn’t really be about you at all. It wouldn’t necessarily mean he didn’t love you, that he was going to leave you, that he wasn’t happy with your sex life or anything like that.
So what would it mean?
There’s a study that came out a while ago that showed that 60% of men who cheated on their wives actually reported being happy in their marriages and relationships.
To women that sounds crazy. “How could he be happy in his marriage and sleep with someone else?”
But to guys it just sounds like common sense. To guys, sex and love are pretty well decoupled. Yes, we can have deep, emotionally connected sex. But we can also have sex with women we don’t love (and don’t necessarily even like that much) without any kind of emotional turmoil.
And we’re hard wired to crave sexual variety no matter how beautiful or sexy the woman we’re with is.
So Why Do Guys Cheat on Women?
In my experience, there are three reasons men typically cheat on women:
1. To feel a sense of power and feed his ego. There’s nothing more intoxicating to a guy than the satisfaction of seducing a woman. And most guys (especially most married guys) stop feeling like sexually desirable creatures within a few years of getting hitched.
Honestly, most guys in our culture don’t feel like men at all. They sort of shuffle from place to place like zombies. And a new woman showing interest in a guy can be like a shot of cocaine to his self esteem.
2. Because he doesn’t have the willpower to say no. I’ve gotten lots of emails from guys talking about how they ended up cheating even though they didn’t want to. They went on a business trip, got drunk, and fell into bed with a girl from the bar. Or a woman targeted him and he simply didn’t know how to say no (most guys have no idea what to do if an attractive woman actually hits on them.).
3. To get sexual needs met that he doesn’t feel like he can get from you. We’ll talk about this a lot more in the lesson on sex, but a lot of guys feel like they can’t reveal their true sexual desires to the woman in their life, so they end up going outside the relationship to get those needs met.
Notice that that none of these reasons are really about hurting you. I’ve never heard of a guy cheating on his wife or girlfriend with the intention of hurting her or as some way of getting revenge on her.
In general, guys don’t justify their cheating or make up excuses for it, at least to other guys. (Though I’ve got a ton of messages from women saying they cheated on “that son of a bitch to teach him a lesson” or as revenge for him cheating on her.)
A Quick Note on the Serial Cheater
The most heartbreaking emails I get are emails like this:
“Michael, I need your help. I am in love with a man. He says he loves me and when we’re together he makes me feel wonderful. But he cheats on me constantly. He is sleeping with two other women and one of them is now pregnant. How do I get him to love only me? What do I do?”
This kind of email is shockingly common, and it’s also the kind of message that makes me want to become an alcoholic carpenter.
There’s no subtle way to say this, so let me just be blunt: Some guys are just douchebags who don’t respect women. I hate these guys and regularly write them mean messages when they email me.
If you’re on my email list, you know I go pretty soft on one-off cheaters– guys (or women) who, after a stint of monogamy, mess up and end up cheating on their partner. If it just happens once and then fades away,
I don’t think it’s a black mark on your character or that it means you’re a bad person. You’re human. It happens.
Heck, I’m even OK with folks who have an affair. They’re with somebody for a long time, the spark fades, they fall into bed with somebody for a few months of passion, and then come to their senses and go back to their lives. Sucks. But again, it’s human.
But serial cheaters are another matter entirely. If it’s important to you to be in a monogamous relationship and a guy has shown again and again that he can’t live up to the promise he’s making to you, you need to leave him for your own sanity and self esteem.
It’ll hurt to cut it off. It’ll feel like failure at first. But being with a man who won’t give you what you want is a great way to end up miserable.
You deserve better. And a guy (or girl) who cheats again and again isn’t going to change his spots. He needs to be single (or be in a nonmonogamous relationship).
So How Do You Cheat Proof Your Relationship?
OK, now that we’ve covered why men cheat, how common cheating is and that, yes, all men would cheat in the right circumstances (especially those right wing moralists you see on TV or in Congress. You ever notice it’s the guys who shout the loudest about the EVILS of sex who are doing the worst things behind closed doors? Interesting.)
So how do you cheat proof your relationship?
Honestly, there’s no way of making sure your relationship stays 100% monogamous for 50 years, but here’s some quick tips that definitely increase your chances:
1. Open Palm Method. The tighter you hold a bird, the more likely you are to crush it. Accept the fact that you and your man are both human, that he’s going to desire other women sometimes (and fantasize about them) and that it’s not about you. It’s simply part of being a guy. If you hold your relationship too tight, you’re likely to crush the life out of it.
2. Talk to him like a guy. If I was somebody else, I’d be talking about “open communication” here. But instead I’m just going to say this: Talk to your guy like a guy. Admit your own flaws. Admit your own desires, how you sometimes think about other men or that you’re occasionally attracted to other guys you know, and let him know that it doesn’t change your feelings for him. When you open the door that way, you’ll find him much more likely to admit his own desires and private thoughts (as long as you don’t freak out when he tells you the truth.).
Summing up Lesson 6
I feel like I could write another 10 pages on this topic, but to sum up. . .
- Cheating sucks and if you make a promise to be monogamous, you should keep it.
- Even though cheating sucks, it’s ridiculously common. 30% – 60% of married people admit to cheating on their spouse. Women cheat almost as often as men do.
- Cheating means different things to different people. You need to set your own parameters about what cheating actually means to you.
- Humans are NOT naturally monogamous. This goes against a lot of religious teachings, but science has shown conclusively that humans just aren’t “built” for monogamy. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be monogamous if you want to be, but that you should accept that monogamy is hard. It’s something to strive toward and you might end up failing.
- All men would cheat in the right circumstances (and all women would, too). Those circumstances vary wildly from guy to guy, but lust is an incredibly hard thing to deny. Any guy who finds it “easy” to stay monogamous long term simply doesn’t have many opportunities to be with other women in the first place.
- Most of the time when a guy cheats it has nothing to do with you or how he feels about you. For most men, cheating is about feeding his ego/desire to feel powerful, satisfying basic biological urges for variety, or acting out desires he doesn’t feel like he can act out at home. Only very rarely do guys cheat because of their wives or girlfriends. For guys, sex is often just sex and isn’t even about their relationship or how happy they are with it.
- Serial cheaters are douchebags. To me, if somebody cheats once over a long period of time it can be forgivable. But if a guy has cheated on you again and again, it’s silly to think he’s going to change. You need to be with someone else and he needs to be in a non-monogamous relationship.
- The way to cheat proof your relationship is to accept that both you and your partner are flawed human beings. That you’re both going to desire people outside of your relationship sometimes and to be honest about it. If you lead the way in being honest (and show that you can handle the conversation without freaking out), he’ll follow.
Exercises for Lesson 6
Just one exercise for this one and it’s all about accepting your man for being human.
Take out a piece of paper and write on it (as many times as you want)
“He would cheat on me in the right circumstances but he’s not right now.” Focus on the present tense and let the future take care of itself.
Up Next – Reflected glory: what your appearance means to him
In the next lesson, we’ll talk about whether how you look matters to a man, what your appearance says about him to other men, and how to be the beautiful woman he loves to show off (even if you aren’t that impressed with your own looks now).
