after all, cheating is unthinkable and (at.rst blush) unforgivable you don't and can't comprehend why a man would be unfaithful, and you won't ever pretend to. You.gure that if you've told him you love him; given him your mind, your body, and your time; moved in with him; shared the bills with him; done his laundry; cooked his food; borne his children; and said an enthusiastic, I do, in front of the Lord, the pastor, your mother, and all her best friends and yours, too, the least your man can do is honor what is most sacred to you: the promise of.delity. He can lie (every once in a while), fall down on the housework and the child rearing, get a little lax in the income department, pay more attention to his boys and his mother than he does to you, and slip into the mediocre category when it comes to the boudoir even say the Lord's name in vain while you're walking out the door to go to yet another church service alone.
But let a man step out on his woman, and watch the earth move.
That's my way of saying that women will put up with a lot of things.
Cheating is not one of them.
Now, we men? We understand this. We know what it takes to tip, we're capable of calculating the collateral damage that comes with getting caught, and we know that getting back into the graces of the woman we cheated on and her mother, and her friends, and anyone else who's sympathized with her having to resurrect herself from such a devastating life event will require a Herculean effort.
Still, we do it.
Why?
I am not here to justify a cheating man's actions. Rather, this is my humble attempt to explain to you why a man might go on ahead and get a little something on the side, and what you can do to cut down the chances that your man will do this to you. So let's just go on ahead and get right to it. Men cheat because…
Dress it up any way you want to, but men don't view sex the way you women do, plain and simple. For a lot of you, the act of intercourse is emotional an act of love. That's understandable, considering the sheer physics of the act; you have to lie back and allow a foreign object to enter your body. You've been taught all your life that you only let that kind of deeply intimate moment happen with someone who really means something to you.
By contrast, when it comes to men and sex, neither emotions nor meaning necessarily enter the equation. It's easy very easy for a man to have sex, go home, wash it off with soap and water, and act like what he just did never happened. Sex can be a purely physical act for us love has absolutely nothing to do with it. Consider this Strawberry Letter from a woman who called herself Concerned:
During a conversation with my husband of 20 years, I asked him if he would honestly always be satis.ed with having sex with me only. He hesitated for so long before answering that I just knew he was going to say no. He then went on to explain that he loved me and would never do anything to hurt me, but if I gave him permission to have sex with other women and not form relationships with them, he would. He said that as he's gotten older, he's been wondering if he is still attractive and sexually appealing, and that attention from another younger woman would boost his ego. Then he asked me if I would be willing to give him permission to have sex with other women if he promised to let them know up front that it's only sex he's interested in and he's not interested in a relationship. He even offered to answer any questions I'd have with his encounters, or, if I didn't want to know about it, to just do it and not tell me what and when it happened. Obviously, he's got a problem with monogamy. Should I consent so that a potential for sneaking around can be eliminated? What can I do to get him to change his thinking if anything?
The answer to that last question in the Strawberry Letter is, not much. A man can love his wife, his children, his home, and the life that they've all built together, and have an incredible physical connection to her, and still get some from another woman without a second thought about it, because the actual act with the other woman meant nothing to him. It was something that may have made him feel good physically, but emotionally, his heart the professing, providing, and protecting he saves for the woman he loves may be at home with his woman.
Now.lter that bit of information through the lens of, say, a high-powered man who has a wife whose job is equally prestigious and demanding. I don't profess to know what goes on behind closed doors in that kind of household, but by all public accounts, that couple could be perfectly happy, in love, supportive down for each other. Still, her job could take her overseas, leaving her man at home to run the household, take care of the kids, and keep up his demanding work schedule for weeks on end, without so much as a hot-and-heavy phone conversation to help him make it through the enormous time period he'd have to go without having sex. Trust me when I say this: under this situation, plenty of men would easily justify their getting some from somewhere else. Neither he, nor any other man, for that matter, is going to go without sex too long. It's not that he doesn't love his wife. But he's there, coming home exhausted from a hard day's work, cooking dinner, shuttling the kids around to all their after-school functions, and checking homework. He's stressed out, and plenty of us men can hear what he may have worked out in his mind: I'm going to go over here and let this other woman tighten me up, and then I'll come back and cook, shuttle, and work until the woman I love comes back to me.
This may seem like a cold piece of work to you, but to a man, it's reasonable. He's got to try to feel better some kind of way, and so he's going to get sex from someone if he can't get it from you. You see it as betrayal. Men see it as just a way to get tightened up, especially if…
Of course, men will consider the risks of getting caught cheating on his lady. But mostly, men initiate affairs pretty con.dent that they're going to get away with it, and most certainly with all kinds of con.dence that if they get caught, their denials will see them through. I used to do a joke where I would encourage men to ride their lie all the way out. I told them, I don't care if somebody got a picture of my butt up in the air in the pump position with my social security number stamped on the left-hand side of my cheek, I'm going to tell my wife, 'It ain't me I don't know who that is with my social security number all over his butt, with the same shoes as me, but that's not me!'
Now, that's my joke, but most men don't consider getting caught a laughing matter. A man who cheats has most certainly calculated the collateral damage that would come from getting busted potential loss of the woman he loves, his children, his home, and his peace of mind and he recognizes that this would be a devastating blow to all the things that matter in his life. We all are quite familiar with the saying Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and men understand its meaning much better than you do; we know the hell is coming and there will be plenty of scorn if we get busted.
Still, men don't really ever think they're going to get caught. Basically, we think we're slick and we go to great lengths to hide our in.delity from you, always with this in mind: if you don't know about it, it can't hurt you. We're pretty con.dent that your willingness to be in a relationship with us supersedes all the things we do that look suspicious, because we know you'll work through the suspicion that it's more important to you to be with us in our imperfection than to leave us and be alone. At least that's what we're hoping. And in the beginning, mostly, you will. But the moment your suspicions turn into a Law & Orderutype investigation, we're going to lie and deny.
That's if we care about you.
But if not if a man doesn't see you.tting into his life plan he won't even bother with all of the covering up and the chitchat after he gets found out. He'll simply tell you that he was sleeping with someone else because…
You may think this is a cop-out, but it is the reality. It goes back to the way men judge themselves against each other: I told you in the introduction and have reiterated elsewhere in the book that we are de.ned by who we are, what we do, and how much we make. And if we haven't gotten to where we want and need to be, then we're not going to be ready to.gure out how settling down with one woman.ts into our plans for becoming a truly independent, mature, well-off man. I mean, how many times have you seen or been in a relationship where the man says over and over again, When I get my money right, I'll think about commitment, or, I just need to get that promotion.rst, then I'll settle down. That guy is still trying to complete himself, and while he's working toward that, he's not organizing his life to include a committed relationship. He tells himself he simply doesn't have time for it it's simply not a priority for him. And so creep he will.
The same can be true, even, of a man who is married with children. The man who is mature and has.gured out who he is and is happy with what he does and how much he makes probably has his life ordered up correctly; he's become the man he envisioned himself being and has put his priorities in this order: God, family, education, business, and then everything else. But if family isn't second, it's about to be a problem; he's going to dedicate himself to whatever his priorities are, in the order in which he's put them. Even if he's already said, I do, and held his babies in his arms and done everything a man's supposed to do to protect and provide for them, if he's decided that it's more important to him to ful.ll that hunting jones, then that's going to be the priority for him he's not going
