Why Men Want Sex and Women Need Love (17 page)
Read Why Men Want Sex and Women Need Love Online
Authors: Barbara Pease
Infidelity is on the rise in all age groups—between 1998 and 2008 in the United States, it rose by 20% for men over sixty and 15% for women. So why is the older generation doing the horizontal hula like never before? Two reasons: First, the Baby Boomers are in this group, and they rejected Victorian attitudes to sex and refuse to accept getting old—they see age sixty as the new forty-five; second, older people now have some things past generations never had—Viagra, hormone-replacement therapy (HRT), and erectile-dysfunction solutions. The forty-to sixty-year-old group is the last of the Baby Boomers, who—especially women—are throwing off the restrictive sexual constraints of their past.
Infidelity is also up in the under-forties group, and this is driven by the widespread availability of Internet porn, which is changing what this group sees as “normal” sexual behavior—past generations never heard the words “fisting,” “scat,” “MILF,” and “cruising the Hershey Highway.” In 2002, psychologists Raymond Bergner and Ana Bridges were the first to show how Internet porn had a significantly negative effect on permanent relationships. They found that the emotional distance created by Internet porn and online sexual relationships can be just as damaging to a relationship as real-life sexual infidelity.
“Sex at ninety is like trying to shoot pool with a rope.”
George Burns
Dr. David Schmitt of Bradley University, Illinois, collected data on the sexual habits of men and women from forty-eight countries across the world and found that men dunk the love muscle more in their late twenties than at any other age. This is the time when male testosterone has peaked and begun its decline. Women are more likely to philander in their thirties because their biological clock starts ticking as their fertility lessens. Women reach their sexual peak in their middle to late thirties, when testosterone levels rise, and this is nature’s way of pushing women to reproduce before time runs out.
Analyzing the results of most infidelity surveys will bring you to the conclusion that around 50% of men and 30% of women have probably dropped their drawers at least once while a partner wasn’t looking. That’s a lot of infidelity. It’s important to remember, however, that these statistics also mean that most people are still faithful most of the time.
A man had six children and was so proud of himself that he started calling his wife “Mother of
Six” in spite of her objections to this name. One night at a restaurant he shouted at the top of his voice, “Shall we go home now, Mother of Six?”
Irritated by his lack of discretion, she yelled back, “Anytime you’re ready, Father of Four.”
A poll of the clients of divorce lawyers in the United Kingdom in 2008 showed that the top ten reasons men gave for playing around were:
Lust
Loss of attraction to the wife/partner
Sex problems—they want more sex or more variety or have a sex addiction
Wife preoccupied by family life and the demands of children
Aggressive seduction by another woman
Lack of aggressive seduction by the partner
Thrill of the chase
Nagging
Failure to communicate with partner about problems
Male self-image—sex appeal, aging, an easy ego boost
By contrast, what most women are looking for is more akin to an out-of-body experience. They want to be someone other than wife, mother, daughter, or employee. They want to be with someone who makes demands of them other than “Take my suit to the cleaner’s,” “Have you packed my lunch box?” and “Have I got a clean shirt for the meeting?” Even women who are not at home but have successful careers of their own and are respected at work find they are underestimated and often unappreciated in their own home.
For some women, it’s simply a way of making a man stand up and take notice, drag him back to the romance of their earlier life, remind him they are more than just housewives, or pay him back for an affair he had. Women are also looking to boost their egos—they want to feel needed, desirable, that a man thinks it’s worth taking risks for them, that they merit the time spent on foreplay, and so on. For women cheaters, sex is not the driving force; it’s emotional nourishment.
“Men supplement their marriages with extramarital sex; women augment their marriages with some extra emotional nourishment, which also includes sex.”
Debbie Then
, Women Who Stay with Men Who Stray
The top ten answers women gave when asked why they had an affair were:
Loneliness (the most common problem for stay-at-home women)
Unable to communicate with their partner about problems
Not made to feel desirable enough
Lack of appreciation by husband
Husband too self-absorbed and full of hang-ups
Lack of romance and excitement in bed
Need to escape the routine in their life
Wanted to feel as powerful in their personal life as at work
Bored with routine
Opportunity was offered at the right time
We’ve all seen famous or powerful people who appear to have everything yet have risked it all for a quick and apparently pointless bonk. Think of Hugh Grant, adored actor who was with one of the most desirable women in the world, Elizabeth Hurley. He risked it all for a quick blowjob with a prostitute in a car in a seedy backstreet. Not to mention the famous tennis player caught in the broom cupboard of a London Japanese restaurant giving a waitress his California roll.
The world gasped with amazement that Bill Clinton, a powerful man who had the world at his fingertips, should want to use those fingertips on the average-looking Monica Lewinsky. Why would a man who seemed to have it all be so stupid as to risk the wrath of the American people in such a reckless way? By contrast, most of the famously philandering women in history have been classically lonely souls searching for something they never seemed to find in their relationships—Marilyn Monroe, Janis Joplin, and Anna-Nicole Smith, to name a few. The actions of these people make no sense at all until you look at the list of reasons people give for affairs on the previous page.
The ordinary woman lulled into playing around was perfectly illustrated by Meryl Streep in the film
The Bridges of Madison County
. She was bored and lonely, isolated by the routine dullness of her life, and an apparently free spirit, played by Clint Eastwood, offered an exciting alternative. She took it and successfully hid it. But when Bill Clinton said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” and pointed his finger at the camera, you knew he was sunk. The whole world suspected he was guilty even if his wife still claimed blissful ignorance.
“Clinton lied. A man might forget where he parks or where he lives, but he never forgets oral sex, no matter how bad it is.”
Barbara Bush (former U.S. first lady)
The joke about men having to undo their fly to think isn’t far from the truth. Most women have the planning ability to get away with murder when it comes to affairs—men don’t and rarely do. Men’s main problem is an inability to manage rational thought in situations dominated by sex. Most men usually don’t plan an affair; it just happens. Women are much more likely to have affairs that have been on the drawing board for some time before reaching fruition. Overall, the number of women playing around is lower than the number of men, even though evidence is surfacing that shows philandering by younger women is higher than it is for older women. Michelle Langley, author of
Women’s Infidelity
, conducted research over a ten-year period that indicates that women cheat as much as men, especially younger women. But women are by nature more nurturing and more loving than men and have lower levels of the sex-drive hormone testosterone and higher levels of the “cuddle hormone” oxytocin and so are less driven to have physical sex. In addition, most women go through life believing they should be the most important person in their partner’s world because a woman puts her man in the number-one position in hers.
Many women will sacrifice their own needs to support their man, raise his children, run his home, and be loyal to him no matter what. For a majority, this also extends to sex, and the idea of being touched by or having sex with someone else is unthinkable to them. The naive among them expect their husbands to feel the same. A training class in the differences between men and women would open the eyes of every new bride and would save a lot of marriages from divorce, which is where around 50% or more of them currently end up. The problem is that men are driven and consumed by their sex drive from the moment their hormones kick in at puberty, and it lasts until the end of their days; however, as a man ages, his mind begins to make contracts that his body can’t fulfill. The
urge to act on it may diminish over time, but for most of his life, the male brain is very rarely off the subject.
Marriage has its good side. It teaches you loyalty, forbearance, tolerance, self-restraint, and other valuable qualities you wouldn’t need if you had stayed single
.
Baby Boomer men—born before 1962—cheat about twice as much as Baby Boomer women, but new research shows that women in their twenties and thirties have about the same amount of affairs as men of the same age. More women in this group are working and have more financial freedom and are therefore more likely to take risks with their relationships. Around 50% of all affairs are with a person in the workplace.
Given the right circumstances, anyone is susceptible to cheating. It’s common for people to become involved in an affair when they had no initial thoughts of being unfaithful. It may not even be consistent with a person’s value system, but if the circumstances and time are right and the opportunity presents itself, that person may be tempted. Perhaps a workmate makes an advance at a business conference when these people are getting over a fight with their partner. Maybe they are stressed to the eyeballs and their cute gardener pays them a compliment. Yet many people believe that there’s a specific type of person who’s unfaithful, and so they have a false sense of security. Although some people are serial philanderers, affairs can happen to anyone. For men, an affair is usually opportunistic, but
for women, it’s usually planned. Don’t fool yourself into believing you’ll never have an affair. Instead, think of situations or circumstances in which you might be susceptible and make a point of avoiding them.
More people have affairs during the first two years of marriage than at any other time. This is the time when women are asking themselves if they made the right choice or whether they would be better off with someone else. It takes at least two years of living with someone before you really know that person. If a man was a serial cheater before marriage, he may also be a suspect for it during this initial period. Serial male cheaters are usually driven by a combination of higher testosterone levels and early childhood experiences, which affect how relationships are perceived as an adult.
In 2007, noted infidelity researcher Shirley Glass, author of
NOT “Just Friends
,
”
found that people who never intended to be unfaithful unwittingly formed deep, passionate connections before they realized that they had crossed the line between platonic friendship and romantic love. For male philanderers, the opportunity just happened to appear and they really got off on the chemical highs associated with philandering. She found that women philanderers said that they had been emotionally disconnected for around a year prior to the commencement of the affair. Women also reported that the affair had been forming in their minds for most of that time.
The bottom line is that the more emotional distance you develop between yourself and your partner, the greater the chance an affair has of starting. Open discussion about your relationship is the best way to ward off affairs.