Why Men Want Sex and Women Need Love (19 page)

For the reasons previously mentioned in this book, a man often finds that his sex life at home is spiced up by a little action on the side, and because a man’s brain can separate sex from love, running two or more women at one time is not difficult.

The night Prince Charles gave his famous TV interview and admitted to his long-running tryst with Camilla Parker-Bowles during his marriage, Princess Diana put on her sexiest little black dress and paraded before the world at a high-profile event looking glamorous. It couldn’t have been easy for her—but it was easier on the soul than sitting at home with a box of tissues. Men suffer less when they are betrayed, because for most the initial and lasting emotions are anger and hurt pride—these are aggressive emotions. The problem for men comes in opening up emotionally, talking to friends, and communicating their hurts and fears.

As a rule, a woman will go through several distinct phases, starting with anger and hurt, but the long-term effects go much deeper. She will have a crisis of confidence and low self-esteem; she will feel more protective of her children and will feel the burden of keeping the family together as well as a lack of options. She is also likely to feel responsible in some way for the fact that her partner fancied another woman. The most common side effects for betrayed women are depression and physical illness because high stress levels deplete the immune system and leave the body unguarded against infection and disease. She will catch everything going, from her kids’ head colds to joint and back pain caused by the rigid tension gripping her body day and night.

Many women will blame the other woman for their partner’s infidelity, which is part of the denial syndrome. They can’t believe that the man they love and have built their lives around could hurt and let them down like this. Often women decide to stay after a series of his one-night stands; many even stay after his extended affairs, which they are promised will end; and some even stay for years through a succession of quick bonks and long-running mistresses.

They do it for several reasons: They love him; they love their kids; they love family life and the social standing of being a couple with children. Importantly, they don’t want to lose their resources—their house and income. Their self-esteem sinks so low, they can’t imagine anyone else ever loving them, so some women decide that a man’s playing around is a tradeoff for a nice house, income, and lifestyle—in other words, they’ll hang around for the resources. But a woman who decides to hang in there may do so at great emotional and physical cost to herself, and there are no guarantees he will not leave anyhow. Having said that, it’s rare that a man will leave a relationship because he’s unhappy. He will stay in a relationship simply because he hasn’t got a better offer. One-night stands can turn into romantic love or long-term attachment if he decides that the new woman is worth the agony of leaving his current relationship.

A man who stays after discovering his wife’s affair is more likely to do so if the affair was kept quiet and no one knew about it. Male pride gets severely damaged by a woman’s affair. Public knowledge of it makes him look and feel bad, and his primal self tells him that his paternity is no longer guaranteed. As we said, unless a man has a better offer on the
horizon, he’s more likely to stay and try to work things out—unless she decides to kick him out.

The reality of coping with life after the decision to stay can be tougher than jumping ship and starting again. Very few people manage to find an outlet for pent-up hurt and aggression while trying to hide the hurt and deny to themselves that the partner is a cheat. The right outlet for anger and hurt is the person who has caused it—the partner—not the person with whom the partner had the affair.

Those who confront a cheating partner also suffer feelings of self-loathing for allowing themselves to be reduced to the level of many scorned lovers—screaming in the street, fighting, smashing cars, throwing bricks through windows, posting Internet revenge blogs, or cutting the arms off clothes.

Some men and women see revenge affairs as their only option, but these affairs these can seriously backfire. After an initial ego boost, they may get dumped and be left feeling used and abused again. Besides, a revenge affair only puts them on the same level as the one who betrayed them.

Serial cheaters are not good marriage material and need personal counseling and reevaluation if they are ever to sustain a long-term relationship of any value. A cheater’s partner is better off starting again rather than attempting to make a happy life with a serial philanderer. You wouldn’t intentionally look for a criminal or con artist for a partner, so why chase a serial cheater?

The person having a long-term affair must be forced to choose. There is no real future—other than one of illness and depression—for anyone who chooses to stay while his or her partner continually cheats. If the situation continues unresolved, it can only end in misery, and a high emotional price will be paid by all.

The biggest challenge for those who want to resolve their problems and resurrect their relationships is to leave the wreckage behind and build a better new relationship with the partner than the one they previously had.

1. Communicate
   . Unless you talk about what happened and why and how it happened, you will never find a way of moving on. Be honest and don’t be afraid to ask a question even if you don’t like the answer. Only these answers can unlock the key to the future.
   

2. Speak openly
   . If you had the affair, admit that it was a mistake and state that you genuinely want to save your relationship. You may be afraid of the consequences, but
   the confession will give you a much greater chance of putting things right than if your partner hears about it some other way. Be heartened by the fact that the revelation of an affair can often be all that you need to restart your ailing marriage, because it often provides the shock necessary to make people stop, reassess, and improve.
   

3. Avoid blaming each other
   for what you did or didn’t do. It is a negative approach and won’t help you uncover and address the problems that led to the affair.
   

4. Don’t make hasty decisions
   . Allow time for the shock to pass. This will allow you to make an informed, logical assessment of the situation. After a week or so, you will feel calmer and able to make major decisions about the future of your relationship.
   

5. Accept a period of mourning
   . The relationship as you knew it is gone and will never return. Putting on a “normal” face to the world does not mean you can convince yourself that everything will carry on as it was before.
   

6. If you can’t say it, write it down
   . This has proved very useful for men who find difficulty in communicating their feelings and fears. Talking is not one of men’s strong points, so don’t have endless postmortems about the affair. Stick to the point.
   

7. Make a list
   . You and your partner should make a list of what needs to change or receive attention to set the relationship right. It’s amazing how the things that appear on people’s lists are often simple and straightforward. It’s a wonder why they weren’t spotted as flash points before the affair, but the problem is that things get buried beneath the avalanche of daily family life.
   

8. Be kind to yourselves
   . Give yourselves a leave of absence from chores that do not really need to be done or done as often if they encroach on quality time spent together making each other feel good.
   

9. Work on your self-esteem together
   . Following an affair, the only salvageable marriage is one that includes a
   healthy level of remorse on both sides, but don’t allow it to overwhelm you. Try to turn it into a positive conclusion. The best way to rid yourself of guilt is to accept your part in the mess and banish it for good by putting things right.
   

1. Always make your partner your number-one priority
   . Relationships in which one or both partners have their main focus on careers, business, or children are at high risk of an affair. While these things are important, never let them always be number one in your life.
   

2. Have confidences that only you and your partner talk about
   . Don’t share private or intimate thoughts with others that you haven’t discussed with your mate.
   

3. Connect with each other on a daily basis
   . Couples who make time to discuss their thoughts with their partners every day have the lowest incidence of infidelity and the highest sense of security.
   

4. Avoid any situations that allow affairs to happen
   . Avoid any circumstances in which you may become temporarily attracted to someone else. This doesn’t mean there’s a problem in your relationship or that you have to act on it; it simply means you need to stay away from these situations.
   

Infidelity is the thing any person in a relationship most fears, but there are almost always warning signals when one partner is unhappy and likely to stray. By talking and communicating your feelings and fears to your partner and keeping in touch with the heart of the relationship, you can build a barrier to keep infidelity out.

Affairs rarely solve problems; they always create new ones. A new person brings new demands, and the bigger the age difference, the more complicated those problems will be. Most cheaters confuse lust and the “fear-of-discovery” ingredient with love. An affair is a completely selfish, one-on-one time with someone with no discussion about the realities of real life—who will scrub the toilet, who’ll drive the kids to piano lessons or take out the rubbish. Even if a person marries the affairee, most of the lust hormones that drove them together disappear for 90% of people after twelve to twenty-four months, when the thrill of discovery is gone and life becomes routine once again.

Those caught in an affair stand to lose 50% or more of their social contacts with divorce, along with the same amount or more of their resources, and they must juggle the relationships between their new love and any existing kids, brothers, sisters, parents, their ex, and work colleagues, some of whom will reject the new partner.

Relate, the leading British relationship organization, found that 50% of couples who ended a long-term relationship later regretted that decision. An affair does not have to spell the end of a relationship; it can be a wake-up call that a problem exists and that one or both partners were in denial. When a man or woman is unfaithful, it is because the relationship needs to change in some way.

Regular relationship counseling can head off the majority of problems that lead to affairs.