rom the male perspective, the answers to the question “Why do men cheat?” are crystal clear. Not so much for women. No matter how good or sensible the reasons are, men know that women will never hear one and say, “Oh! Now I get it!” There are neither words big enough nor experts with enough credentials and letters behind their name to slice it and dice it up in a way that’s palatable for most women; inevitably, responses to this million-dollar question are always going to sound like ten-dollar answers.
And who could argue with that? For (most) women, after all, cheating is unthinkable and (at first blush) unforgivable—you don’t and can’t comprehend why a man would be unfaithful, and you won’t ever pretend to. You figure 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 fidelity. 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 ser vice 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 re- quire 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 satisfied 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 wonder- ing 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 filter that bit of information through the lens of, say, a high-powered man who has a wife whose job is equally presti- gious 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, support- ive—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- fident that they’re going to get away with it, and most certainly with all kinds of confidence that if they get caught, their denials will see them through. I used to do a joke where I would en- courage 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 infidelity from you, always with this in mind: if you don’t know about it, it can’t hurt you. We’re pretty confident 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 & Order–type 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 fitting 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 defined 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 figure out how settling down with one woman fits into our plans for be-
coming 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 first, 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 figured 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 fulfill that hunting jones, then that’s going to be the priority for him—he’s not going to sync up with your demand that he be faithful. He’s not going to rub it in your face, and he’s going to do everything he can to preserve what he has with you, but he’s still going to have a little some- thing on the side. Really, it’s got nothing to do with you.
I have a friend who’s successful, has plenty of money, a beau- tiful family—the ideal life. And one evening while we were sitting around with a few of our friends shooting the breeze about how satisfied we are with our stations in life, my boy an- nounced with a slick grin, “I love my wife, man, but I got this cold one on the side.” We were surprised—don’t get me wrong. But we accepted that from him because we all know that this man hasn’t got his priorities right yet, and there’s nothing we can do or say to make him do it. He knows that once he’s stepped out on his wife, he’s putting something else before God and family. But only he can put his house in order. Now, if he’s young, that might come with mental maturity; the old-timers say all the time that experience is priceless—too bad you have to pay for it with your youth. Of course, maturity and age go hand in hand, but circumstances bring it about, too: if a man is a spiri- tual person and he’s got a relationship with God, he’ll mature much more quickly, just because his beliefs will hold him to a much more stringent moral code. And that moral code will au- tomatically make him put family second, because this is what a relationship with God demands. Now, he’ll make it a priority to find a woman who completes his life, someone who can be the mother of his children—who can make his unit complete.
Sometimes men wise up without God in their lives. I have a buddy who had all kinds of women doing all kinds of things to him and for him, and he finally got into a position where he said, “Man, I got all these women and I can get them to do all
these things and give me all these things, but I’m not happy. I don’t have any peace and I just don’t feel like I have my life together.” And right then and there, he made the decision to stop treating women the way he’d been treating them and get what he was finally yearning for: a family. His philandering stopped cold. He’s not saved. He didn’t have some big revelation with God, he didn’t get called to the ministry. He just decided he needed to do something different to find the joy in his life, and the only way he could find that was with someone, and only one someone, special.
When a man finds that joy—the chances of his cheating get really slim. Unless. . .
That’s right, I said it: it could have something to do with you. Your man may be walking around telling himself that your relationship just doesn’t have that spark anymore, that you don’t turn him on like you used to—that you don’t come on to him like you did when the two of you first fell in love. You know how it goes: the two of you get comfortable with each other, settle in, have some babies, buy a house, and then get bogged down in the bills and raising the kids and going to work and keeping up with the rat race that comes when you’re a
family trying to make it. The next thing he knows, the woman who used to wear and do little things to keep it hot and spicy isn’t interested in doing that little thing she did when the two of them first got together. In fact, the sex has become unin- spired; she’s coming in from work, where she was dressed up in her nice skirt and heels and makeup and such, and she’s break- ing down before she can get to the door good. And now, after a long day at work, and even more work when she gets home, she’s coming to bed in a head scarf and a T-shirt and is this close to hiring a firing squad to take you out for even looking at her with those bedroom eyes.
In other words, what’s back at the house has become ho- hum—routine. And this man is missing the spark that used to be there. You’ve changed. (He knows he’s changed, too, but we’re not talking about him, we’re talking about you.) Perhaps that comes, too, with a feeling that you don’t appreciate him like you used to. The thank-yous come less frequently, there’s a lot of arguing going on—turmoil seems to get up with you in the morning and cuddle up with the two of you at night. And your home just isn’t feeling like what he signed up for. And if he can’t get what he signed up for back at the house, he’s more likely to go out and find it somewhere else, because guess what? He knows he can always go find it somewhere else, particularly since. . .
That’s the truth that no woman wants to face. Imagine if every woman said, “You’re married—I can’t do that with you.” Man, do you know how many marriages and relationships would still exist today? Men can cheat because there are so many women willing to give themselves to a man who doesn’t belong to them. Sure, every now and again there are women who get fooled and don’t know that a man is already spoken for. A ma- jority of the time, however, these women know they’re sleeping with a married man. Yes, these are the women who have no standards and requirements and who suffer from serious self- esteem issues, making themselves willing to cheat and available to be cheated on. If those women took themselves out of the cheater’s circle, the incidence of cheating would be cut seriously down. And the way to get out of that cheater’s circle is to do exactly what I’m teaching you to do in this book: figure out your standards and requirements, explain them, and stick to them (Chapter 9), get to really know the man by asking five es- sential questions you’ll need to know to move a relationship forward (see Chapter 10), and follow the Ninety-Day Rule (see Chapter 11). And then teach all of this to your daughters, too. If we don’t, after all, break that cycle, the cheating will continue.
So, ladies, the reasons I’ve given here are the primary rea- sons men cheat, but trust me, there are many, many more. A man is always going to have a reason to justify why he’s doing wrong, and those reasons will change from man to man and woman to woman. What’s important for you to understand, though, is that regardless of a man’s reasons, he knows what you know: it’s wrong to commit to someone and promise to remain faithful and then go against that—especially if this was one of your mate’s requirements. Women can go over it again and again in their minds, finding all kinds of deficiencies in them- selves—“I didn’t do this right,” “I wasn’t good enough,” “I didn’t love him the way I should,” “she came in here and out- performed me”—but the fact still remains that he didn’t have any business cheating. So women need to release themselves from the blame of a cheating man’s actions—just do that for yourselves. Because holding on to that baggage can be paralyz- ing; it can cripple you and keep you from performing in your next encounter. You simply cannot drive forward if you’re fo- cused on what’s happening in the rearview mirror.
You can, however, limit the amount of times you’re cheated on again. You do that by upping the ante on your requirements. See, you have a lot more power to limit the things that happen to you—you’ve got the power of persuasion, your power of intuition, your power of suggestion, standards to help keep you protected. If you let a man know up front that you’ll tolerate a lot of things but cheating is not one of them, then he’s really
clear on the fact that if he steps out of the union, he stays out of the union. And if he breaks that promise and steps out anyway? You’ve got to be prepared to let him go and walk away. You can’t find out your man cheated, confront him about it, and then stay with him, only to question his every move and nag him about what he’s doing every chance you get. Because that simply means you never really forgave him, and you’re creating a situation that’s ripe for him to cheat again. You’ve got to either let him go, or find it in your heart to truly forgive the man and work on a way to move forward with him.
Now sometimes, it takes a man to lose something or nearly lose something to really appreciate it. But isn’t that true of ev- erybody? Some men cheat because there’s never been a penalty for it. But if a man who’s cheated on you sees you walking out the door and you matter to him, please know that at this point he’s very vulnerable and open to learning. Should he win you back, he’s going to straighten up and fly right because he’s almost lost his girl and his family, which means he’ll do most anything you tell him to get back into your good graces. He’s going to work to earn your trust back—follow your require- ments to get back on the team. If that means he has to be home by a certain time, call when he’s going to be late, send flowers every week, find a sitter so you all can have a date night on Thursdays, go to church with you on Sundays, even sit on a psychologist’s couch and air out all of your dirty laundry until you’re satisfied he’s a changed man, then that’s what he’ll do.
Once there’s a penalty and he’s forced to say to himself, “Wow, everything I’ve ever loved was about to be lost,” he may very well come through the fire a better man.
Is that to say it’s going to be easy to forgive him and not be suspicious? No. But he may eventually earn your trust back and be willing to work through it with you. He’s not going to like being asked questions about where he’s been, he’s going to hate not being able to be intimate with you while you work through your anger, and he’s going to be really reluctant to carry his butt down to the psychologist’s office with you. But in his heart of hearts, he knows that’s a part of working his way back into your heart. He knows he created this—he knows what he did, and he understands the consequences, ramifications, and reper- cussions way better than you think he does. We understand penalties, and we know it’s going to be straight hell. Trust me, I know. Because it’s happened to me. It happens to a lot of men. You can’t be a man of power and not step outside your house. I don’t know one man of power who has not stepped outside his house. Such a man may exist but I have not met him. But I do know men of power who have learned to do right, go home, and take care of their families. Each one of them eventually gets to that. I certainly have; now, I carry my behind home. I had to come to this, though. And guess what? I know a lot of those same men—entertainers, ball players, executives, and so on—who have turned into some of the best husbands and fathers in the world, because they’ve lined up their life responsibilities in the
right order: God, family, education, and then business. And their wives? They’ve become better wives in the process, too—by trying to create a little bit of that magic they had when their relationship was fresh and new. She might come home from work and instead of kicking off those heels, keep them on and whisper in his ear to meet her in the bedroom for a pre- dinner snack. Or she might smile a little more, act a little bit more happy, be a tad bit more spontaneous—appreciate her man more, and show it, too.
This was certainly the story of one of my really good friends. His wife found out about his woman on the side, and she left him—went to her mother’s house for seven months and took his son with her. Dude was miserable. I mean, he was losing weight. We would go by to get him and say, “Let’s go out and have a good time,” and he would tell us, “Eh, I don’t feel like it.” We even offered to take him to see the woman he had on the side, in hopes that at least getting some from her would make him feel a little bit better, but he refused her, too. “I’m through with that,” he insisted. “I lost my marriage, my boy is gone—the people who mattered most to me are gone. And I want them back.”
It took him a year and a half to get this woman back. I don’t know what’s going on behind their closed doors, but I’ll tell you one thing: she’s got the ideal husband now. Any married man can look at him and see how to get it done. But two things had to happen to him: first, he had to find out what was impor-
tant to him, and what it was like to lose it. And second, he had to come to the realization that he needed to restructure his priorities: God first, then family. And you know what? He goes home every night. He’s making money, he’s extremely happy, and their family has nothing to worry about. And I heard his wife say, “My new man is something else.”
They’ve been living in their happily ever after for thirty- three years now. He’s a helluva dude, man—and she’s a lucky lady.