Why Men Cheat: Is It Really All About Sex?

By Norman Fried
The recent attention and controversy surrounding same-sex marriages in California have caused many of us to focus on our own definition of ”family values” and have forced others to look more closely at the marital bond in particular. The question of fidelity in marriage has now become forefront in the minds and writings of many journalists, clergymen, and psychologists alike.

In his May 18 column (appearing in the May 26 issue of New York Magazine entitled “The Secret Lives Of Married Men”) Philip Weiss attempts an answer to the question of infidelity and the “affairs” of men, many of them in the public eye. Citing the “outings” of Eliot Spitzer, Governor David Paterson, and New York Congressman Vito Fosella (who recently admitted to having two families), and after collecting opinions from anonymous men that he questioned for his article, Weiss deduces that men’s hunger for sexual variety is a “basic and natural and more or less irresistible impulse.”

Weiss’ qualitative findings provide us with an interesting socio-biological, but limited, interpretation for the controversy of male infidelity, and they beg the question:

Is sexual impulse really the driving force behind men who have extramarital affairs?

Researchers in the fields of clinical psychology argue differently, as they assert that the wounding actions of an affair are often rooted in deeper, more unconscious origins. Marriage therapists suggest that people often choose a spouse based on their own (sometimes negative) parental role models; and they re-enact in the marriage the “dramas” which they experienced in their original families. The recapitulation of these earlier themes often renders each member of the couple vulnerable to ”acting out” behaviors; ultimately reaching their apogee in an extramarital affair.

When a marriage is predicated on the unconscious contract of rescuing a couple from an “unjust” history, and offers them each a second chance to “make it right,” married men may find themselves trapped in a web of fear and confusion that grows with time. The result is the gradual replacement of feelings of promise and positivity with despair and negativity.

Thus, we ask: Were the actions that caused political figures such as Eliot Spitzer to exchange his public identity as governor with that of “Client #9″ the result of unresolved conflicts from his family of origin, or were they more about sexual impulse?

We on the outside will never know.

But it is prudent for us to consider that marital discord subsumes a complex network of emotional states, including the breakdown of communication, conflicting values, financial stressors, unreal expectations and projections from each spouse’s past. Considering these contributing factors places “irresistible impulses and the need for sexual variety” quite low on the proverbial list.