For almost as long as marriage has existed, so has adultery.
Even while so much else has changed about our ideals regarding romantic relationships, we continue to revere and seek out monogamous relationships. Gender roles change, but relatively few people adopt different values around monogamy and sexual fidelity.
Is it evil or sinful to cheat? Is it dishonest, dangerous, or immature?
Nearly everyone says it’s wrong to cheat, yet in recent studies, a quarter of men and a sixth of women interviewed admitted to having had at least one extramarital affair. What sorts of people cheat on their partners? Why do they do it?
The Good Men Project and elephant journal‘s Love and Relationships are pairing up again (see our very successful Men and Pornography series) to present a series on Why Good Men and Women Cheat. Send your pitch, query, or submission to Justin Cascio, Senior Editor, The Good Men Project at [email protected] or to Lori Ann Lothian, Love and Relationships editor at elephant journal, at [email protected] by Friday, December 21 for consideration.
Each editor will publish accepted submissions in their own journal; select submissions will be reprinted in both. Read The Good Men Project submission guidelines here and elephant journal submission guidelines here for more information.
Read more Calls For Submissions.
Image credit: epSos.de/Flickr
The same reason some good people are attracted to persons of the same sex. They were born that way. There are people, obviously, many who are happy to have more than one relationship concurrently. They love two people, possibly for different reasons and in different ways. They are most content with both of them; they don’t want to let either of them go, except they know that neither of them wants to share. So, it’s a dilemma. Anyone that is strongly tempted to have multiple concurrent relationships was born, to some extent at least, naturally poly. As our society has… Read more »
Being poly doesn’t entirely explain why people sneak around, whatever the arrangement of one’s primary relationship. I’ve known people in poly relationships with relatively few restrictions, who still managed to violate the spirit and letter of their agreements, and destroy their marriages this way. I know there are plenty of others who cheat undetected. There are more questions there than what drives us beyond the monogamous ideal society upholds (are we genetically programmed to have multiple mates? is this true of men as well as women?) and what drives us to destroy or uphold those values at the same time.
It’s because men have forgotten how to be men and women have forgotten how to be women. Instead of cooperating in relationships by operating with their naturally complementary traits and abilities, men and women compete for control. That competition kills romance. Who would be satisfied by a relationship where each person is constantly vying for power? Many people think gender roles are an antiquated concept. However, gender roles allowed men and women to enjoy monogamous, satisfying relationships for literally tens of thousands of years. This decades long surge in infidelity, divorce, or outright non-commitment coincided with the notion that women… Read more »
You should submit an essay on your views. Be sure to back up your assertions with evidence though, otherwise it will sound like you’re just making things up to confirm your own opinions. For example, you might show how rates of infidelity were very low before suffrage, or have skyrocketed since the seventies.
Good advice, Nick.
Excellent advice. Looks like I have a new research project on my hands.
I’m afraid I find your argument rather weak. Are you suggesting that infidelity hasn’t existed for as long as there has been males and females? Look at the animal kingdom, one is hard pressed to find animals paired for life. Recent studies show that even those that we thought were monogamous (i.e. some birds) we now know mate with others on the side. I am not suggesting that monogamy is wrong, I am in a monogamous relationship and have never been unfaithful and plan on keeping it that way but I do think it is part of our evolution that… Read more »
I find a lot of identity in Morgan’s comments. He/She (not sure which you are, Morgan:)) broke the issue down to some simple, yet probing factors — ego, consequnces, selfishness, choice, respect, etc. I was unfaithful to my wife for many of thosereasons. I lost my wife and that relationsip for the rest of my life. That is my consequence of the worst series of decsions I have made in almost 50 years, the weight of which I will carry to my grave. To the married and single, alike, my admonition — be true. To be otherwise, is to overly… Read more »
Piers – your remarks lack any appreciation whatsoever of the social construction of gender, and consider our history through some kind of rose tinted, highly inaccurate veil. Gender roles are not ‘natural’ at all. The most prominent divisions that we have come to understand as gendered norms were manifest most obviously as a result of industrialization. I point you to the work of Mary Evans, among many others, who demonstrates this very well. The roles you describe are needed for a functional society in some way, but that doesn’t mean that one sex or another should be allocated them. It’s… Read more »