Why Men Cheat
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Why do men cheat? Why are men unfaithful? Why do they have affairs and step out of the relationship?

You might be asking yourself, why am I even getting this? The answers are obvious. But the truth is that if you're a man that has ever been unfaithful and you have cheated, it's not always so obvious. In fact, most of the men that I work with and that come to me because they are having an affair or because some infidelity has been found out or they're struggling with it and their partner doesn't know, one of the first things they say to me is, I don't know why I did this.

Tell me why, help me figure out why I had this affair. You know, did I just want the attention? Like, are things really that bad in my relationship? For a lot of men that have affairs, the question, why did I do this, is actually quite prominent.

So I'm going to give you some of the main reasons based on research and based on my own personal experience with the men that I've worked with in my own life about why we as men cheat. And I'm going to give you a little bit of insight and direction into how we need to move past some of these pieces.

So years ago, I spoke at this conference and this sex therapist was talking before me and she had condensed down why men cheat, why women cheat into this beautiful phrase, which was men cheat to stay and women cheat to leave. Men cheat to stay and women cheat to leave.

So generally speaking, I have seen this to be true. On average, the majority of men that have affairs or that are cheating, they are cheating to stay. Now, what does that mean? It means that they don't want the relationship, the primary relationship that they're in to end.

They don't want the divorce to happen. They don't want the relationship to be over. But the affair happens anyways. Whereas with women, oftentimes cheating is a sign that she is either emotionally, sexually, physically, intellectually out of the relationship. She's done with it in some capacity. She wants to leave.

That's not every single time, but for a lot of women, it's a sign that she's wanting to leave the marriage or wanting to leave the relationship where she's at least thought about it. And this is her almost like dabbling with the exit or putting a stamp on the exit.

So for men, it's more of a sign that something is dysfunctional in the relationship. Something's happening in the relationship. Something's missing in the relationship. And either you as a man have tried to figure out how to rectify that problem. Maybe there's a big desire discrepancy between you and your wife or your girlfriend, and that's causing a lot of strain and pressure. Maybe there's communication problems or conflict or who knows what it is.

But for a lot of guys, what ends up happening is that there's something dysfunctional, something missing in the relationship. And eventually over time, they step out of the relationship because of it in order to maintain the primary relationship.

So I think sometimes women hear this and they're like, that doesn't make any sense. But the reality is that the majority of us as men, it's a very rational, linear thing. It's like, well, this thing is pretty good. You know, this relationship is pretty great.

And maybe something about it is a little dysfunctional or it's not working, but I'm very loyal to this person. I've dedicated myself to this person. And so I don't actually want this relationship to end completely. I just, I'm not getting all of my needs met. And so then I'm going somewhere else.

So let's talk about the reasons that fall underneath that and some of the reasons that fall outside of that. So the first main big one for a lot of men very clearly is sexual dissatisfaction. And in fact, in 2017, there was a study done that was published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior that said that men were significantly more likely than women to cite sexual dissatisfaction as a reason for infidelity.

So, you know, you as a man might find that frequency, variety, excitement, satisfaction within the bedroom of your primary relationship is

that that has caused you to have an affair. And in fact, Dr. David Buss has noted that in his cross-cultural studies, men prioritize sexual access and novelty more than women do on average. And again, some of that is because of access, right? For men, it is much harder to

to acquire or get laid, acquire sex or get laid than it is for women. Women do not necessarily understand what it's like for men to try and have sex because for the majority of women, regardless of where they fall on the spectrum of looks and attractiveness and mating viability,

they are going to have a much easier time getting a man who wants to have sex with them than most men are going to have getting a woman to try and have sex with them. So for a lot of men,

Sex is this thing that in the relationship, there can be pressure around it, but there can also be sexual dissatisfaction and they want variety and excitement, et cetera. And when that's not there, when there isn't a coherence of how often or how frequent or

how deep the sexual connection is, that can lead to a good amount of dissatisfaction that will lead a man to either end the relationship entirely or to step out. So for a lot of men, the stepping out is because of sexual dissatisfaction. Next is desire for novelty or variety. Again,

This is something that a lot of men cite, right? Esther Perel said that men don't always cheat because they want to leave their partner, as I've been saying. Sometimes they cheat to escape from themselves, right? So you as a man might be looking for an escape from who you are, from what you're experiencing, from the dregs of your everyday life, from your nine to five. Or maybe you're looking for novelty and variety in your life. You need some excitement, right?

You know, your life doesn't really have any excitement. And all of a sudden, you know, the woman in your office or wherever it is, the bar, et cetera, gives you some excitement and some attraction and, you know, flirts with you a little bit. And all of a sudden you're like, well, this is novel. This is some variety. So for men, if you are out there and you've had an affair, you're having one right now, novelty and variety might be a part of it. You might be bored.

in your relationship. There might not be enough excitement or adventure. There might not be enough sexual exploration. And maybe the connection between you and the person that you're with has sort of flatlined, and that's caused you to shift outside of the relationship.

The next thing that leads men out to infidelity is opportunity. And according to a study published in Psychology Today, men are more likely than women to cheat when the opportunity presents itself with low risk of being caught.

Now, again, this kind of plays into what I was talking to before. And I think women sometimes have a hard time conceptualizing this because for a lot of women, what they're mostly doing is telling men no to sex. Out at the bar, men are hitting on them and talking to them. And you're a dude who's gone to the bar and you're trying to get a woman's number and maybe get her to come home with you or go on a date with you. And so women are constantly sort of fending men off and saying no.

to sexual advances or mating advances or just dating advances altogether. Whereas for men, that's not the case, right? That's just not the case. The majority of men have not experienced

a woman approaching them and saying, hey, I want you to come home with me tonight. Or hey, why don't I take you out on a date tonight? Or why don't you let me buy you a drink? I want to pick you up and take you home. That's not what most men are experiencing. And not only that, for the majority of guys, and maybe you fall in this category watching this or listening to this, for the majority of guys, it's very challenging to get female attention.

It's very challenging for a lot of guys. So if you are one of the men who maybe didn't have a lot of sexual partners or you haven't had a lot of sexual variety over the course of your dating life and your relationship life,

and you're in a long-term relationship, and things have kind of become stagnant. And all of a sudden, you start to get attention and validation from somebody who's attractive, that you find attractive, and they're flirting with you. And all of a sudden, there's just this opportunity to have a one-night stand or have an affair, and there's very low risk

of your wife, your girlfriend, your partner finding out, then that cost-benefit analysis of, well, there's kind of a pretty high reward here, great sex, and a pretty low risk of my person finding out, you get some immediate gratification.

This increases the likelihood that a man is going to say yes. So sometimes it's just about opportunity. Then we get into the realm of emotional dissatisfaction and feeling disconnected. For some men, they find themselves in a relationship that cannot be described as anything else other than miserable.

that there's just a big disconnection between them and the person that they're dating. Maybe they're dating somebody who's hypercritical and harsh and you can never do anything right, you can never get anything right. And what ends up happening is that you kind of fall into this state of just being in this miserable relationship where nothing's ever good enough and you're really, really underappreciated.

That causes this part of you that when the opportunity arises, or maybe you even start to look for it, that you venture outside of the relationship for something that you have some level of emotional connection to and that there's some level of feeling appreciated. In fact, in a survey done by the Institute of Family Studies, men also cited emotional neglect as

as a key driver for infidelity. Now, that was less than women. Women cited emotional neglect almost as the number one reason in that study for having an affair. But for most men, it's still a big piece of it. And the big piece of it is feeling underappreciated, that what a man is doing within the relationship, within life, is just going unnoticed and underappreciated.

Next piece, I call it the escape from self, the escape from self, which is the low self-esteem. So for me, one of the main drivers of why I would cheat in past relationships was I just did not like who I was.

And I remember specifically being in one relationship with somebody, with a woman that I really loved, I really cared about, I thought she was phenomenal. And I really didn't feel deserving of the relationship in my core because I hated who I was. I didn't like who I was. I didn't really value or appreciate who I was.

And so I needed all of this external validation and attention. And so if you're a guy that has low self-esteem or you're hypercritical of yourself, you're very perfectionistic, you're harsh on yourself, it's likely that you are going to seek validation and worth and value outside of yourself and outside of the relationship. And you might have found that you pressurize the relationship and put a lot of pressure

pressure on that person to give you validation. And if that's not enough, then you start to seek outside of that. Last but not least,

is an avoidance of intimacy or conflict. So for some men, what I have also noticed is that there's a very deep fear of closeness, intimacy. This is just sort of like typical avoidant attachment style, disorganized attachment style, maybe even for some of the anxious, although generally the anxious tend to be the validation seekers. So anxious men are generally the men that are going to go out and seek

an affair or they're going to have an affair because they're getting some validation and they're getting some attention that feels good and helps them feel powerful and sort of strong and confident. Whereas the man that's avoidant

of intimacy and closeness and connection, or the man that's afraid of it might leverage an affair or cheating or infidelity unconsciously. He might leverage it unconsciously in the moments where things start to go really well in the relationship, or there's a lot of connection, or it's moving in a direction of some type of deeper commitment or deeper intimacy.

Or he will negate that type of deep intimacy within his primary relationship and kind of shut it down continuously and then start to build it with an affair partner. So that I've seen as well. So these are some of the main reasons. If I missed anything, drop it in the comments below. Otherwise, I'm curious to hear your thoughts about why men cheat.

The way out of this, how do I want to say this? The way out of this is working on our attachment. There's going to be another video on this, so I'll drop that soon. But for now, drop your thoughts and comments in the comment section below, whether you're on YouTube or Spotify. Don't forget to hit the bell notification because otherwise you won't get informed about the videos dropping because on YouTube, they just don't tell you. You don't even see the content unless you are watching meticulously yourself.

Thanks very much for tuning in. Until next week, Conor Beaton signing off.