SoulManX
The Inspector!
- Joined
- Oct 20, 2004
- Messages
- 11,028
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Lets get something straight: You are not some fedora-tipping Man of the House who comes home from the office expecting the rump roast to be on the table. Nor are you an aging frat boy who sits in front of the flat-screen with an Icehouse while wifey irons your Red Wings jersey. You are sensitive. You were raised by a working woman. You wipe down the counters after you make the kids lunches. No decent woman would cheat on a man like that, right?
Thats what Rob (not his real name) thought, anyway. The 41-year-old financial analyst had a house in the D.C. suburbs, two kids, and in his own words, a goody-two-shoes wife from a nice Catholic family.
Last fall, Robs wife began to seem depressed, like something was bothering her and she wouldnt tell me what it was, he says. In December, after stumbling across some e-mails, Rob found out exactly what was bothering his wife: She had reconnected with an old flame. Shed been reconnecting with him for five months.
Its far worse than you can possibly imagine, he says. Its like, What the ****? The person you thought you married isnt that person anymore.
The tired old paradigm of the buttoned-up father who comes home late with the secretarys Revlon on his collar has reached the end of its shelf life. Statistics vary, but it doesnt look good: According to a study published in the Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy in 2002, 55 percent of married women engage in extramarital sex at some time during their relationship (compared with 60 percent of men).
And heres a far scarier number: After interviewing more than a hundred adulterous wives for her 2001 book A Passion for More, Susan Shapiro Barash found that 90 percent of them didnt feel guilty about doing itthey felt entitled to do it.
Somehow, the 21st-century husbands noble attempt to be provider and nurturera Superdad duality his father probably never attemptedseems to have backfired. Rob is the perfect example. He grew up watching his dads philandering wreck his parents marriage and vowed not to make it a legacy, only to find himself a cuckold a generation later. And he didnt suffer alone. He had a nice support network on the website survivinginfidelity.com of guys who had gone through the same thing. Its so common, I wonder how many affairs go undiscovered, Rob says.
There are a lot of reasons why women cheat now, and the simplest is that they can, says Diane Shader Smith, the author of Undressing Infidelity: Why More Women Are Unfaithful. Nowadays women have jobs. And if theyre home, there are gardeners, there are pool men. They have opportunities and they feel empowered. They also feel sexual. And while your prowess with a Dyson is commendable, its hardly titillating.
Make no mistake: Women can be just as driven as men are in pursuit of a fling. One woman Smith met used cheating as a weight-loss incentive, telling herself that a certain guy would sleep with her if she dropped a particular number of pounds.
Once she succeeded, she was on to the next quarry. Another one waited for her husbands Ambien to kick in so she could go across town for the night and be back by the time he awoke.
Women have become, in many ways, as predatory as men, says Judith Brandt, the author of The 50-Mile Rule: Your Guide to Infidelity and Extramarital Etiquette. And the prey is abundant. We grew up with the bejesus scared out of us by Anjelica Huston in Crimes and Misdemeanors and Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. The libido-withering moral was clear: Its just not worth it, man.
But wheres the male equivalent? Your wifes potential playmate probably has no interest in annexing your emotional territory.
http://men.style.com/details/features/full?id=content_5748&pageNum=2
Thats what Rob (not his real name) thought, anyway. The 41-year-old financial analyst had a house in the D.C. suburbs, two kids, and in his own words, a goody-two-shoes wife from a nice Catholic family.
Last fall, Robs wife began to seem depressed, like something was bothering her and she wouldnt tell me what it was, he says. In December, after stumbling across some e-mails, Rob found out exactly what was bothering his wife: She had reconnected with an old flame. Shed been reconnecting with him for five months.
Its far worse than you can possibly imagine, he says. Its like, What the ****? The person you thought you married isnt that person anymore.
The tired old paradigm of the buttoned-up father who comes home late with the secretarys Revlon on his collar has reached the end of its shelf life. Statistics vary, but it doesnt look good: According to a study published in the Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy in 2002, 55 percent of married women engage in extramarital sex at some time during their relationship (compared with 60 percent of men).
And heres a far scarier number: After interviewing more than a hundred adulterous wives for her 2001 book A Passion for More, Susan Shapiro Barash found that 90 percent of them didnt feel guilty about doing itthey felt entitled to do it.
Somehow, the 21st-century husbands noble attempt to be provider and nurturera Superdad duality his father probably never attemptedseems to have backfired. Rob is the perfect example. He grew up watching his dads philandering wreck his parents marriage and vowed not to make it a legacy, only to find himself a cuckold a generation later. And he didnt suffer alone. He had a nice support network on the website survivinginfidelity.com of guys who had gone through the same thing. Its so common, I wonder how many affairs go undiscovered, Rob says.
There are a lot of reasons why women cheat now, and the simplest is that they can, says Diane Shader Smith, the author of Undressing Infidelity: Why More Women Are Unfaithful. Nowadays women have jobs. And if theyre home, there are gardeners, there are pool men. They have opportunities and they feel empowered. They also feel sexual. And while your prowess with a Dyson is commendable, its hardly titillating.
Make no mistake: Women can be just as driven as men are in pursuit of a fling. One woman Smith met used cheating as a weight-loss incentive, telling herself that a certain guy would sleep with her if she dropped a particular number of pounds.
Once she succeeded, she was on to the next quarry. Another one waited for her husbands Ambien to kick in so she could go across town for the night and be back by the time he awoke.
Women have become, in many ways, as predatory as men, says Judith Brandt, the author of The 50-Mile Rule: Your Guide to Infidelity and Extramarital Etiquette. And the prey is abundant. We grew up with the bejesus scared out of us by Anjelica Huston in Crimes and Misdemeanors and Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. The libido-withering moral was clear: Its just not worth it, man.
But wheres the male equivalent? Your wifes potential playmate probably has no interest in annexing your emotional territory.
http://men.style.com/details/features/full?id=content_5748&pageNum=2
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