common-excuses-cheating

In a previous post I examined some common excuses for cheating that men tend to use when defending their actions to the woman in their life.  I promised to do some digging into why women cheat after many readers pointed out that women cheat too.  Although I truly was aware that women also cheat, I have to admit that when you say adultery I generally think of men.

I received a comment from physician and dating blogger, Bina Patel, who explained that in her practice it seemed that women cheated at least as much as men.  This was a surprise to me, so I set out to find some answers about women and cheating.  I found many statistics that showed rates of cheating among married women and men each coming within a few points of the 50% mark, but these were not scientific studies, so I decided to focus on finding women who were willing to tell me why they cheated.  It has been a long process, but I finally received enough replies to spot some patterns in their replies and share the following results:

Not Satisfied With Marriage was top excuse-

Recently, our video blogging team tackled the topic "Why Do People Have Affairs?"  Two of our vloggers were brave enough to interview people on the streets of New York City, and they even got a few people who had cheated to admit their reasons for cheating.  For my part, I went through the postings on LuvemOrLeavem and compiled a list of the 3 most common excuses that men had given their women for why they cheated.

Excuses Men Gave Women to Explain Cheating:

1. Newness/ Excitement- One very common excuse was that over time the relationship had gotten stale and the newness and excitement that an affair promised was too great to resist.  It's true that at a certain point a relationship is no longer "new," and every relationship will reach a point where the novelty wears off.  For many people the lack of novelty is no big loss compared to the greater intimacy that occurs as a relationship progresses, and if you find that this isn't the case then the best solution is to just end the relationship.

As far as excitement, you need to work to keep excitement in a relationship.  I know that doesn't sound very romantic, but romance doesn't always "just happen," sometimes we need to create it.  Some of these men went to elaborate lengths to carry on these affairs, and I can't help but feel that if they had put that same amount of energy into making their existing relationship exciting that they would have succeeded.

A few years ago I was surprised to learn that a friend of mine, I'll call her Jenna, was getting a divorce.  Her husband asked for the divorce after she admitted to having an affair with her personal trainer.  I remember being surprised, because Jenna didn't strike me as the type of woman who would cheat on her husband.  As surprised as most of us were to find out about this affair, we had one friend who seemed to have known that it was just a matter of time before this friendship between Jenna and her personal trainer turned into something more.

When we asked our friend about how she knew that Jenna was heading down the road to adultery she simply replied "they've been dating for months."  Of course we fiercely defended Jenna's lunches with her trainer as friendly lunches after her training sessions, but our friend then asked us "what's the difference between that and a date?"  With that question, she had us stumped.  The only differences that we could come up with were  1) Jenna was married and  2) until the affair, there was  nothing physical going on between them during or after these lunches.