House of Eratosthenes

I think a woman’s first instinct when seeing the cover of your book is, ” Why do I have to prevent this? Why doesn’t he just not cheat?”
Gary Neuman: There is clearly no blame on the woman if he’s cheated. She’s not responsible for stopping him. However, the fact that you’re not responsible does not mean that you don’t want to take an active role in your relationship to bring out the best in your husband, as he should for you…a lot of men are essentially good people. They make mistakes, but that’s not who they are. So a lot of women are married to men who are good but that does not mean they are not susceptible to ultimately cheating.

What did you find was the No. 1 reason men cheat?
…when the results came in [from my study] only 8 percent of cheaters said that sexual dissatisfaction was a primary contributor [in cheating] and only 12 percent said the mistress was better looking or in better shape than their wives. It really started to show a completely different pattern than what most expect. In fact, the majority—48 percent—said that the cheating was about an emotional disconnection.

What was causing this emotional disconnection?
The No. 1 reason was feeling underappreciated. It was a lack of thoughtful and kind gestures. What I found is that men are far more insecure than they let on, and they do want to please their wives and feel valued. They like to win and as long as they are winning with their wife then they stay in the game. It is feeling underappreciated and like they can’t win—and maybe they do things that make it hard for her to appreciate him—that usually leads them into dangerous waters. Appreciation is what they first and foremost get from the mistress. [emphasis (bold within Mr. Neuman’s comments) mine]

I have been accused of taking a black and white view on this, and I’m probably guilty, willfully so. To me, “good people” just don’t cheat, period. I think people do before they are, so in my world when Mr. Neuman says “they make mistakes, but that’s not who they are” he’s just babbling so much nonsense. People are what they do.

Also, if the woman is not to blame, there’s nothing she can do to stop it. Neuman got it right the first time, missed it on the second. You want to change something that’s wrong, the first thing you do is find a way to make it your fault. Now, why a woman would want to go through this, with regard to a man who doesn’t have the strength of character to stay faithful to her — I dunno. But it speaks volumes, to me, that nearly half the men ‘fessed up that their cheating was because of an emotional disconnection, a lack of appreciation. I wonder how many better men are bearing such a burden in silence, without engaging in this kind of betrayal.

It’s peculiar what kind of tortured logic we’ll pursue, and to what kind of lengths we will go, to avoid telling females they’re doing something wrong. I mean that, without regard to whether they’re decent wives or not, or whether they have decent husbands or not. Even if both husband and wife are faithful people with strong characters and aren’t going to engage in any of these shenanigans…if she’s starting to treat him a little bit like an accessory, or like a beast of burden, to the point where he’s occasionally unhappy with it, she could be doing things better. What’s wrong with simply saying this? You can point this out without rationalizing the behavior of cheating men, or lending support to what they’ve done. It’s not that fine of a hair to slice.

I’ve been treated like a beast-o-burden by some women. I’ve been around other women who were ready and willing to do anything for me — women who were genuinely stuck in this stuff we call “love.” And I’ve been around some other women, if you can believe this, who did both (it’s quite possible…and those are the saddest stories I’d have to tell, were I inclined to go into details).

There’s just no two ways about it: If a man treats his woman with kindness and respect, he deserves the kind of relationship he’ll want to have front-and-center in his life all the time. Nowadays, that’s a rarity. And some of our weaker and less worthy men, have the indecency to occasionally lower their conduct to adapt to this, in ways that do not speak highly for their character. It doesn’t change the fact that for every man who’s motivated this way and acts it out, there are probably two or three more who are similarly motivated, and do not similarly act. And that’s a great, great pity. It is the plague upon the romantic terrain of our modern times.

Make it a genuine disgrace for a man to cheat on a woman, or for a woman to make the man want to…and you’ll solve probably nine out of every ten social issues we have, overnight. Things you probably never suspected were connected with this. Because our cultural protocols have always followed the females. When women are emotionally distant and unavailable, we all are. And then there’s nothing truly “wrong” with what anybody does. We’ll descend to any depth that happens to be convenient under the immediate circumstances, because there’s no reason not to.

In this day and system, good men don’t cheat, or date or get married for that matter……….
- Robert Mitchell Jr. | 09/27/2008 @ 15:52
Call me “progressive”-
What, exactly is cheating?
When the wife is spending the college fund money on no-tell motels for some afternoon delight with the pool boy?
When daddy’s new little tax deduction looks like the milk man?
When the new intern serves up a blowjob just for the thrill of something “dangerous”?

When I was slutting around with various friends with privileges, was THAT “cheating” on any of them that retroactively implied an oral “contract”?

And who, exactly, are married men “cheating” with, other married women simply seeking variety?
Other women simply keeping score for notches in other womens “previous domain”?

The point isn’t lost. But where’s the beef?
- CaptDMO | 09/28/2008 @ 11:10
I don’t believe there’s any meaningful ambiguity here. What ambiguity there is, was injected into the question purely as a matter of convenience to aid and assist cheaters like Bill Clinton. Sex is pretty easy to define. Susan Webber Wright did a more than adequate job. You’re away on a trip, your wife has licentious thoughts about your best friend, there’s no cheating. She starts talking with him and confiding with him about hopes, desires, fears, etc., there’s no cheating. She smokes and drinks with him, no cheating. She touches his dick — cheating.

The relationship being betrayed, likewise, is subject only to apocryphal uncertainty or ambiguity…apocryphal at the very best. If you’re married, obviously, you have exclusive “rights.” If you’re not married but there’s a mutual understanding that you’re monogamous, then a betrayal of that would be cheating. There’s very little gray here. People who live in open relationships make it very plainly understood that that’s what it is. They even brag about it. It tends to be a little difficult to get ’em to talk about anything else.

So the sex part has only mythical ambiguity. The with-someone-else part, obviously, has no ambiguity at all. The committed-relationship part, like the sex part, has only mythical ambiguity. There never was any foundation for raising any question about any of this. We only pretended that because it was in the interest of certain people for us to so pretend.

The beef is, simply, that it’s a waste of the other person’s life. Here’s a woman thinking she’s spending years and years coping with the various adventures of life as an equal with someone else, as a peer, with his commitment and support. And the whole time, she’s really nothing more than a plaything. A “yesterday’s” plaything…a dreary thing, just an embodiment of responsibilities the cheater would probably just as soon have retired. Who wants to have their entire existence defined around that?

I see cheaters as lower than low. It’s almost on par with raising a fist against a woman…almost. It’s in the same direction as murder, in my eyes…same bearing, less vector. A murderer takes a life, a cheater takes a part of a life. But the nature of the crime is the same. If I ever do become Dictator Of The Entire World, it’d be a fantastic idea for anybody engaged in cheating, to just knock it off for their own good that very day. Those tribunals would definitely NOT be fun.
- mkfreeberg | 09/28/2008 @ 11:55
There’s plenty of ambiguity here. Once you start playing silly ass games with the rules, it’s hard to stop. The baseline was “You are committed to the first, only person you had sex with”. That’s real clear, with no ambiguity. Now we don’t allow people to get married, but we pretend the word still has meaning. So now we have sex when “I don’t love him anymore, and we’re going to get a divorce”. Sex when “we’re separated, and getting a divorce”. Sex when ” I was married, but she divorced me”.

Then there’s the other side of the equation. What is to be done about women who don’t have sex with their partners? It used to be called alienation of affection, if I have the right term. I would think that would be worse then cheating, but there’s no penalty for it, and a jail term if you force the issue.

Partnerships must benefit both sides, or they will fail. Now, men must provide for women, and women have to what? Cleaning?, no, that shared. Sex, no, not a commitment, only if she’s in the mood. Children? No, they go with her if the “marriage” ends, if she let them live. I am not seeing anything modern American women do to show they are commited to “her man”. How can you cheat if there is no partnership to cheat on? I’m sure I come off as harsh in this post. I am working off the “You are committed to the first, only person you had sex with” baseline. I am definitely odd man out on this issue.
- Robert Mitchell Jr. | 09/28/2008 @ 12:59

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Men Cheating Because They’re Unappreciated?Saturday, September 27th, 2008

Men Cheating Because They’re Unappreciated?
Saturday, September 27th, 2008