The Two Type of Cheating Men

Okay, if you're a frequent listener of the Dad Starting Over podcast and you find yourself saying, "Yeah, that sounds like me," well, you don't need another podcast episode. What you need is support. The Help for Men Brotherhood is where men go when they're done pretending that they got it all handled. You know, your dead bedrooms, your divorce, your loneliness, your rebuilding life. We have private forums, frequent live Zoom meetings, one-on-one coaching, courses, all my books at no additional charge. And yes, we get together in person. Real men and real conversations. So stop doing this alone and join the Help for Men Brotherhood today at help4men.com/join. I look forward to seeing you in the next member meeting. Do men cheat? Well, yeah. The majority do not, But it's not unheard of. And believe it or not, the stats seem to show us that men do it more often than women. That is, if you believe anonymous survey data, which is basically the best we have to go on. Now, in my years of doing this, the Dad Starting Over and now Help for Men thing, and I've been talking to men one-on-one and in, in our group and so forth for over a decade now. As I often say, to oversimplify it, I can categorize these men in one of two ways. One is the former player, which I've done videos about before. He had in his past, uh, easy access to a lot of different women. So as far as his need as a male for sexual variety, which is, as we know when we study humans, is an important thing for the human male, um, he was able to meet that need and then some. And then he commits himself to one woman and then for a variety of very valid reasons, the intimacy between the two of them, you know, comes to a halt or somewhat slows down thanks to kids and stress and disease and whatever it may be. And he doesn't take it too well because he has the skills necessary to get his needs met from a lot of different women, and he's not getting that need met through one. So he goes and has a girlfriend on the side. Not unheard of. Those men seem to be able to compartmentalize their extramarital affair from their marriage. The two worlds do not meet emotionally. They are able to separate the two. This is girlfriend and this is wife. And we know from survey data, if you ask men overall who cheat, are you happy in your marriage? The majority say yes, which is very surprising to a lot of ladies. I would say those men who fall under the category of the former player type, In my mind, those are the ones who are more apt to say, "Yes, I'm happy with my marriage." In other words, he likes his wife for her domestic abilities. I'll often hear these men, I'll often hear these men say, "My wife is a fantastic mother. She's my best friend in the world. But as far as the romantic sexual side of things, she does not scratch that itch." And oftentimes these men will recognize it's not necessarily her fault, but I have these needs. I can easily get it met with this chick at work, and away they go. So that's category number 1. Category number 2 that I've seen is your really needy, anxious dude who doesn't have a lot of relationship experience at all. His wife is probably the first woman that he has slept with, and more often than not, these anxious men are married to very, what we call, avoidant women. These women tend to abhor any kind of real vulnerability or intimacy with the other person. When they are past the honeymoon stage of the relationship, they tend to kind of shut everything down. And these men are left with basically this cold roommate of a woman. And he really needs more than that. And he takes courses and he reads books and he listens to podcasts. He really is very much, as the psych people like to say, preoccupied with the health of the relationship. And he wants nothing more than to fix it. That guy, by virtue of his self-improvement, his increase in confidence, his better physical looks, all that good stuff, now has, for the first time in his life, multiple mate choices. He goes to the gym and he's flirting with some gal at the gym. He goes out on some work trip and now he's flirting with some gal at a bar. And since he's not getting his needs met emotionally or physically at home, This breaks down his boundaries and he allows other people in, other women in, and it doesn't bode well for the marriage. Now, these men tend to have a very difficult time compartmentalizing. They don't have, hey, this is my girlfriend on the side and this is my wife. This, to these men, is a very existential crisis. And yes, if you're making the connection, these men tend to be more, for lack of a better term, kind of feminine in nature. No, I'm not saying that as an insult or they're less of a man than the other guys. It's just they tend to have more in common when it comes to the intimacy department with women than it does with the average dude. As I've shown in the past when I've done surveys of my followers, when I asked men, why is it that you cheated? A big portion of the men say, wasn't getting it at home, so that left me open to temptation outside of the relationship. While other men, a big chunk of the men say, I don't know, I was just stupid. Well, when I asked the women, the women just gave paragraphs and paragraphs of reasons. It was like reading a novel from some of these women when they described why it is that they cheated in the relationship. The anxious men are more like the latter. They're more like the women in that regard. What's interesting, what is common for a lot of those anxious men who engage in affairs, is that they will go like right away to the wife and admit what they did. If that surprises a lot of you to hear that, I was kind of surprised too to hear, but I hear again and again and again. And the men will go on and on about the guilt that they feel and so forth. But with some digging, basically what you can see is what they're trying to do is kind of guilt trip their wife. Look what you made me do. In an underhanded way, he is hoping that she will say, the wife, oh, I didn't realize how bad we were. I didn't realize what I drove you to do. Uh, let's fix this relationship. I love you. But what these men learn is that these very avoidant wives of theirs either say, eh, oh well, and look the other way, which is very surprising, or, um, cool, I'm gonna divorce you and take you for everything that you're worth. So it's interesting seeing the split here. One is probably what we would think of as the more stereotypical male, or alpha male, you know, lack of a better term, their approach to it, which is This is girlfriend, this is wife. Yeah, we see this kind of this arrangement play out in Hollywood with like mafia movies. The mafia guy has the gumada and then he has the wife and the two worlds don't mix until the wife finds out about the girlfriend and then all hell breaks loose, but she sticks with her man. But what we see on the other side is the more anxious take on it. I want the more softer, connection. I want that emotional intimacy, that closeness. And what I get over here really rocks my world and makes me question everything over here. But I want to save my family and everything else. I want to stay with my very avoidant wife. A lot of these men are very codependent and attached to people that don't like him. And, uh, uh, so I'm going to dump in her lap, you know, look what I did, in the hopes that it will reignite some kind of love and guilt in her. And but both really, when we look at it, are born out of need. Neediness, if you will. And both are basically bringing with them their baggage to the monogamous relationship, their marriage. And we're seeing how it can slowly erode and destroy the marriage. Now, some are going to say I'm placing blame on the man for doing what he did, when, for example, with the anxious guy, his wife's very avoidant and get the hell away from me. So what do we expect from this guy? Of course he's going to go try and get it elsewhere, duh. I can totally see the point and I can empathize with those men, but there's a good way of going about getting that need met within the relationship, or plan B, leave said relationship. But I also understand that's not so simple for a lot of guys. There's a lot of financial reasons, logistical reasons, kids, family. Often I will hear from the anxious guys, I can't leave my children with this woman here, this wife of mine, because she's very emotionally unbalanced. She's so cold. She's not a loving person. The kids come to me for that. And if I leave them, probably at least half the time I won't see them. So at least half the time they're gonna be with this very cold, indifferent person. I can't do that to them. So I'm not gonna throw stones and say that these guys are horrible for what they're doing. Everybody has their own little story. Everybody has their own little reason for doing what they're doing. But overall, I think we can all agree it's not healthy. And if you guys can relate to either situation, Again, I'm oversimplifying. I'm sure there's a lot of different iterations and permutations of this, uh, cheating man scenario that I'm not explaining here. But wherever you fall on that spectrum, you need— if you're a man doing this, you really need to stop and question what exactly is it that you're doing. Is it in fact an illustration of some deeply embedded negative baggage in your psyche? Is this just an artifact or result of just a poor marriage, a poor union between two people that should have never gotten together? In very blunt terms, does this show that, dude, you're just not wired for this marriage thing? You know what, as far as I'm concerned, that's okay. That's, from what I can tell, probably the majority of you. A lot of conservative types don't like to hear that, but there's a lot of people in long-term monogamous marriages that really shouldn't be. And going out and screwing other people is a pretty big indication of that.