Ralph Brewer explains why some women cheat: often they're dealing with childhood trauma, insecure attachment, and poor coping mechanisms rather than marital unhappiness. He describes a pattern where anxious men pair with avoidant women seeking validation through affairs, and argues reconciliation is unlikely when the root cause is the woman's dysfunctional background.
Chapters
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. So I've talked quite a bit in my videos and articles over the years about the whole awful world of infidelity, more specifically the women in our lives cheating on us. And then the subsequent, you know, cascading series of awful events that tends to happen after that. As we know, we have data to show and polling of women that are engaged in extramarital affairs. The vast majority of those women say that they are really unhappy with their marriage, hence why they are engaging in affairs. So if you catch a woman cheating on you, it's not good for the marriage. It doesn't bode well for your future. If you're one of those guys that wants to work on it and see if you two can come back together, chances are not in your favor. But that doesn't answer the big question that many men who discover their spouse in an affair have. The big question is, why? Why did she do it? Is it as simple as she wasn't happy? People that are unhappy in marriages, believe it or not, typically do not cheat. And yes, that applies to women too. The vast majority of women do not cheat on their spouses. The vast majority of women unhappy in their relationships do not cheat on their spouses. But if you're watching this, that may not apply to you. You may have caught your spouse cheating. So, Ralph Brewer, you're saying, why did she cheat? Why is she one of the lucky few that did step outside of the relationship? Well, this is my channel, my content, my microphone, my camera, so I'm going to speak in platitudes here. I'm going to speak in generalities that will, of course, piss some people off. But newsflash, I can't cover every single iteration or permutation of an issue in one small video. So I'm going to speak in generalities here. From my experience, after doing this for years and years, after speaking to so many men and now more and more women, I can say with no intended malice or prejudice in any way, shape, or form, just from what I've seen, over and over again in these situations, we can very succinctly explain away why your spouse— and I'm saying your, who am I pointing to? I'm pointing to the guy watching this who is probably what we call an anxious dude. It's a term I use a lot, and it's not meant to be insulting. I consider myself to be one of those guys. Psychologists would say we tend to have higher levels of anxiety than average. We tend to anxiously attach to our partners, not want to let go. Et cetera, et cetera. I just call those guys anxious guys, right? Well, you anxious guys tend to pair up with a certain type of woman, unfortunately. And cheating is not common in that world, but it's not unheard of. And dare I say, probably more common than the average. So you're probably a little above average as far as, will my spouse cheat on me? So back to the question, why? Why did she do it? Drum roll. She's just a broken little girl. I am not making excuses. If I were making an excuse for her behavior, the follow-up to that would be, so give her a chance. So work through it. So go to therapy together. Be there when she has her third, fourth, and fifth affair. No, I'm telling you, she's a broken little girl. She doesn't have the tools in her mental toolbox to navigate typical things that life throws at her. In fact, she has one wrong coping tool in her toolbox in the form of get attention and validation from others to feel better about herself when things are going down. So instead of healthy coping mechanisms such as take care of yourself, go to therapy, work with friends, exercise, you know, reach out to your partner for help or whatever it may be, for a lot of those women, the mechanism that they have is reach out to other dude or gal outside of the relationship and form a secretive inappropriate relationship because it makes her feel really, really good. Now, when I say they're broken little girls, what the hell am I talking about? I'm telling you, 10 out of 10 times when I'm talking to a dude and he's Mr. Anxious and he's married to Miss Avoidant, as they say over the years, very little, you know, emotional and physical connection, especially after they got married, had kids, it just seems like everything just went down, right? When I ask about Miss Avoidance's childhood, I just have to sit back and strap in because it's usually a lot of not good stuff. It's not unheard of to hear about sexual abuse. It's not unheard of to hear about abandonment. Dad left, mom left. It's not unheard of for these women to become like a surrogate spouse to their father, or maybe even a weird way, like to their mother. Very unhealthy enmeshment with their parent. They take on a very responsible adult role at a very young age. And that is very debilitating to them and to their development later on in life, going through adolescence, young adulthood. So for a lot of you guys wondering, why did she do this? You're just seeing the end result of a cascading series of events over the years that have led to this. And in hindsight, if you look back after the fog of all this emotional bullshit clears and you look back clearly at this relationship, You probably saw this coming. You probably look back on her family and go, what a dysfunctional mess that was. Her mom was such a narcissistic asshole. Her dad was such a pushover who drank too much. And I'd never seen anybody hug or kiss in their family. I've never heard anyone say I love you. Brothers in prison, sisters on drugs, whatever it may be. And you sit back and go, well, no wonder she did this. People that come from that kind of chaotic background tend to— not always— tend to be chaotic themselves. Most people that come from that kind of background don't say, "Timeout, I'm not going to continue this. I need help to figure out how to circumnavigate this and, you know, not become one of them." Instead, they let life and everything else just, you know, wash over them, and then they just go with the flow, and voilà, they end up just like Mom. So let me know in the comments, Does that ring true for you in your situation with your spouse? For those of you guys who were cheated on, and after the fact, you've looked back on trying to figure out where this all went wrong. How many of you came to the same kind of conclusion? Oh, wow, this poor woman was just broken. This was gonna happen to me or whoever was in my place. It really doesn't have much to do with you, dude. Now, she could make the case, and she may have a very good point, that you were very disconnected. She had a lot of resentments, maybe for that one thing you said or did years ago, or the many small things you've done over the years. Maybe you've actually kind of a shitty husband. But none of that is an excuse for, or fully explains why, they do something as drastic as reach out, form an emotional and sexual relationship with somebody outside of the— outside of your marriage. That's a really huge, huge step, and that points to some not-so-good stuff going on up here.
