Why Men Believe Women Cheat More

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We've created courses. We have live group meetings quite frequently. And after doing this for so long, you start to hear the same things over and over and over again. One thing I hear quite often from men is stories that they tell themselves. 3 of the most common stories that I hear men tell themselves are, number 1, women are secretly more sexual than men. They're just really good at hiding it. Number 2, women actually cheat more than men do. Again, they're just really good at hiding it. And thing number 3 that I hear is actually, believe it or not, most women in committed long-term relationships, marriage, most of them actually cheat. And let me just say this right outta the gate. I understand where this sentiment is coming from. I understand the emotion behind it. Been there and done that, as I often say. Because if you're a guy that's dealing with a woman who refuses to have any kind of physical intimacy with you, or if you're a guy who discovered unfortunately that your wife has stepped outside of the marriage, living in either of those really terrible worlds requires that you face some not so nice things. Things such as, my wife just really doesn't want me anymore. Or, you know what? I think I missed some really important bad red flag things throughout this relationship. Or, you know what, I think I chose the wrong woman like 10, 20, 30 years ago. And I deep down inside, I knew it, but I was just in denial. Or, you know what, I— when it comes to long-term relationships, I'm just really bad at it. I don't know what the heck I'm doing. I don't have the skills, the know-how, the tools in my toolbox to make this work. And I don't know if I ever have. All of these things aren't necessarily an intellectual problem, but really it boils down to an identity problem. And a lot of men are ill-equipped and actually not even encouraged to have the skills necessary to navigate those deep emotional identity crises. So what the brain does is it looks for some type of easy stabilizer, and anger stabilizes, certainty stabilizes, blame stabilizes you. If the story becomes, you know what, that's just the way women are, then that naturally kind of calms everything down, doesn't it? Suddenly you have a very easy, simple solution to everything. But, and I've been on the planet for over 50 years now, I can tell you that relief doesn't mean truth. Often they are complete polar opposites of each other. Examples of some of these stories that I hear from men. I'll hear from a guy that's been in a long-term dead bedroom relationship. He's tried the date nights, he's tried to emotionally connect to this woman, he's tried to go into counseling or whatever it may be. And he ends up telling the story to himself, which is, "You know what? I think she deep down has really high libido because, hey, I can see she's using her vibrator," or whatever it may be. "I think she is purposely holding back on that energy because she finds me disgusting, or she's directing that energy to somebody else. I just know it. The energy is in there." In fact, from what I'm reading, the guys will tell me women are more sexual than men. They're all just little secret horn dogs. They're all going out and getting some elsewhere. And the men will continue this line of thinking and say, and in fact, from everything I've read and from talking to all these guys online and everything, I've come to the conclusion, we've all come to the conclusion that these women actually cheat way more than men do. I've always thought it was the opposite, but holy shit. And then we'll have some very analytical, very engineer type of guys, and I'll go a little bit more into this later. And they will say, I've studied this. I've read every book on the subject. I've watched countless YouTube videos. I've listened to countless podcasts. And you know what? This, all this bad behavior that they're seeing from their wife, this is just how women are. They can't help it. All of these men, whatever the situation may be, they're not necessarily looking for truth. What they're looking is for some kind of stable ground to stand on. They're looking for certainty in a very uncertain and scary world. Now, to better understand my audience, there's another wrinkle in all of this that makes a lot of sense. A lot, and I mean a lot of you out there that are watching this, are what we call neurodivergent. You're ADHD, or maybe you're on the autism spectrum, obsessive-compulsive. A lot of you are engineers, analytical types. You're very system-oriented thinkers. This is by no means an insult because I, you know, relate to a lot of this. But this helps explain some of the analytical, over-hyper-analytical thinking that we see in a lot of these men. A lot of you men out there, you do not like gray area. You want rules, you want a framework, you want a step-by-step guide. This is why I sold so many copies of my book, "The Dead Bedroom Fix," because in that book I outline here are the things you are probably doing wrong and here are some steps that you can do to possibly improve the situation. And the very hyper-analytical guy loves that kind of stuff. He doesn't like all the fluff. He doesn't like a lot of, you know, verbose stuff that you see in a lot of women's self-help books, things that go on and on about feelings, you know, a lot of that gray murky stuff. They like hard and fast rules, concrete steps. But here's the thing, guys. Human relationships, especially romantic relationships, are anything but stringent. They are not structured. They are emotional. They are inconsistent. And they are full of implied rules that nobody really seems to spell out to you, do they? Everybody just thinks you already know this stuff. Duh! Who doesn't know this stuff? Well, a lot of us don't know this stuff. So when a relationship fails and you invariably come back to the conclusion of, "I really don't have a very clear picture of why this failed," that's not just very uncomfortable. To a lot of men, it's completely intolerable. They cannot live in that headspace at all. That uncertainty creates a great deal of anxiety. And black and white thinking calms all of that down. Women want more sex than men. Women cheat more than men. And in fact, most women cheat. It's clean. It's simple. No ambiguity. No more having to read between the lines. No more having to deal with all that yucky gray area stuff. And here's another layer to all of this. Guys that are hyper-analytical that look for those easy solutions are often guys that try to find some kind of hidden secret meaning below all of this. They believe that there is a hidden truth beneath all of this that very few other people out there understand. This isn't necessarily like a cartoon conspiracy theory type of thing. It's more like a once you see this, then everything clicks into place. There is research to show that the more uncertain and scary an environment tends to be, the more men tend to gravitate towards this conspiratorial type of thinking. And this isn't about being crazy or stupid or whatever. It's just that the hyperanalytical mind naturally looks for these kind of easy solutions. Again, they're looking for certainty. This hyperanalytical brain does not like unanswered questions. So when you got questions out there like, why did my wife lose desire? Why did she run off and cheat with some other guy? Why did our marriage counseling not work? Why did this relationship fall apart even though I tried every single thing that everyone told me I was supposed to do? To stand on a lot of those whys feels like a trap door that is ready to open at any moment. It's scary as hell. So again, the brain searches for some kind of certainty to hang onto so you don't fall through the trap door. So you know what? Let's dig into this a little further because I'm talking about all these supposed truths and certainties as if they are myths because they are. Let's look at some of the data. I'm a very data-driven kind of analytical guy. I'm with you guys on this. So with my wisdom of 50+ years of being on the planet and over a decade of working with men, I've realized that, you know what, we gotta set aside our feelings and we gotta look at the facts. How many of you out there have heard of this whole facts over feelings thing? Kind of ironic, isn't it? Let's start with the sexual desire thing. Do women in fact, on average, have more of a sexual desire than the average man does? The data, which is comprised of thousands of studies, over many years, over hundreds of thousands of human beings, have come to one conclusion. Oh, hell no. Men have more sexual thoughts, more sexual desire, and in fact masturbate more than women do. This doesn't mean that women don't enjoy sex. The average woman does in fact enjoy sex. It just means that there is no factual basis for women desire it more than men do. Every piece of data that we have seems to show the opposite. And guys, I'm sorry to say, and I say this as a very pro-male dude who has helped dudes, again, for over a decade, the science also seems to show us that men tend to cheat more than women. Every large, long-running study that we have done over decades of studying this sort of thing shows us that men tend to report infidelity more so than women. That does not mean that women never cheat. Oh no, dude, I've been cheated on. I can tell you for a fact. No, women do cheat, but not every woman and certainly not most women. And in fact, if it's a race, us men tend to win that race. Now, a lot of men hear me say this and think that I'm throwing men under the bus, that I'm saying all women are angels. Oh, hell no. Women tend to, when we look at the data, have their own special flavor of not so good stuff for sure. Men and women tend to express dysfunction differently. Men tend to commit most violent crime, murder, assaults, and so forth, because men, it seems, tend to externalize their stress. We tend to be in a lot of things we do more aggressive in that way. Women, on the other hand, tend to internalize their aggression, and they also tend to be aggressive within relationship dynamics. They also tend to be more likely to show what we call maladaptive caregiving tendencies. And we also see a higher diagnosis of personality disorders within women. So we see higher rates of things like Munchausen syndrome, which is basically people hurting themselves in order to get attention. That tends to be women more than men. Or something like Munchausen by proxy syndrome, which is hurting others in order to get attention on me. You will hear of mothers hurting their child, for example, poisoning their child, making the child sick in order to get attention on themselves as the caregiver. More often than not, that is the woman in that position, unfortunately. This is all just context. It's not necessarily a moral indictment on women versus men or men versus women. Again, we're just looking at the facts. And there's all kinds of reasons why women tend to do that more so than men. Women are more caregiving roles with children than men are. Maybe there's a biological component when it comes to hormones and brain chemistry and our anatomy that, you know, causes people to do certain things, causes women to do things more so than men and men to do things more so than women. The existence of ugly human behavior doesn't give you an excuse to flatly prescribe one type of bad behavior on one gender versus the other. We can't say, "You know what? Most women cheat. Most men are emotionally unavailable. All women manipulate, and men only want sex and no emotional connection." Those aren't insights into the human condition. Those are all just coping mechanisms. We are turning pain into certainty. We are turning grief into anger and rage. And we are turning confusion into something that you can hold onto. But all of these things stifle your development as a human being. They cause you to freeze in place. For example, if you're a guy who says, "I know that all women cheat," you know that betrayal is inevitable in a relationship, but you somehow find yourself in a relationship and what do you do? You become immediately suspicious of everything. You emotionally withdraw because you can't be vulnerable with a person that's gonna hurt you, right? You assume bad intent for every one of their little actions. None of that makes you a more attractive mate, and none of that makes your relationship safer, ironically. It's rigidity, and rigidity within a relationship will kill it faster than ignorance ever will. Personally, when I first went through all the stuff that I went through about 14 years ago now with an adulterous spouse and divorce and being a single father to 3 kids and all that stuff, yes guys, been there and done that. I was regurgitating a lot of these same stories myself because they felt protective. It felt like an armor. It felt smart, like I had, you know, secret knowledge that nobody else seemed to have. All that stuff did was keep me stuck longer than what I needed to be. What actually helped wasn't finding some comfortable slogan to apply to everything. What helped was actually learning discernment. This is not about defending women. It is not about blaming men. This is understanding how you and your brain function under stress, especially you neurodivergent analytical engineer types. The real work is not finding some solution to everything, something that explains away everything. The real work is learning how to tolerate some ambiguity, learning how to find a good partner. That's huge, guys. Learning how to walk away from a bad situation sooner instead of dragging it on for decades. Learning about what your identity is and developing your own sense of values and your own standards, and learning to resist turning your pain into a theory about half the human race just to make you feel better. Some women cheat, some men cheat, some people lose desire within a long-term relationship, and some of your relationships, a lot of your relationships, were broken from the very beginning. Your job is not to explain away an entire gender. Your job is to build a life where you don't need comforting stories in order to survive. Truth isn't always comforting. There's a lot of gray area in life. There's a lot of this can exist as well as this at the same time. And that's very disconcerting to you, I know, and it fills you with a lot of anxiety. But truth gives you leverage in life. And those coping stories, they may make you feel good, but they leave you very, very trapped in life. Guys, if you like what you have seen in this, check out help4men.com. And while you're at it, give me a like, give me a subscribe, give me a follow, however the hell it works wherever you're watching this. I would greatly appreciate it. And leave a, leave a comment down below. What do you think of all this? Thank you so much for watching, guys. I appreciate it. Catch you on the next one.