Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man

8
W h y M e n C h e a t
F
rom the male perspective, the answers to the question 
“Why do men cheat?” are crystal clear. Not so much for 
women. No matter how good or sensible the reasons are, 
men know that women will never hear one and say, “Oh! Now 
I get it!” There are neither words big enough nor experts with 
enough credentials and letters behind their name to slice it and 
dice it up in a way that’s palatable for most women; inevitably, 
responses to this million-dollar question are always going to 
sound like ten-dollar answers.
And who could argue with that? For (most) women, after all, 
cheating is unthinkable and (at first blush) unforgivable—you 
don’t and can’t comprehend why a man would be unfaithful, and 
you won’t ever pretend to. You figure that if you’ve told him you 
love him; given him your mind, your body, and your time; 

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moved in with him; shared the bills with him; done his laundry; 
cooked his food; borne his children; and said an enthusiastic, “I 
do,” in front of the Lord, the pastor, your mother, and all her best 
friends and yours, too, the least your man can do is honor what is 
most sacred to you: the promise of fidelity. He can lie (every once 
in a while), fall down on the housework and the child rearing, 
get a little lax in the income department, pay more attention to 
his boys and his mother than he does to you, and slip into the 
mediocre category when it comes to the boudoir—even say the 
Lord’s name in vain while you’re walking out the door to go to 
yet another church ser vice alone.
But let a man step out on his woman, and watch the earth 
move.
That’s my way of saying that women will put up with a lot 
of things.
Cheating is not one of them.
Now, we men? We understand this. We know what it takes 
to tip, we’re capable of calculating the collateral damage that 
comes with getting caught, and we know that getting back into 
the graces of the woman we cheated on—and her mother, and 
her friends, and anyone else who’s sympathized with her having 
to resurrect herself from such a devastating life event—will re-
quire a Herculean effort.
Still, we do it.
Why?
I am not here to justify a cheating man’s actions. Rather, this 

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is my humble attempt to explain to you why a man might go on 
ahead and get a little something on the side, and what you can do 
to cut down the chances that your man will do this to you. So 
let’s just go on ahead and get right to it. Men cheat because. . .
Dress it up any way you want to, but men don’t view sex the 
way you women do, plain and simple. For a lot of you, the act of 
intercourse is emotional—an act of love. That’s understandable, 
considering the sheer physics of the act; you have to lie back and 
allow a foreign object to enter your body. You’ve been taught all 
your life that you only let that kind of deeply intimate moment 
happen with someone who really means something to you.
By contrast, when it comes to men and sex, neither emotions 
nor meaning necessarily enter the equation. It’s easy—very 
easy—for a man to have sex, go home, wash it off with soap and 
water, and act like what he just did never happened. Sex can be 
a purely physical act for us—love has absolutely nothing to do 
with it. Consider this “Strawberry Letter” from a woman who 
called herself “Concerned”:
During a conversation with my husband of 20 years, I asked 
him if he would honestly always be satisfied with having 
sex with me only. He hesitated for so long before answering 

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that I just knew he was going to say “no.” He then went on 
to explain that he loved me and would never do anything 
to hurt me, but if I gave him permission to have sex with 
other women and not form relationships with them, he 
would. He said that as he’s gotten older, he’s been wonder-
ing if he is still attractive and sexually appealing, and that 
attention from another younger woman would boost his 
ego. Then he asked me if I would be willing to give him 
permission to have sex with other women if he promised to 
let them know up front that it’s only sex he’s interested in 
and he’s not interested in a relationship. He even offered to 
answer any questions I’d have with his encounters, or, if I 
didn’t want to know about it, to just do it and not tell me 
what and when it happened. Obviously, he’s got a problem 
with monogamy. Should I consent so that a potential for 
sneaking around can be eliminated? What can I do to get 
him to change his thinking—if anything?
The answer to that last question in the “Strawberry Letter” is, 
not much. A man can love his wife, his children, his home, and 
the life that they’ve all built together, and have an incredible 
physical connection to her, and 
still
get some from another 
woman without a second thought about it, because the actual act 
with the other woman meant nothing to him. It was something 
that may have made him feel good physically, but emotionally, 
his heart—the professing, providing, and protecting he saves for 
the woman he loves—may be at home with his woman.

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Now filter that bit of information through the lens of, say, a 
high-powered man who has a wife whose job is equally presti-
gious and demanding. I don’t profess to know what goes on 
behind closed doors in that kind of household, but by all public 
accounts, that couple could be perfectly happy, in love, support-
ive—down for each other. Still, her job could take her overseas, 
leaving her man at home to run the household, take care of the 
kids, and keep up his demanding work schedule for weeks on 
end, without so much as a hot-and-heavy phone conversation to 
help him make it through the enormous time period he’d have 
to go without having sex. Trust me when I say this: under this 
situation, plenty of men would easily justify their getting some 
from somewhere else. Neither he, nor any other man, for that 
matter, is going to go without sex too long. It’s not that he doesn’t 
love his wife. But he’s there, coming home exhausted from a hard 
day’s work, cooking dinner, shuttling the kids around to all their 
after-school functions, and checking homework. He’s stressed 
out, and plenty of us men can hear what he may have worked out 
in his mind: I’m going to go over here and let this other woman 
tighten me up, and then I’ll come back and cook, shuttle, and 
work until the woman I love comes back to me.
This may seem like a cold piece of work to you, but to a 
man, it’s reasonable. He’s got to try to feel better some kind of 
way, and so he’s going to get sex from someone if he can’t get it 
from you. You see it as betrayal. Men see it as just a way to get 
tightened up, especially if. . .

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Of course, men will consider the risks of getting caught 
cheating on his lady. But mostly, men initiate affairs pretty con-
fident that they’re going to get away with it, and most certainly 
with all kinds of confidence that if they get caught, their denials 
will see them through. I used to do a joke where I would en-
courage men to ride their lie all the way out. I told them, “I 
don’t care if somebody got a picture of my butt up in the air in 
the pump position with my social security number stamped on 
the left-hand side of my cheek, I’m going to tell my wife, ‘It 
ain’t me—I don’t know who that is with my social security 
number all over his butt, with the same shoes as me, but that’s 
not me!’ ”
Now, that’s my joke, but most men don’t consider getting 
caught a laughing matter. A man who cheats has most certainly 
calculated the collateral damage that would come from getting 
busted—potential loss of the woman he loves, his children, his 
home, and his peace of mind—and he recognizes that this would 
be a devastating blow to all the things that matter in his life. We 
all are quite familiar with the saying “Hell hath no fury like a 
woman scorned,” and men understand its meaning much better 
than you do; we know the hell is coming and there will be 
plenty of scorn if we get busted.
Still, men don’t really ever think they’re going to get caught. 
Basically, we think we’re slick and we go to great lengths to 

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hide our infidelity from you, always with this in mind: if you 
don’t know about it, it can’t hurt you. We’re pretty confident 
that your willingness to be in a relationship with us supersedes 
all the things we do that look suspicious, because we know 
you’ll work through the suspicion—that it’s more important to 
you to be with us in our imperfection than to leave us and be 
alone. At least that’s what we’re hoping. And in the beginning, 
mostly, you will. But the moment your suspicions turn into a