Women that are married cheat because they love their husbands and want to save their marriages, according to a new book.
Author Alicia Walker spent a year interviewing cheating wives and her findings will stun you. Of over 50 cheaters the Missouri State University professor spoke to, only three wanted out of their marriages – while most women thought the affairs made them BETTER wives. Only 5 per cent of female cheaters get caught (compared with 17 per cent of men), she discovered, so the risks were low but the rewards high.
Determined to figure out why women cheat if they don’t intend to split from their husbands, the mum-of-three put a request for case studies on married dating site Ashley Madison. Alicia, 47, revealed: “More than half of the women I talked to (26 to be precise) said, ‘I’m in a sexless marriage or I’m not having orgasms, and that’s why I’m cheating’. They made no bones about it. It wasn’t ‘I had an affair and I fell in love’. It was very much this calculated, deliberate decision to get what they were missing from their marriages, which for them was orgasms, and they were really cheating to stay married which was quite surprising. They all said ‘I’ve been in this marriage, it’s been like this for years, so either I cheat and I get someone to get me the orgasms I need, or I’m going to leave my husband’.”
Alicia has shared the revelations in a book called The Secret Lives Of Cheating Wives. Married Tiffany, 47, told her: “There was only so much of ‘taking care of yourself’ before the lack of sex drove me crazy.” While Gabrielle, 45, said: “I was on my knees sobbing and the decision came: I have to cheat or I will leave him. Done.” And Joy, 34, simply explained: “I was horny. I snapped.” Alicia added: “A lot of these women had not had sex with their husbands in years, some of them decades, so a sex desert if you will. Some of the stories were kind of heartbreaking. One of the women said her husband had some kind of health issue. She talked a lot about how painful it was, because she was so in love with him, and he was really the sexual partner she wanted. But eventually she grew very resentful, even though she’d tell herself that’s totally illogical. He’s not choosing this, this is his health. But in between living with this deprivation, the constant longing, the resentment, she said ‘I didn’t like who I was in my marriage, because I was taking it out on my husband’.
“Then there were the women who had sexless marriages and they didn’t know why they were sexless, and that was also heartbreaking. The husband wouldn’t have sex with them, and they didn’t know what the reason was. The years of rejection was painful.” She said: “Most of the women said ‘I love my husband’. They talked about what great fathers they were, and what great people they were, and how great of a friend. So for them it was ‘either I leave my marriage, I take my kids from my husband, I break my husband’s heart and maybe my own and be single’, or I do this and keep my family together. The bulk of the women said the orgasms come first, but they also talked about how it really enabled them to be better wives and better mothers, because the strain of going without their sexual needs being met had been lifted.”
She added: “These women were actually vetting partners to avoid emotional attachment to the cheater. They specifically sought out men that weren’t going to be a threat to their marriages and their families without getting too emotionally attached. So they were really looking for sex without emotion, which is not how we tend to think of how women do things. Eight of the women said they were cheating to fulfil some kind of emotional need, but they were definitely in the minority.”
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