Act like a lady, think like a man (9 page)

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 require a Herculean effort.

Still, we do it.

Why?

I am not here to justify a cheating man’s actions. Rather, this 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 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 wondering 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.

Now filter that bit of information through the lens of, say, a high-powered man who has a wife whose job is equally prestigious 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, supportive—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. . .

Of course, men will consider the risks of getting caught cheating on his lady. But mostly, men initiate affairs pretty confident 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 encourage 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 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
Law & Order
–type investigation, we’re going to lie and deny.

That’s if we care about you.

But if not—if a man doesn’t see you fitting into his life plan—he won’t even bother with all of the covering up and the chitchat after he gets found out. He’ll simply tell you that he was sleeping with someone else because. . .

You may think this is a cop-out, but it is the reality. It goes back to the way men judge themselves against each other: I told you in the introduction and have reiterated elsewhere in the book that we are defined by who we are, what we do, and how much we make. And if we haven’t gotten to where we want and need to be, then we’re not going to be ready to figure out how settling down with one woman fits into our plans for be-

coming a truly independent, mature, well-off man. I mean, how many times have you seen or been in a relationship where the man says over and over again, “When I get my money right, I’ll think about commitment,” or, “I just need to get that promotion first, then I’ll settle down.” That guy is still trying to complete himself, and while he’s working toward that, he’s not organizing his life to include a committed relationship. He tells himself he simply doesn’t have time for it—it’s simply not a priority for him. And so creep he will.

The same can be true, even, of a man who is married with children. The man who is mature and has figured out who he is and is happy with what he does and how much he makes probably has his life ordered up correctly; he’s become the man he envisioned himself being and has put his priorities in this order: God, family, education, business, and then everything else. But if family isn’t second, it’s about to be a problem; he’s going to dedicate himself to whatever his priorities are, in the order in which he’s put them. Even if he’s already said, “I do,”

and held his babies in his arms and done everything a man’s supposed to do to protect and provide for them, if he’s decided that it’s more important to him to fulfill that hunting jones, then that’s going to be the priority for him—he’s not going to sync up with your demand that he be faithful. He’s not going to rub it in your face, and he’s going to do everything he can to preserve what he has with you, but he’s still going to have a little something on the side. Really, it’s got nothing to do with you.

I have a friend who’s successful, has plenty of money, a beautiful family—the ideal life. And one evening while we were sitting around with a few of our friends shooting the breeze about how satisfied we are with our stations in life, my boy announced with a slick grin, “I love my wife, man, but I got this cold one on the side.” We were surprised—don’t get me wrong.

But we accepted that from him because we all know that this man hasn’t got his priorities right yet, and there’s nothing we can do or say to make him do it. He knows that once he’s stepped out on his wife, he’s putting something else before God and family. But only he can put his house in order. Now, if he’s young, that might come with mental maturity; the old-timers say all the time that experience is priceless—too bad you have to pay for it with your youth. Of course, maturity and age go hand in hand, but circumstances bring it about, too: if a man is a spiritual person and he’s got a relationship with God, he’ll mature much more quickly, just because his beliefs will hold him to a much more stringent moral code. And that moral code will automatically make him put family second, because this is what a relationship with God demands. Now, he’ll make it a priority to find a woman who completes his life, someone who can be the mother of his children—who can make his unit complete.

Sometimes men wise up without God in their lives. I have a buddy who had all kinds of women doing all kinds of things to him and for him, and he finally got into a position where he said, “Man, I got all these women and I can get them to do all these things and give me all these things, but I’m not happy. I don’t have any peace and I just don’t feel like I have my life together.” And right then and there, he made the decision to stop treating women the way he’d been treating them and get what he was finally yearning for: a family. His philandering stopped cold. He’s not saved. He didn’t have some big revelation with God, he didn’t get called to the ministry. He just decided he needed to do something different to find the joy in his life, and the only way he could find that was with someone, and only one someone, special.

When a man finds that joy—the chances of his cheating get really slim. Unless. . .

That’s right, I said it: it could have something to do with you. Your man may be walking around telling himself that your relationship just doesn’t have that spark anymore, that you don’t turn him on like you used to—that you don’t come on to him like you did when the two of you first fell in love. You know how it goes: the two of you get comfortable with each other, settle in, have some babies, buy a house, and then get bogged down in the bills and raising the kids and going to work and keeping up with the rat race that comes when you’re a family trying to make it. The next thing he knows, the woman who used to wear and do little things to keep it hot and spicy isn’t interested in doing that little thing she did when the two of them first got together. In fact, the sex has become uninspired; she’s coming in from work, where she was dressed up in her nice skirt and heels and makeup and such, and she’s breaking down before she can get to the door good. And now, after a long day at work, and even more work when she gets home, she’s coming to bed in a head scarf and a T-shirt and is this close to hiring a firing squad to take you out for even looking at her with those bedroom eyes.

In other words, what’s back at the house has become ho-hum—routine. And this man is missing the spark that used to be there. You’ve changed. (He knows he’s changed, too, but we’re not talking about him, we’re talking about you.) Perhaps that comes, too, with a feeling that you don’t appreciate him like you used to. The thank-yous come less frequently, there’s a lot of arguing going on—turmoil seems to get up with you in the morning and cuddle up with the two of you at night. And your home just isn’t feeling like what he signed up for. And if he can’t get what he signed up for back at the house, he’s more likely to go out and find it somewhere else, because guess what?

He knows he can always go find it somewhere else, particularly since. . .

That’s the truth that no woman wants to face. Imagine if every woman said, “You’re married—I can’t do that with you.”

Man, do you know how many marriages and relationships would still exist today? Men
can
cheat because there are so many women willing to give themselves to a man who doesn’t belong to them. Sure, every now and again there are women who get fooled and don’t know that a man is already spoken for. A majority of the time, however, these women know they’re sleeping with a married man. Yes, these are the women who have no standards and requirements and who suffer from serious self-esteem issues, making themselves willing to cheat and available to be cheated on. If those women took themselves out of the cheater’s circle, the incidence of cheating would be cut seriously down. And the way to get out of that cheater’s circle is to do exactly what I’m teaching you to do in this book: figure out your standards and requirements, explain them, and stick to them (Chapter 9), get to
really
know the man by asking five essential questions you’ll need to know to move a relationship forward (see Chapter 10), and follow the Ninety-Day Rule (see Chapter 11). And then teach all of this to your daughters, too.

If we don’t, after all, break that cycle, the cheating will continue.