Discover the one crucial error that cheaters make.

Win Back Their Attraction

Saving your marriage with trust and love

How You Can Quickly and Easily Discover If You Are Being Cheated On

Tigress Luv, The Breakup Guru

Breakup Support at Brokenheartsville

Why Women Love Bastards

Saving your marriage with trust and love

Why Women Cheat

Daily Breakup Inspiration
Breakup Co
The Zodiac Man
Breakups Magazine
Narcissistic Men

Cunnilingus Academy
Curl her toes with these tips and techniques!

Hold on to your wedding ring: It is difficult, but not impossible, to repair the damage caused by infidelity. Increasingly, that’s what couples want--likely the White House occupants, too. But let go of most of your assumptions; In an interview with Editor at Large Hara Estroff Marano, our leading expert Dr. Shirley Glass challenges just about everything you think you know about the most explosive subject of the year.

Q: What is the single most important thing you want people to know about infidelity?

Dr. G. Boundaries. That it is possible to love somebody else, to be attracted to somebody else, even if you have a good marriage. In this collegial world where we work together, you have to conduct yourself by being aware of appropriate boundaries, by not creating opportunities, particularly at a time when you might be vulnerable.

That means that if you travel together, you never invite someone for a drink in the room; if you just had a fight with your spouse, you don’t discuss it with a person who could be a potential partner.

You can have a friendship, but you have to be careful who you share your deepest feelings with. Although women share their deep feelings with lots of people, particularly other women, men are usually most comfortable sharing their feelings in a love relationship. As a result, when a relationship becomes intimate and emotional, men tend to sexualize it.

Q: Infidelity appears to be the topic of the year. What has struck you most about the reaction to what may or may not be some kind of infidelity in high places

Dr. G. Whatever horror or dismay people have about it, they’re able to separate the way the President is performing in office and the way he appears to be performing in his marriage. That’s especially interesting because it seems to reflect the split in his life. We don’t know for sure, but he apparently is very much involved in his family life. He’s not an absentee father or absentee husband. Whatever it is that they share--and they do share a lot, publicly and privately--he has a compartment in which he is attracted to young women, and it is separate from his primary relationships.

Q: Is this compartmentalizing characteristic of people who get into affairs?

Dr. G. It’s much more characteristic of men. Most women believe that if you love your partner, you wouldn’t even be in an affair; therefore, if someone has an affair, it means that they didn’t love their partner and they do love the person that they had the affair with. But my research has shown that there are many men who do love their partners, who enjoy good sex at home, who nevertheless never turn down an opportunity for extramarital sex. In fact, 56 percent of the men I sampled who had extramarital intercourse said that their marriages were happy, versus 34 percent of the women.

That’s how I got into this.

Q: Because?

Dr. G. Being a woman, I believed that if a man had an affair, it meant that he had a terrible marriage, and that he probably wasn’t getting it at home--the old keep-your-husband-happy-so-he-won’t-stray idea. That puts too much of a burden on the woman. I found that she could be everything wonderful, and he might still stray, if that’s in his value system, his family background, or his psycho dynamic structure.

I was in graduate school when I heard that a man I knew, married for over 40 years, had recently died and his wife was so bereaved because they had had the most wonderful marriage. He had been her lover, her friend, her support system. She missed him immensely. I thought that was a beautiful story. When I told my husband about it, he got a funny look that made me ask, What do you know? He proceeded to tell me that one night when he took the kids out for dinner to an out of the way restaurant, owned by one of his clients, that very man walked in with a young, blonde woman. When he saw my husband, his face got red, and he walked out.

Q: How did that influence you?

Dr. G. I wondered what that meant. Did he fool his wife all those years and really not love her? How is it possible to be married for over 40 years and think you have a good marriage? It occurred to me that an affair could mean something different than I believe.

Another belief that was an early casualty was the hydraulic pump theory--that you only have so much energy for something. By this belief, if your partner is getting sex outside, you would know it, because your partner wouldn’t be wanting sex at home. However, some people are even more passionate at home when they are having extramarital sex. I was stunned to hear a man tell me that when he left his affair partner and came home he found himself desiring his wife more than he had in a long time, because he was so sexually aroused by his affair. That made me question the hydraulic pump theory.

Many of our beliefs about the behavior of others come from how we see things for ourselves. A man who usually associates sneaking around with having sex will, if his wife is sneaking around, find it very hard to believe that she could be emotionally involved without being sexually involved. On the other hand, a woman usually can not believe that her husband could be sexually involved and not be emotionally involved. We put the same meaning on it for our partner that it would have for us. I call that the error of assumed similarity.

Q: What research have you done on infidelity?

Dr. G. My first research study was actually based on a sex questionnaire in Psychology Today, in the Seventies. I analyzed the data looking at the relationship of extramarital sex, length of marriage, and gender difference on marital satisfaction and romanticism.

I found enormous gender differences: that men in long term marriages who had affairs had very high marital satisfaction--and that women in long-term marriages having affairs had the lowest marital satisfaction of all. Everybody’s marital satisfaction went down the longer they were married, except the men who had affairs. But in early marriages, men who had affairs were significantly less happy. An affair is more serious if it happens earlier in the marriage.

Explaining these gender differences was the basis of my dissertation. I theorized that the men were having sexual affairs and the women emotional affairs.

Continued >

Please Visit Our Sponsors

The Breakup Guru
<<============

Borderland Blues Gay & Lesbian Advice
============>>