How Women (and Men) View Relationships and Betrayal
We mistakenly assume that if our partners love us they will react and behave in certain ways—the ways we react and behave when we love someone.
—John Gray, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
When your significant other found out about your cheating (or some of your cheating, anyway), her first reaction was probably something like utter rage, or at least a whole world of hurt.
And she’s probably still quite reactive, regardless of how many days, weeks, or months it’s been since her discovery. To you, this probably seems extreme, especially if your behavior was purely sexual with little to no emotional or psychological connection. You might think, Sure, I violated my vow of monogamy, but I told her it didn’t mean anything and I’m sorry. So now it’s time for her to let it go and get back to normal. Right?
Nevertheless, she is still extremely angry and upset. This is because, as mentioned earlier, men and women view sex and relationships in very different ways. Men are typically able to separate and compartmentalize sex and intimate connections, whereas women typically are not. So for you, as a man, sex is sex and relationships are relationships, and the two things do not necessarily overlap. With your spouse you absolutely have (or had) an intertwined sexual and emotional attraction and connection. With your casual sex partners and quickie affairs, however, you may or may not have felt that way. And if you didn’t, that probably made it very easy for you to separate your cheating from your primary relationship, viewing your extracurricular sexual activity as a perfectly normal, enjoyable, and harmless activity—like playing on the company softball team or grabbing a beer with the guys.
However, as you’re now finding out, this is not a thought process that your spouse understands or believes, because women in committed relationships are typically much less able than men to separate and compartmentalize sex and emotional connection.
For evidence of this male-female dichotomy, consider the results of a well-known study (Chivers et al. 2004) in which men and women were shown videos of two men having sex and two women having sex. The male test subjects’ responses were highly specific by sexual orientation. Straight guys were turned on only by the videos of women, and gay guys were turned on only by the videos of men. Meanwhile, two-thirds of the women, regardless of their sexual orientation, were aroused by both male and female stimuli—in particular the videos that displayed or at least hinted at an emotional and psychological connection between the partners. And this research is hardly an outlier. Numerous other studies have produced similar results, confirming that in general women are attracted to and turned on by emotional intimacy (especially in committed relationships), whereas men are turned on by body parts and sex acts.
For women, therefore, emotional connection and sexual arousal are deeply intertwined. That is why your significant other is behaving the way she is behaving. When you cheated, regardless of how the act made you feel or what it meant to you, you wounded your mate not just sexually but emotionally.
Exacerbating matters is the fact that your loved one probably sees your betrayal in a holistic way, looking at how your behavior affects her entire life. So instead of thinking, You had sex with another woman and I’m pissed off about that, she is probably thinking something like, It’s not just me that you’ve betrayed, it’s our children, our home, our community, and our church. She is probably also thinking (if not saying) things like, If you lied to me about your sex life, then what else have you been lying about? How can I believe anything you say ever again or anything you’ve ever said so far? Basically, when you cheat on your spouse, she sees a much bigger picture than just the sex. So even though your behavior may seem inconsequential to you, your significant other will likely view it as all-encompassing.
The Neurochemistry of Love
The powerful initial romantic/sexual interest that we sometimes feel (known as limerence) is usually enough to keep us with another person long enough to decide if our attraction extends beyond physical appearance. If there is more to the connection, then we may decide to stick around, developing emotional intimacy in addition to sexual attraction. In all likelihood, this is what happened with your significant other. You thought she was hot, you asked her out, you realized that you also liked her as a person, and the two of you built a meaningful life together. Or maybe you had sex with her right away, and then, a few days or weeks later, you realized there was something beyond just a hot attraction, so you went back for more.
Inside your brain this process is both simple and traceable. In fact, researchers, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans, can easily watch what happens in your brain as you meet, like, and eventually love another person. Basically, fMRI scans are used to monitor activity in various regions of the brain in response to specific stimuli. When one portion of the brain is activated—by a thought, an emotion, a movement, or anything else— blood flow to and within that area increases, and fMRI scans clearly depict this response.
One rather extensive study (Cacioppo et al. 2012) combined and analyzed the results of twenty separate fMRI trials looking at brain reactivity in response to physical attraction, sexual arousal, and long-term love. After pooling this data, scientists were able to map the ways in which both sexual desire and long-term love stimulate the brain. The two main findings were as follows:
In short, your brain’s rewards center is responsible for initial attraction and sexual desire, whereas the value center is responsible for transforming that desire into long-term love.
Significantly, the rewards center is also the area of the brain most closely associated with the formation of addiction. In fact, addictive substances and activities thoroughly stimulate this segment of the brain. As such, it is hardly surprising that some people (i.e., cheaters) might repeatedly pursue the initial and highly stimulating limerence stage of relationships. After all, limerence produces the same high (the same basic neurobiological stimulation) as cocaine, heroin, alcohol, chocolate, nicotine, and the like, primarily through the release of dopamine, adrenaline, oxytocin, serotonin, and a few other pleasure-inducing neurochemicals.
I actually wouldn’t be at all surprised if you told me that you sometimes felt high when you were chasing other women. Most men who cheat do at times feel this way, as do the women who cheat. The difference between the sexes is that men are usually able to separate this neurochemical rush from their sense of emotional attachment, whereas women typically cannot. This is why a hand-job from a stranger at a party can mean nothing to you and everything to your spouse.
Whether or not you fully understand the neuroscience discussed above is not important. What matters is that you understand that in most men the neurochemical response to casual cheating is centered in the brain’s rewards center, with little or no long-term value attached. In other words, men think about how good sex will feel, and that’s about it. It’s entirely possible that you felt no emotional connection at all to the woman or women with whom you cheated. However, your spouse neither thinks nor operates in this fashion. For her, sex and emotional connection are one and the same. So you should not expect her to “get over it” as easily as you think she ought to.
But don’t bother trying to explain this to her as a way of helping her understand that she shouldn’t be as angry with you as she appears to be. That won’t alleviate her pain or stop her from being angry. In fact, it might just piss her off even more.
Or Versus And
It is probably not a surprise for you to learn that male sexual desire is driven more by physiological than psychological factors. This is why porn sites created for male users feature sexual body parts and/or overt sexual acts and not much else. In male-oriented porn, there is rarely a story line, kissing, foreplay, or any romantic interaction. Men do not see a real person on the receiving end of whatever it is that’s being inserted. For the unbridled male brain, it’s just sex, sex, and more sex. Even pornographic “literature” written for a male audience tends to focus much more on body parts and sexual acts than on the development of relationships and feelings.
Women operate differently. Open up a romance novel or tune in to True Blood, the Twilight movies, and other female-oriented romance and erotica, and you’ll see this rather clearly. In these stories, be they written or visual, you will find very little in the way of purely objectified, nonrelational sex. Instead, you get a bunch of broad-chested, square-jawed, deep-voiced bad boys turning into goo whenever they spot the story’s heroine. Think Fifty Shades of Grey. So while male-oriented pornography focuses on a woman’s tits and ass (and maybe the man’s huge penis penetrating her in some way), erotica for women focuses on how the man makes her feel and, perhaps more important, how she makes him feel. So, yet again, women tend to be more turned on by emotional connection than by body parts and sex acts.
One easy way to think about this involves or versus and. For men, sexual arousal is a matter of or. For instance, a guy sees a woman with large breasts or a nice butt or a really short skirt or whatever— pretty much anything at all that seems even remotely sexual to him— and he gets turned on. Certainly men can be turned on by a nice personality as well, but more often they’re turned on by specific body parts. Men do not need to be in love to enjoy sex. In fact, most guys don’t even need to be in like. We just have to be turned on.
Meanwhile, the process of sexual arousal in women is quite different. It is much more difficult to get a woman interested in sex because, for her, it’s not a matter of or, it’s a matter of and. Women want a deep voice and a hairy chest and big biceps and a good job and a sense of humor and the desire to fix up a house together and kindness and a whole bunch of other stuff.
This very important male-female difference is most likely the product of thousands of years of evolution. Researchers Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam (2011) expound on this as follows:
When contemplating sex with a man, a woman has to consider the long-term. This consideration may not even be conscious, but rather is part of the unconscious software that has evolved to protect women over hundreds of thousands of years. Sex could commit a woman to a substantial, life-altering investment: pregnancy, nursing, and more than a decade of child-raising. These commitments require enormous time, resources, and energy. Sex with the wrong guy could lead to many unpleasant outcomes. . . . A woman’s sexual desire must be filtered through a careful appraisal of these potential risks.
Ogas and Gaddam call this feminine need to thoroughly vet a potential partner’s physical and character traits before becoming both physically and psychologically turned on “Miss Marple,” referring to novelist Agatha’s Christie’s crusty yet astute female detective. They note that a woman’s internal Miss Marple is not willing to approve sexual arousal until multiple conditions are met. Miss Marple says, “Sure, he’s cute, but does he have a good job? Is he interested in marriage? Does he have a history of cheating? Is he a heavy drinker? Has he ever been abusive?” All this must be considered before a woman says yes to sex.
Note: Disinhibiting substances (like alcohol) can temporarily short-circuit a woman’s inner Miss Marple. This is why men typically find it easier to hook up with women who’ve had a few drinks. Essentially, booze puts to sleep the part of a woman’s brain that says no to sex unless her internal conditions are met.
In case you’re wondering, men do not have such an inner detective. As a result, male sexual arousal typically looks something like this: Wow, would you look at that! That is hot! I wonder what it would be like to have sex with that. I’m going for it!
Interestingly, female sexual arousal starts out exactly the same way, though it quickly takes a different path: Wow, would you look at that! That is hot! I wonder if he’s single and has a good job. His hands are soft. I bet he’s gentle. But, of course, none of that matters because I’m already in a relationship and I don’t want to hurt my husband, my kids, or any other aspect of my life. So I’ll just forget about this and move on.
Vive la différence!
This dichotomy is why your hot, meaningless sexual hookup is relatively easy for you to dismiss, but your wife can’t seem to let it go. She just doesn’t think the way you do. In her mind, the only reasons for you to have sex outside your marriage are the following:
Hence, you are now faced with her seemingly irrational and disproportionate surge of fear, rage, and emotionally unpredictable behavior, even though, from your perspective, all you did was get a lap dance from a stripper.
Note: Just because men are easily turned on doesn’t mean we have to act on that feeling. And let’s be honest: most guys don’t. So even though men are genetically programmed to want sex with as many women as possible, that’s not how we generally behave. Instead, we think through the process, weighing the pros and cons before making a decision. As such, a happily married man might ideally think, Gee, this woman is very hot, but she’s also a neighbor and a good friend of my wife. So as much as I’d like to—and boy, do I want to—maybe it’s best that I not get her into bed. Unfortunately, that sort of thinking is sometimes discarded for momentary gratification, as you well know.
The Shock of Betrayal
When cheating is discovered, the betrayed partner is nearly always emotionally traumatized. Even if she suspected that something was amiss in the relationship before her discovery, she is blown away when she officially learns the truth. In fact, research shows that wives who learn about their husbands’ cheating typically experience stress and anxiety symptoms characteristic of post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD is a very serious, potentially life-threatening problem—a psychological reaction to an especially traumatic event. The symptoms commonly include flashbacks, nightmares, severe anxiety, hypervigilance, and powerful mood swings (including flashes of extreme anger, insecurity, and/or fear).
Have you noticed any of this behavior in your significant other? If so, it’s your fault, not hers. She is just responding in a very normal way to the pain and hurt that you have caused. (By the way, she probably does not actually have PTSD; for a formal PTSD diagnosis, the symptoms must persist for at least six months, and what your partner is going through will probably abate, at least partially, within that timeframe.)
Regardless of how your mate has reacted since learning about your cheating, you have probably convinced yourself that your actions were not that bad and you don’t deserve all the grief she is heaping onto you. She, however, almost certainly feels otherwise. For proof, consider the results of a recent study on infidelity (Schneider, Weiss, and Samenow 2012) in which betrayed women, after learning about their men’s cheating, made statements like the following:
While you are feeling resentful and impatient, wondering why your significant other won’t just let this slide so you can both move on, she is likely suffering—deeply. And if you truly love her, you need to find a way to care about this and to support her instead of feeling rankled by her endless anger, demands, questions, withdrawal, and threats.
About “Gaslighting”
Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse that involves the presentation of false information followed by dogged insistence that the information is true. Most people are familiar with this term thanks to Gaslight, the 1944 Oscar-winning film starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. In the story, a husband tries to convince his new wife that she’s imagining things, in particular the occasional dimming of their home’s gaslights. This is part of the husband’s plan to rob his wife of some very valuable jewelry. Over time, the wife, who trusts that her husband loves her and would never hurt her, starts to believe his lies and, in turn, to question her perception of reality and even her sanity. In the twenty-first century, the rather convoluted plot of Gaslight seems a bit silly. Nevertheless, the psychological concept of gaslighting—presenting false information and insisting that it’s true, thereby causing the victim to question his or her perception of reality—is well accepted, particularly in connection with sexual infidelity.
Did you gaslight your partner to cover up your sexual adventures? If you think you didn’t, you might want to think again. Consider the following lies:
Do any of these statements sound familiar? I’m guessing that at least a few of them do. Even if you didn’t tell your spouse these exact lies, you almost certainly told similar whoppers. And when she worked up the courage to question your dishonesty, you flipped the script, insisting that your lies were true, that you weren’t keeping secrets, and that she was either forgetful, delusional, or just making things up. You convinced her that she was the issue, that her emotional reactions were the cause of, rather than the result of, the problems in your relationship. In short, you made your spouse question her perception of reality.
At this point you might be thinking that you couldn’t have pulled that off because your wife is way too smart to fall for that. But maybe that’s not the case. One of the most disturbing facts about gaslighting is that even incredibly smart, emotionally well-adjusted people can fall for it. In part this is because our natural tendency as human beings is to believe what the people we love tell us. We will defend, excuse, and overlook our concerns about their behavior, especially when they seem sincere. In larger part, your spouse’s vulnerability to gaslighting, no matter how smart or sane she usually is, is linked to the fact that gaslighting starts slowly and builds gradually over time. It’s like placing a frog in a pot of warm water that is then set to boil. Because the temperature increases only gradually, the innocent frog never even realizes it’s being cooked.
In the beginning, your lies probably seemed very plausible to your spouse. “I’m sorry I got home at midnight. I’m working on a very exciting project and I lost track of time.” An excuse like that one sounds perfectly reasonable to a woman who both loves and trusts you, so it’s easily accepted. She might even be excited about how interested you are in this new project at work. Of course, over time, as your cheating escalates, your deceptions also escalate. “I swear, I told you over breakfast that I was going away for the weekend. You were a little groggy, so maybe it didn’t register. Or maybe you just forgot.” Most women would toss that little doozy out with the garbage, but gaslighting victims become habituated over time to increasing levels of deceit, so eventually even the most outrageous lies seem plausible. Then, instead of questioning you, your betrayed and psychologically abused mate will question herself.
Certainly you did not mean to drive your partner crazy in this way. In fact, on some level it’s likely that you were trying to protect her from the pain of learning about your cheating. Yet a lot of the problems wrought by infidelity are inadvertent, occurring only because the cheater didn’t think about the potential consequences when he was tempted in the moment. Nevertheless, those consequences still do occur, whether you want them to or not, and you need to recognize and accept them if you hope to heal your relationship and make your way out of the doghouse.
QUESTIONS FOR
Reflection
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