This is an excerpt from the Introduction of my eBook, Why Is He Cheating?
Several years ago, a good friend of mine admitted to me that he had been secretly having an affair for two years. While we were sitting in a bar and he explained how he had known the woman he had just married much longer than he had led everyone to believe. He had actually been seeing her while he was still living with another woman—his ex-girlfriend—and she never suspected a thing the entire time.
He and his current wife used to live thousands of miles apart from each other. Theirs was a secret long-distance relationship. He would make excuses to travel to see her several times a year—telling his live-in girlfriend that he had to visit his parents, attend work conferences, or go to seminars.
I was friends with both him and his girlfriend during the time that he was cheating on her. While they never had a formal commitment sanctioned by the state, they were essentially a common law marriage, having lived together for almost ten years. I never suspected a thing, and apparently—neither did she.
My friend was able to plan his wedding, travel to another state, and go through with the wedding, and the whole time neither his new wife nor his girlfriend knew about the other one. The girlfriend finally found out after he had returned home, packed his belongings while she was at work, and left her a note as he vacated the apartment. It was only then that he admitted that not only was he leaving her, he had married someone else.
I couldn’t believe it! Beyond the moral implications of what he had done, it amazed me how I never would have known if he hadn’t come out and told me. Certainly, he wasn’t the “cheating type.” I knew several of those kinds of guys at my workplace. They were men who would regularly have one-night stands on business trips. Some of them even went as far as having regular mistresses overseas where they spent a lot of time working.
I don’t know if my place of work was typical or not, but it sure seemed like there was a lot of infidelity going on. Sometimes I felt there must be something wrong with me as a man, because I was never interested in having an affair or cheating on my wife. Sure, there were many attractive women that I would occasionally fantasize about, even some that I gave more than a passing thought. However, these thoughts and fantasies never went any further than that.
From where I stood, the damage that these men were doing to their marriages and relationships was obvious and painful to see. But to my friend with the new wife, everything seemed justifiable, normal, and almost destined. That made me wonder why the things that were apparent to me about these men who were cheating, weren’t so obvious to them.
I wanted to get down to the bottom of it. Call it simple curiosity. Ok, call it a kind of twisted curiosity. I wanted to know what made these men different from me—what it was about their life or relationship that made them vulnerable to cheating, and what was so fascinating to them that they would risk their relationships, marriages, family, or lifestyle just to have a little “something” on the side.
So I started doing research. I read tons of books and talked to a lot of cheaters. I also solicited personal stories through ads I placed on Craigslist, with the promise that identities would remain protected.
As I was learning all the “hows” of cheating and how to know if someone close to you is doing it, the natural next question arose like sunrise: “Why?” Why do people cheat, and more crucially, why do people cheat on loved ones whom they profess to cherish and hold dear to their hearts?
One of my college professors once told me that when you are trying to solve a problem, you can’t just ask why. You have to ask why five times, digging deeper and deeper into the root cause. Why are we going out of business? Because we’re being sued. Why are we being sued? Because an old lady burnt herself drinking our coffee. Why did she burn herself? Because her paper cup fell apart in her lap. Why did it fall apart? Because we bought the cups from company A, not company B. Why? Because company A saved us $2500 last quarter and we needed to show cost cuts for the stockholders.
That’s an overly simple example, but it illustrates how true understanding isn’t possible with just a single “why.”
When I learned that cheaters hold just a few different types of beliefs and attitudes, these revelations begged answers to still more questions:
• What would make a man claim to love one woman and yet sleep with another one?
• If a man cheats on his wife, does that mean he secretly doesn’t want to be married any more?
• How can so many men get away with cheating for so long?
• Is monogamy not natural for humans, or is the temptation just too great for some people?
The answers I found blew me away, and I can’t wait to share these secrets with you.