A couple weeks back, I did a post about why men cheat. This week, I decided to look into why women cheat. Turns out, humans are humans and regardless of gender, men and women have a lot of overlap when it comes to cheating. However, one major difference I did notice was that women had more of a tendency to cheat out of a reaction to being hurt than men.
Whereas a man will probably be more likely to succumb to temptation (i.e goes out clubbing, meets a dtf hottie, and gets intimate in the spur of the moment), women seem to be a bit more intentional, almost calculated, when it comes to running astray (i.e emotional build up and making plans with less spontaneity). After interviewing a handful of female friends, here’s what I concluded:
Mistrust Due to Past Trauma
A dear friend of mine, Elena, opened up to me about being molested by a male family member as a child. This greatly impacted her dating life later on, although it took her a while to connect the dots. By the time she was 13, she was dating an 18 year old and living quite the wild child life. The guy ended up getting arrested and spending six months in jail for gang-related charges. He didn’t tell her where he was going and she was left confused, feeling totally abandoned.
By the time he came back into the picture, she had started seeing someone else. Elena is very conventionally attractive and self-identifies as a people pleaser, so it’s never been hard for her to find men to commit to and take care of her. She tends to get trapped in monogamous relationships, unable to be her true self and put in a position where she feels tempted to do shady shit, namely talking to and sleeping with other men.
Elena openly admits that her childhood trauma paired with years of unhealthy relationships contributes to her inability to “be normal,” whatever that means.
She’s been hurt a lot and has a deep mistrust in people, particularly men. Now in her late twenties, she’s come to terms with the fact that polyamory may be a good fit for her and that that’s nothing to be ashamed of. Currently, she’s dating a super nice guy and focusing on healing her wounds so that she can eventually settle down and break her pattern of cheating.
Nearly all the other women I interviewed had some kind of past trauma – daddy issues, sexual assault, getting cheated on – which led them to the same conclusion as Elena:
“The only person I can count on is myself, so why bother letting my guard down and caring about someone when I know he will inevitably hurt me?”
Payback for Mistreatment
While past traumas certainly influence how we show up in relationships, so do present relationship dynamics. When COVID first hit, my commitment-phobe ass found myself in an open relationship with another commitment-phobe. Though we labeled ourselves as open, the reality was that we were obsessed with one another, hung out every day, and were in constant agreement that we didn’t want to sleep with anyone but each other.
Then one day, he drunkenly hooked up with a friend and confessed his sexual dissatisfaction with me — something about how I seemed disassociated from sex at times (shoutout to years of practice having disassociated sex with daddies!).
Needless to say, I was crushed. This was the first guy in years I had fully committed myself to. I had cut off contact with my entire roster, stopped hanging around my guy friends topless, and convinced myself into believing this man was my end-all-be-all. I wasn’t even interested in having sex with anyone else at this point, but I wanted to level the playing field — and then some. So I slept with a random guy and hid it from my boyfriend. The guilt of keeping a secret eventually got the best of me and I came clean, but the actual act was very empowering. I needed to get back out there and have my magic validated by someone who wasn’t my toxic boyfriend.
Turns out I’m not alone. Another friend of mine, Abby, described how she spent the better part of her twenties in an abusive relationship: “I got tired of dealing with his shit. Once he hit me, I completely checked out of the relationship.” Eventually, she ended up sleeping with his brother-in-law and some rando she met out on the town. He found out about both and didn’t end things, but it was definitely a catalyst for her to make a change.
Once she realized there was a life for herself outside of this shitty relationship, she was able to make an escape plan and leave safely. Today, she’s in a happy, open marriage with her husband and subscribes to the, “No one person can satisfy all your needs. By thinking they can, you are putting an unfair amount of pressure on them, while setting yourself up for disappointment” sentiment.
Needing a Safety Net
My friend, Alice, definitely falls into the past-traumas category. She was raised in an ultra conservative household and spent her early twenties trying to wrangle fuck boys into serious, monogamous relationships that mirrored her parents’ marriage. One of these fuck boys stole her heart before proceeding to cheat on her with multiple women on multiple occasions.
Left heartbroken, Alice learned the hard way to stop giving any one man total power over her and totally switched gears in her approach to dating. She still likes a man to commit to her and prefers relationships over casual hookups, but when she realizes her boyfriend isn’t the one (usually three months into a relationship), she re-downloads her dating apps and starts looking for the next good thing.
When she finds him, she will start going on dates, while continuing to act like she’s in a committed, monogamous relationship with her partner. The one line she never crosses is having sex with the new guy until she’s ended things with the old guy.
With STDs running rampant, it’s too fucked up to pull the “I’m not sleeping with anyone else” wool over someone’s head. Eventually, once things get more serious with the new guy and she’s officially fallen out of love with the old guy, she bites the bullet and dumps her boyfriend so she can enter a new committed relationship.
For her, there’s a lot of fear being totally alone, and she finds it easier to two time a guy than to break up with him and be single.
Attention Feels Good
Similarly to how men like to feel seen and desired, hetero women – no matter how feminist they claim to be – love some good old, external validation from the opposite sex. Since men are socially primed to be the instigators, it’s far more common for a woman in a relationship to be showered with attention from other men than for a man in a relationship to be getting hit on 24/7 by other women.
As such, women are generally better at turning down hookups. They are used to unsolicited attention and aren’t as desperate to bone as men tend to be. They know they have options and, as a result, get to be far more selective when it comes to sexual partners than men. With that said, it doesn’t make women totally averse to letting temptation get the best of them, especially when they feel like their man isn’t giving them the attention and appreciation they deserve.
A friend, Jess, described how she was going through it with her boyfriend at the time. She worked with someone who had a similar look to her boyfriend, only this guy was taller. They ended up getting close. He expressed his romantic interest but respected the fact that she had a boyfriend and they kept things platonic. But eventually, as her romantic relationship continued to go down hill, she found herself seeking solace in the new guy.
She liked that he put her up on a pedestal and treated her with the respect she so craved in her actual relationship. Eventually, she began cheating on the asshole boyfriend with the coworker. Before long, she had ditched the asshole entirely and begun dating the coworker, only to repeat the pattern a year later. “What can I say? It feels good to be adored!” she blushed.
Jules
Based in Brooklyn, Jules has dedicated her twenties towards harnessing her pussy power, exploring the muse, whore, and wild woman archetypes along the way. When not blogging, you can find her sweating the toxins out in a hot yoga class or sipping a matcha latte at a pretentious coffee shop, whilst she scribbles away in her journal.
