Why Modern Women Cheat

From a female rabbit, courtesy of a reader:

One of the more interesting facts in Esther Perel’s new book, State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity, comes near the beginning.

Since 1990, notes the psychoanalyst and writer, the rate of married women who report they’ve been unfaithful has increased by 40 percent, while the rate among men has remained the same…

So what exactly is happening inside marriages to shift the numbers? What has changed about monogamy or family life in the past 27 years to account for the closing gap? And why have so many women begun to feel entitled to the kind of behavior long accepted (albeit disapprovingly) as a male prerogative?…

… they loved their husbands, but felt in some fundamental way that their needs (sexual, emotional, psychological) were not being met inside the marriage…

In an earlier generation, this might have taken the form of separation or divorce, but now, it seemed, more and more women were unwilling to abandon the marriages and families they’d built over years or decades…

In The Secret Life of the Cheating Wife: Power, Pragmatism, and Pleasure in Women’s Infidelity, another book on infidelity to be published this November, the sociologist Alicia Walker elaborates on the concept of female infidelity as a subversion of traditional gender roles…

Surely, one might think, a woman who would do such a thing must be acting out of a desire to escape a miserable marriage. And yet it turns out, this isn’t always the case: Many of the women Walker interviewed were in marriages that were functional…

We now tell women that they can have it all, that they can work and have a family and deserve to be sexually satisfied…

I tested this idea out on a few of the friends who had confided in me about their affairs, and most of them agreed. Twenty or thirty years ago they might have opted for divorce.

So divorce rates today are up from twenty or thirty years ago, and the number of those who stay married and end up admitting to an affair are up 40%, while still others probably have affairs and don’t admit to them.

You can see the change in attitudes which is producing this, and how it arises in amygdalae that can not accept adversity. There is an emphasis on the idea that every woman’s life should be the ideal of security of marriage, and sexual ecstasy, forever. There is a perfectionism which has been cultured by a life that has, until marriage, been devoid of any challenging circumstances or miseries which need to be endured, leading to a perception that perfection in everything is not only easily attainable, but a prerequisite. These are amygdalae that are conditioned to not expect any adversity, and to refuse to tolerate any adversity which presents itself. It is quite interesting how that adaptation to an environment of perfect ease translates into a mating strategy designed to exploit the glut which produced it.

Interesting also is the fact that researchers even refer to this as a reversal of gender roles, one that results in promiscuous females seeking out a small pool of alpha Chads who think nothing of cuckolding a myriad of beta providers. You can see how it would favor long form DRD4 alleles in offspring, from both the mothers and the fathers.

Interestingly, there was a link to this article on the same page:

Female breadwinners, especially those who didn’t set out to make most of their family’s income, have been found to feel less satisfied about their lives, based on a survey by Working Mother Media…

This new study, showcased in the June issue of the American Sociological Review, found that men who are 100% economically dependent on their spouses were most at risk for cheating, three times more at risk than women married to male breadwinners…

Already, in four out of 10 households with children, women are the sole or primary breadwinners, based on a 2013 report by the Pew Research Center.

I would believe the men in such arrangements are probably having affairs more, but I strongly suspect the women will too, if the opportunity presents itself. There is no way you have high Testosterone alpha females supporting everyone, and they aren’t open to affairs more.

Regardless, another example of the reversal in gender roles produced by r/K, and the relationship of that reversal to promiscuity and infidelity. All of this is a reproductive strategy imbued through evolution, and molding the psychologies of people along all of the r/K lines of behavior, based on resource availability.

And only Apocalypse can truly set things right.

Tell everyone about r/K Theory, because the natural order is right, even when you don’t know why