Abstract
Speaking directly with dozens of married heterosexual men involved in extramarital affairs fleshes out a dirty little secret: it’s not always the sex they seek but the validation. By digging deeper, we learn how threatened masculinity gives rise to tacit expectations of wives’ relational labor.
iStockPhoto // Halfpoint
“I decided to pursue an outside relationship simply because I was lonely in my marriage,” Barry confided over email. Eight years into that marriage, Barry, 37, felt that his wife no longer met his emotional needs. “I’m a man. I need a lot of encouragement,” Barry explained, continuing, “I need her to pay attention to me, act excited to see me, care about my day. I need her to notice that I’m sad or that I need a hug.” To satisfy these unmet needs, Barry had turned to Ashley Madison, a website designed to facilitate matches between individuals seeking an affair partner. And Barry told me that he found what he was looking for. “My girlfriend can’t wait see me,” Barry wrote, “She asks me about my day, my dreams, my interests. She cares when I talk and she helps me if I feel sad.”
Holden, 41, recounted a similar experience. Like Barry, he described unfulfilled emotional needs in his marriage. Of his wife, Holden said, “For the most part, she is too enveloped in her own issues to notice a little sadness.” And so he, too, outsourced these needs to an affair partner.
In the United States, we’re not fond of infidelity. As sociologists Judith Treas and Deidre Giesen have shown, 95% of Americans report a desire for a monogamous relationship. Sociologist Jenny van Hoof explains that infidelity is the one sexual practice Americans disapprove of in all circumstances and suggests this is perhaps because of the way we see the act of sex as “special.”
the men
Barry and Holden are two of the 46 men I interviewed to understand heterosexual men’s motivations for infidelity. I’d heard people dismiss the question of men’s motivations for affairs with maxims like “men are dogs” and “all men will cheat given the opportunity.” But as a researcher, I couldn’t help wondering if that was the whole story. In order to interview men who were actively cheating, I turned to Ashley Madison, the website whose tagline is “Life is short. Have an affair.” It proved a valuable tool for connecting with an otherwise difficult-to-reach population.
I decided to conduct the interviews over email instead of through a phone or video call because the topic was so sensitive and because many men were worried about confidentiality. Potential participants indicated that finding a private place to talk on the phone would be a barrier to participating in the study. And they worried that having my number in their cell phone call log would trigger suspicion from their primary partners. Email provided a solution to these problems: these men used email to talk to their affair partners, so why not use it to talk to me?
Research by Natilene Bowker and Keith Tuffin shows that people are more honest in interviews when they feel anonymous. In my study, email heightened that sense of anonymity because my participants simply used the same email accounts they used to carry on their affairs, and those were associated with fake names. Even so, as I was starting out, I worried that men wouldn’t want to tell me their deepest, darkest sexual secrets—not only because I’m a researcher but also because I’m a woman. Yet to my surprise, many were enthusiastic about sharing their lives—including the intimate details of their affairs—with me.
I spent several days, and sometimes weeks, discussing the men’s affairs with them over email. Ultimately, my conversations with these men convinced me that the “men are dogs” genre of explanations for men’s infidelity was incomplete at best. Contrary to popular depictions of men as driven by an uncontrollable libido or an insatiable desire for sexual novelty, the men I spoke with emphasized unmet emotional, rather than sexual needs. Like Barry and Holden, the Ashley Madison users I interviewed described their desires for a female partner to pay attention to them, provide frequent praise, show interest in the mundane details of their days, and help them manage their emotional lives—forms of gendered labor I collectively refer to as “relational management.” The perceived failure of these men’s primary partners to deliver this relational management produced hurt, resentment, and a sense of masculine insecurity that ultimately motivated the men to pursue outside partnerships. In short, their affairs weren’t just about the sex.
managing emotions
A long tradition of sociological research documents the disproportionate burden placed on women to manage their own and others’ emotions. In her ground-breaking book The Managed Heart, Arlie Hochschild coined the term “emotional labor” to describe how workers, especially those in highly feminized service professions (flight attendants, for example), are expected to control their feelings and affect to promote a desired emotional state in the people around them. Hochschild used the term “emotion work” to describe the related activity of managing one’s emotions in one’s personal life.
Building on Hochschild’s work, other researchers have shed light on the outsized yet often unacknowledged burden women bear to manage emotions and relationships across domains. Focusing on workplace environments, Arlene Daniels described the “invisible labor” routinely performed by women and people of color, including conflict resolution, mentoring, and event planning. Monique Haicault’s research revealed what scholars have come to call the “mental load” disproportionately shouldered by women within a family unit. This concept captures the cognitive effort—again, disproportionately expended by women—that goes into managing household logistics, such as scheduling rides for children, purchasing gifts, and managing the family’s social calendar.
There is no moment when society pronounces a man “masculine enough.”
In summary, existing research underscores that women tend to shoulder an outsized share of the work managing interpersonal relationships and tending to others’ emotional well-being in both professional and personal settings. Yet, there has been less attention to the specific kinds of emotional and relational work men may expect from women in the context of a romantic relationship, much less when the relationship in question is an extramarital affair. My interviews with Ashley Madison users brought men’s expectations for relational management into focus, highlighting a striking symmetry in the demands placed on their primary partners and their affair partners.
iStockPhoto // Tero Vesalainen
masculinity
American men face a great deal of pressure to perform masculinity. Though there’s no single, agreed-upon definition, American definitions of masculinity typically revolve around characteristics like physical strength, sexual dominance, and authoritative leadership. As Raewyn Connell explains, the performance of masculinity is continual and constant. There is no moment when society pronounces a man “masculine enough.” No event occurs where someone rates his masculinity high enough to render him exempt from its constant and conscious performance. Thus, previous research has pointed out that men’s performance of masculinity often results in pronounced stress and anxiety. So, too, according to research by Kathryn Gallagher and Dominic Parrott, does failing to adequately perform masculinity. To make matters worse, a man’s sense of himself as masculine is bestowed by the public, not by the man himself. And men’s performance of masculinity often negatively impacts their relationships.
if i were man enough…
Zack, 49, had been married since the age of 20. Reflecting on the early years of his marriage, Zack described fond memories of his wife’s clear demonstrations of affection. “When we first got married,” he recalled, “she was so excited to see me when I came in the door. Met me at the door with a big hug and kiss.” He explained that his wife would stop whatever she was doing to “sit down with me, maybe even on my lap, and ask me all about my day.” The fact that his wife remembered the names of his coworkers and the details of mundane office routines made Zack feel good—both about the relationship and about himself. His wife was supportive and encouraging, letting him know that she believed in him. “If I was upset,” Zach continued, “she could tell and she’d help me work through it. I mean, she loved me. You understand? She really loved me.”
Over the years, however, Zach felt his wife’s enthusiasm diminish. He contrasted the golden early days to his present reality: “But now? I have to roam through the house to find her when I come home, if she’s even there.” Zack explained that he perceived he was a source of irritation to his wife, an unwanted presence in their shared home: “And if my coming home happens while she’s on the phone or in the middle of working out or watching a movie,” Zack continued, “Well, I’m interrupting her, you see. I can tell she’s annoyed, too. She barely pretends to listen to my day and never remembers what I’ve already told her about what’s going on there.” Moreover, Zack concluded, the interest, encouragement, and concern that made him feel so loved in the early days of their marriage were all but absent now. “I can’t remember the last time she asked me what was wrong,” Zack wrote, “She doesn’t notice if I’m sad or upset or unhappy. Or maybe she notices but she just doesn’t care anymore? I don’t know. But the point is that before, she loved me. And now, I’m clearly just a disappointment. She’s bored with me. If I were man enough, she’d be hanging on my every word, like she used to do.”
iStockPhoto // Dmytro Sheremeta
Their perception of their wives’ failure to provide relational management—to pay attention to them, provide frequent praise, show interest in the mundane details of their days, and help them manage their emotional lives—swayed these husbands to outsource their validation to affair partners.
Zach’s phrase, “If I were man enough…” captures a key theme that I heard time and again in these conversations. Women’s perceived failure to provide relational management—to pay attention to their male partner, provide frequent praise, show interest in the mundane details of their days, and help them manage their emotional lives—affected not only how these men felt about their marriages, but also how they felt about themselves.
At 29, Milo had only been married for three years when we connected on Ashley Madison. Yet he described a marked change in his wife’s provision of relational management over that short period, which was, of course, how he ended up on Ashley Madison in the first place. As with Zack, Milo’s account emphasized the masculine validation that his wife once—but no longer—provided. “She used to tell me how great I am,” Milo wrote, “Like, she’d tell me I was terrific at my job when I closed a deal. She’d say I was amazing in bed. She’d tell other people what a great job I did at painting the living room. Whatever. But now? I could break the world record for something and she’d just shrug. She’s just not impressed with me anymore.” He invoked the stereotype of the nagging wife, concluding, “All she does now is find fault with any chore I help out with and then she ignores me. But that’s okay because my [affair partner] says I’m the best she ever had.”
Max, who was widowed at a very young age, was 70 years old and 20 years into his second marriage when we first contacted each other. “Sometimes I wonder if my first wife would be as disappointed and disinterested in me as my current wife is. In the beginning, Marcy was really invested in me and concerned with my grief about losing Maggie. And she seemed to want to be close to me, know everything about me. But now, she just acts like I’m fine and I don’t need anything from her besides her cooking for us.” Max addressed this by finding an affair partner, a woman who “can’t wait to see me and thinks I’m a god in bed.”
As Zach and Milo’s accounts illustrate, the hurt feelings produced by their wives’ perceived failure to provide validation, praise, attention, enthusiasm, and relational management in their marriages didn’t just change their perception of the relationship. It undermined their masculine self-image. Their perceived dismissal by their spouses fostered deeper insecurities about their own masculinity, because they internalized their wives’ disinterest as a reflection of their own inadequacy.
Considered from another angle, these accounts also provide a window into the men’s underlying expectations for their wives’ roles in their marriages. They suggest that these men expected their wives to bear the responsibility for initiating emotional intimacy and tending to their emotional well-being. And when their wives did not provide this relational management, they sought to outsource it.
Men expected their wives to bear the responsibility for initiating emotional intimacy.
outsourcing validation
“The more someone else shows me I’m worth caring about, the more I start to dare to believe it,” Riley, 39, told me. The “someone else” in question was his affair partner. Riley described the personal transformation that had occurred since the beginning of their relationship, as his new partner supplied the validation he had been missing in his marriage. “My internal dialogue has begun to change,” Riley declared. “I am appreciating things about myself again, not just finding fault in everything like a spouse trains us to do.” As Riley’s account illustrates, men’s expectations for relational management extended to their affair partners. They sought validation from outside partners, not just sexual gratification.
iStockPhoto // stockphotodirectors
A long tradition of sociological research documents the disproportionate burden placed on women to manage their own and others’ emotions.
Riley wasn’t the only man to suggest that being married meant sharing your life with a wife who constantly tells you she’s disappointed in you. When these men compared the relational management provided by their affair partner with their wives’ unwillingness to supply it, their resentment was palpable. As Patrick, 33, put it, “My wife doesn’t give a sh#t about my day, my work or my interests, even after I just spent the last 3 hours helping her with hers?? That’s okay. My [affair partner] and I like to talk about our work to each other.” Men were bitter about their wives withholding relational management, especially if they felt entitled to such affirmation because they “helped” with things around the house. When an affair partner showed enthusiasm and asked about their days, it provided some solace.
“I once described my marriage like the old [M]eatloaf song, ‘Two out of Three Ain’t Bad.’” Trip, 48, quipped. “You begin a relationship that seems to meet a lot of your needs but is lacking something, but you tell yourself you’re being unrealistic, picky, selfish. [The] problem is that 3rd thing becomes a bigger issue as the years go by, until it’s the elephant in the living room.”
In Trip’s case, it may be more accurate to say the elephant was in the bedroom. He elaborated, “[M]y wife is just disinterested in me. And she definitely doesn’t want to have sex with me. The few times she takes pity on me, she’s clearly so bored. She can’t wait for it to end. It’s a chore for her.” As Trip continued, I noticed that his dissatisfaction with his sexual relationship with his wife centered on emotional rather than physical disappointment. He expressed hurt and insecurity stemming from her apparently negative perception of his performance in bed, which he inferred from her lack of interest and initiation. “She clearly doesn’t think I’m great in bed anymore,” Trip concluded. “I don’t know what happened because it wasn’t always like that.” Thus, even though Trip’s reason for seeking an affair partner was, in a way, about sex, it nonetheless challenges popular assumptions about men’s motivations for infidelity. His primary complaint was not that sex with his wife was physically unsatisfying but that his wife’s lack of interest undermined his masculine self-image.
Trip informed me that he found the validation he was craving in his affair partner. “But now with [my affair partner], she’s very enthusiastic in bed. She tells me she can’t wait to see me. It’s no longer a ‘Wham bam, thank you, ma’am.’ She tells me I’m amazing in bed.” This made Trip feel a lot better about his life and about himself. He said, “It does add a certain optimism, uplift to the day. You feel life hasn’t completely passed you by.”
Trip’s account illustrates an expectation shared by many in the study, namely, for their female partners to validate their sexual prowess by expressing enthusiasm about their performance in bed. This was not only true of their wives, but also their affair partners: the sexual fulfillment they sought from affair partners had a deeply emotional and image-conscious tone. It’s telling that instead of indicating that his affair partner herself was amazing in bed, Trip emphasized how she told him that he was amazing in bed.
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The dynamics of their marriages, which men complained made them undesirable and like they lacked adequate prowess, challenged their sense of themselves as masculine.
These men’s experiences with affairs helped soothe their hurt feelings stemming from the lack of relational management they experienced in their marriages. Even so, there was broad consensus that while outsourcing to an affair partner was an improvement over their previous circumstances, it was not the ideal. Though the affairs made them feel better, going some ways to fill the void, they still wished their needs could be fulfilled by their wives at home.
a lesson in expectations
It’s impossible to know whether these men’s wives were actually disinterested and disappointed in them, or whether they were simply busier with their jobs, children, and household demands. What we can learn from these men’s accounts, however, is that they expected their wives—and their affair partners—to behave in specific ways: to ask about their days and their feelings, to recall details about their jobs, and to validate their sexual performance. When their wives did not supply these forms of relational management, it hurt their feelings and undermined their masculine self-image. Ultimately, it motivated them to seek validation and support from outside partners. As 42-year-old Ozzy put it, “Men need their egos pumped up regularly. We are fragile creatures under all the bravado.”
For these men, the dynamics of their marriages functioned as a source of self-doubt and frustration. Men complained of feelings of being undesirable and lacking adequate prowess, all of which challenged their sense of themselves as masculine. This combined with the lack of relational management provided by their wives led men to outsource to a more interested third party (this is something I call the Infidelity Workaround). The men in this study realized their sense of themselves as worthy hinged on how the women in their lives regarded them. Because of this, they regarded their wives’ withholding of praise and sexual enthusiasm as particularly cruel. They believed that affair partnerships helped soothe the hurts of their marriage by addressing their unmet needs for praise and validation and helping them feel more competent in their performance of masculinity. My conversations with these men provide new insight into the relationship between masculinity, validation, and gendered labor in romantic partnerships. The crucial insight these men provide is about how masculinity, as a set of cultural ideals, produces insecurity—and that produces men’s expectation that their female partners will provide validation.
recommended resources
Pamela Druckerman. 2008. Lust in Translation: Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee. London: Penguin. A journalist’s interviews with cheaters reveal how we all lie about sex.
Tammy Nelson. 2019. When You’re the One Who Cheats: Ten Things You Need To Know. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. Written for anyone who is currently having an affair or who has ended an affair, this book helps readers decide how to move forward.
Ester Perel. 2019. The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity. London: Yellow Kite. An examination of why people cheat and why discovering an affair is so traumatic.
Alicia M. Walker. 2017. The Secret Life of the Cheating Wife: Power, Pragmatism, and Pleasure in Women’s Infidelity. Washington, D.C.: Lexington Books. Details how women develop an alternate solution to a marriage that isn’t wholly working in order to get their needs met.
Alicia M. Walker. 2020. Chasing Masculinity: Men, Validation, and Infidelity. London: Palgrave Macmillan. This book details men’s experiences of their own participation in infidelity, offering a glimpse into how men negotiate marriages that fall short of their expectations.