The Five REAL Reasons That Men Have Affairs – And No, It’s NOTHING To Do With Sex. I See It All The Time Says Leading Psychoanalyst JULIET ROSENFELD… This Is The Brutal Truth

Recently in my consulting room, a furious woman sitting next to her husband said: ‘Why did he have an affair? Because he could.’

As a psychoanalyst, I meet men and women every day who come to talk about their emotions, relationships and sex lives. And inevitably that often involves affairs.

Over almost two decades, I have met many patients who have either been involved in or had their lives damaged by infidelity.

Affairs are more common than we might like to think – one 2018 YouGov survey concluded that one in five of us have been unfaithful. Other studies have suggested that men have more affairs than women, but from my experience in the consulting room, I’m not sure that’s true. What I do believe is that men are unfaithful for different reasons from women.

Though each case is unique, common themes emerge when male patients try to explain to me why they had an affair.

And, contrary to what most people think, it’s never just about sex – or, as my distressed patient claimed, ‘because they can’.

If you are someone who has been deeply hurt by an affair, you may not want to hear this, but I believe that the roots of infidelity are usually laid down decades before it happens, sometimes as far back as childhood.

This in no way excuses or diminishes the devastating pain affairs can cause, but it’s my job to listen to people’s stories without judgment and find out why they acted as they did.

So, here, in my experience as a psychoanalyst, are the top five most common reasons why men have affairs.

AN AFFAIR WHEN TIMES ARE TOUGH

Today rising living costs, unaffordable housing, and the threat of increased taxes and inflation concern most of us. Men however continue to be the primary breadwinner in 72 per cent of households.

Financial pressures, careers stalling or ending, and other typical events of middle age – like the nest emptying, or caring for elderly parents – can make a man long for change or distraction.

In my experience, economics can play a big role in affairs.

Vik, 49, never enjoyed his work in financial services, despite it being well paid. But when he was suddenly made redundant, he began an affair with a female colleague who had also lost her job.

He lied to his wife about being at interviews when he was meeting his lover, eventually being caught out when she looked at his phone and confronted him.

In therapy he was able to look at how thwarted he had felt by his professional life.

He’d felt stuck in his well-paid job at a precarious time for the economy – but the loss of that job only reinforced how trapped he felt, and added hopelessness into the mix.

To begin with he seemed to blame his wife for never seeing how miserable he was and for not sharing the burden of earning money to pay the mortgage on a house he came to resent.

But in time Vik came to understand that he had to take responsibility for his affair.

Yes, he had begrudged his wife for being at home, but equally he had encouraged her to give up her teaching job to be with the children. He also realised he had never mourned how little time he had been able to spend with the kids when they were small. He had never felt courageous enough to be who he wanted to be and embrace the side of him that had really wanted to be a hands-on father.

His short-lived affair lasted as long as his younger lover’s job search – six months – but was extremely damaging for both him and his wife. Indeed, she was unable to recover from the deception. She felt badly treated, and his humiliation of her remained too raw. They continued to live together but in separate bedrooms until both children finished primary school. At that point his wife returned to teaching and told Vik she wanted a divorce.

AN AFFAIR INSTEAD OF DEPRESSION

An affair can be a way of avoiding painful conversations that will either save or end a relationship.

For example, one of my patients, Pete, often spoke of his wife’s ‘wonderful compassion’ towards him during his struggles with depression.

Though he said he loved her, his compulsive cheating seemed to tell a different story.

When describing his younger lover, he was obsessed with her ‘singular’ sex drive and their ‘unreal’ chemistry in the bedroom. By making his wife a ‘saint’ while idealising his lover’s sexual prowess, he was creating an alternative reality.

Despite his wife being incredibly supportive, Pete felt unable to have an honest conversation with her about how he was really feeling in case she decided to leave him.

Behind this lay Pete’s greatest fear – abandonment, after his father had left when he was a boy.

Instead of confronting this isolating fear and having a candid conversation with his wife, he would embark on what he called another ‘irresistible’ adulterous relationship to escape the feelings of isolation and hopelessness that plagued him.

Someone’s unhappiness usually predates a very long marriage. Being depressed can have little to do with a partner – and rarely can a partner fix it. Pete unconsciously chose affairs to stave off breakdown.

His wife never discovered her husband’s affairs. He felt that to tell her would have distressed her desperately, and compared with his decades of depression, this guilt was something he could live with.

Ultimately through our sessions he was able to stop using infidelity as his form of pain relief – to numb off the agony of his desperately lonely childhood that had burdened him all his life. Pete and his wife remain together.

AN AFFAIR TO FEEL ACCEPTED

People who feel loved, seen and cared for do not have affairs. Tim constantly said he adored his wife and that she was the ‘great love’ of his life. She was his best friend, he said – yet he consistently betrayed her. Why?

Tim had endured poverty and bigotry in childhood.

As a result, his motivation to attain external success was considerable.

His wife was from an affluent, middle-class background and, although they had been together since university, he felt she could not relate to this hidden part of himself. He could not share with her the shame and humiliation that still persecuted him.

Instead, he had affairs with women who also had complicated backgrounds, women he felt he could be open and sexually expressive with.

Tim was successful and confident on the outside, but on the inside he felt the opposite. His solution to this was ‘splitting’ – leading a double life.

Eventually his wife discovered his infidelity and she insisted he seek help. Tim remained in therapy for many years and he and his wife had couples therapy too. Together they finally began to understand how they could function in a more intimate and honest way.

The marriage survived, and Tim could recognise his wife as needing him, too, despite her apparent invincibility.

He de-idealised her and saw her as someone who also had needs. With his own pain lessened, he could reciprocate the caring.

AN AFFAIR INSTEAD OF SUFFERING

When someone in a long-term relationship feels profoundly neglected, an affair can occasionally be a shift to something healthier.

For someone starved of affection and respect, a new relationship can emphasise the deficits of an unhappy one. This does not excuse infidelity, which is still an act of betrayal whatever the circumstances, but it can mean it has a less harmful outcome.

Another of my patients, Tobias, had been belittled by his wife for many years. She criticised him for his failure to get a top management job at his company, his weight gain and his lack of hobbies. He put up with her contempt, he told me, like ‘my father did with my spiteful mother’.

Once they both retired, Tobias’s wife complained he was ‘in her way’ even more.

To get away, Tobias helped out at a local charity. A fellow volunteer who he described as the first woman who was ‘kind to me’ became his lover.

For him, and other men in similar positions, an affair seems to represent the only way out of an unhappy relationship. Like his father, Tobias had spent decades with a woman who attacked his sense of self and masculinity.

Therapy allowed Tobias to see the repetitive cycle he had been stuck in: believing that he would never be worthy of someone’s kindness and respect.

Tobias eventually left his lonely marriage and began to date his volunteer companion.

He wanted to maintain his independence and they did not move in together, instead enjoying their shared pastimes and holidays together.

AN AFFAIR TO DENY AGEING

As with menopause, men experience hormonal shifts in midlife which can affect mood and behaviour. With ageing, libidinal and physical changes occur including weaker erections, which terrify some men.

It may be a cliche but it’s true that having an affair with someone younger is often a defence mechanism for men who are fearful of their declining potency and attractiveness and are experiencing a sense of their own mortality.

Robert told me his affair with a woman two decades his junior was because his sex drive was incompatible with his wife of 25 years. He even blamed her menopause for his infidelity.

I suggested, however, that his infidelity stemmed more from his own unhappiness about their inability to communicate, especially about their sadness at being empty nesters.

Robert couldn’t acknowledge his or his wife’s sadness at the changes. Their distant relationship had been disguised by the chaos and fun of family life and neither of them knew how to move into a different chapter of their lives.

Long-term couple’s therapy helped them to grieve the end of their lives as full-time parents and eventually recover from the damage his affair caused.

Names and identifying details have been changed.

Affairs by Juliet Rosenfeld (Bluebird, £20) is out now.