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7 Sure-Fire Ways to Prevent an Affair
As a marriage and family counselor I am always
dealing with issues of sexuality, infidelity, and
betrayal as well as intimacy, honesty, courage, and
integrity. A rash of recent public scandals –
from Tiger Woods to David Letterman, from Sen. John
Ensign to Gov. Mark Sanford, to the suspected
shenanigans of Jon Gosselin of reality TV's Jon and
Kate – might make it seem that sexual
infidelity is sweeping the land. Many of my clients
want to know how to prevent an affair. Here’s
what I tell them.
1. Renew Your Vows Every 7 Years.
There’s a joke I heard that could even be
true. A man and a woman have been married for 57
years and their friends and family are throwing a
party for them to celebrate so many years of love.
After the party the woman says to the man, “It
was a wonderful gathering and I’m so glad all
our family and friends could get together to
celebrate with us.
“But I have a question that has been
bothering me for years. Why don’t you ever
tell me you love me?”
The man looks at his wife of 57 years with
surprise. “Why I did tell you I loved you the
day we got married. If I should change my mind,
I’ll let you know.”
Too many people assume their relationship will
just coast along once it gets started. Well, it
won’t. My wife and I have been married 31
years. It is the third marriage for both of us.
Every 7 years, we renew our vows and recommit to
our marriage. And we tell each other often, “I
love you.”
2. Don’t Let Nature Take Its Course.
Many people assume that if two people love each
other and trust each other they don’t have to
worry about affairs. Nothing could be further from
the truth. Biologically speaking we come together
in order to create children who we can raise until
they are of an age where they can have their own
children.
Through most of human history, when we reached
the age of 40 or so, our children were grown and on
their own and we enjoyed the last few years of our
lives and then quickly died. Now that we’re
living through our 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and
more and more of us into our 100s, we need to
rethink marriage.
Nature is through with us a lot sooner than
we’re ready to check out. We have to continue
to renew our vows to ourselves, to stay committed
to life, even though nature may be pulling us to
the great beyond.
3. Our Biology Wants Older Men To Cheat On
Their Wives. Think of the world through the
eyes of your genes. Their goal is to get themselves
passed on. The only way they can do that is to get
another human to have sex with the body that houses
those genes and hope a baby is created. It is a
biological reality that women reach an age when
they can no longer reproduce. We call it menopause.
Men reach an age when their hormones begin to drop
and they become more and more irritable and antsy.
We call it “male menopause.”
However, for men, we can still have babies later
in life. But only with a woman who is young enough
to conceive. So our biology pulls men away from
their mid-life wives into the arms of someone
younger and more reproductively capable.
When he says, “I love you, but I’m not
‘in love’ with you” what he really
means is that “I don’t feel that crazy,
biological lust that makes me want to have you on
the dining room table.” So what’s to do?
You must talk about this reality. Confront the
issue head on and learn that there is more to life
than sex.
4. Learn Why Sex is Not the Answer to the
Brain’s Big Question. According to author
Mark Brady, there’s one big question that all
brains want answered, and they want it answered,
“Yes.” Parent’s brains,
children’s brains, all brains. And they
don’t want a lukewarm “Yes,” or a
“Maybe Yes” or a “Getting-to-Yes
Yes.” They want a substantial, resounding,
unequivocal, “YES!” Yes.
Brady says that the brain’s big question is
“Are You There For Me?” He tell us that
our children’s brains (and our own as well!)
are continually asking this basic question, whether
we’re aware of it or not. The question takes
many forms in children’s brains and resulting
behavior, of course: Do I matter enough that
you’ll put me first when I need you to –
ahead of your job, ahead of your friends, even
sometimes ahead of yourself? Can I count on you to
attend to me in the ways I need you to? Do I truly
and deeply matter to you? These questions are being
asked – nonverbally through behavior often
– and when they get answered “Yes,”
our children can relax and begin to feel safe, just
as we are often able to do in our own intimate and
business relationships.
The self-preservation structures of the brain
continually monitor our environment and the people
in it for safety. Our survival depends upon it. We
generally love the people we feel the safest being
around, and the emotional responsiveness often
identified as love arises out of this safe
“felt sense.” Canadian psychologist,
Susan Johnson thinks about it this way: “These
safe bonds reflect deep primal survival needs for
secure, intimate connection to irreplaceable
others. These needs go with us from the cradle to
the grave.”
And this is a key issue. We have these needs for
care and support throughout our lives. In fact, as
we get older and we experience the inevitable
losses of health and well-being, we need this
support even more. Want to prevent an affair? Be
there, really be there for your partner.
5. Quit Demeaning Men. At the height of
the “women’s movement” there was a
joke circulating around, attributed to Gloria
Steinem. “A woman needs a man, like a fish
needs a bicycle.” The sentiment may have been
that women need to learn to stand on their own feet
and take care of themselves. They have to stop
making their identity dependent on having a man in
their lives.
But the impact on men was devastating. If I am
as irrelevant to my woman as a bicycle is to a
fish, then why stay? Most men have a strong desire
to protect and serve a woman. However, if we are
not needed or wanted, or if our offers of support
are seen as a big joke, well…”screw
you” we say to ourselves. Our shame and rage
get expressed in our cheating.
Few women consciously shame or demean the men in
their lives. I’ve found that this most often
happens when women are afraid. It’s a vicious
cycle. If a woman feels that she can’t trust
the man to be there for her, she distances herself
a little bit. The man, feeling her distance,
becomes irritable and angry. The woman, feeling the
brunt of his anger, becomes even more afraid that
he’ll leave. The result is that we create the
very thing we are most afraid of.
Women are constantly telling me that they want
their man to open up to her, to share his true
feelings. However, what I’ve found (and many
men have told me), when we do open up and share our
feelings, the woman often rejects us. Usually when
they say they want to know how we feel, they mean
“I want you to shower me with love and
affection.” When they hear how angry, hurt,
and frightened we are, they often run and hide.
Mark Brady had a professor in graduate school, a
wise woman who understood these things. She told
the women in her class, “Ladies,” she
said, “if you want your partners to be
emotionally available to you, you can’t cut
their balls off every time they show some
vulnerability.”
6. Get Thee to a Men’s Group.
Tomorrow I fly to Arizona to meet with my
men’s group. We’ve been meeting together
for 31 years—7 guys who are committed to
supporting each other through life. We came
together at a men’s conference in April, 1979
and have been together ever since.
We used to meet every week for a three hour
session. But over the years some of us moved away
from the place in Marin County, California where
the group had formed. Rather than stop the group,
we decided to meet less often, but for a longer
period. We’ll fly in on Wednesday morning and
stay until Sunday.
What will we talk about? What will we do? Well,
I can’t say. Not because it’s a big
secret, but because I won’t know until we get
there. What I can say is that it will be real. It
will be loving. We trust each other enough to let
our feelings out—the good, the bad, and the
ugly. But most of all we are there for each
other.
I believe that few long term relationships can
survive unless men get away together. If you
don’t have men who are there for you and who
you can be there for, you will have a difficult
time being there for women. You will always be
hungry, always be needy, always be restless, always
be looking for someone or something to fill the
void you feel inside.
7. Grow Up Guys. The World Needs You.
When I see men like Tiger Woods, John Edwards, Bill
Clinton, and all the other cheaters, I see wounded,
immature men. They may be the famous ones we hear
about, but there are millions of other men just
like them. I know, I used to be one myself. I wrote
a whole book about it: Looking for Love in All the
Wrong Places: Overcoming Romantic and Sexual
Addictions.
I applaud Tiger Wood’s willingness to get
himself into treatment, even if he waited until he
was forced to do so by his wife. When we become
seriously disconnected from our own courageous
souls, we need a kick in the butt from someone who
cares, who is truly there for us, to get us back on
track.
Listen guys, we can’t keep acting out our
wounds by escaping from our pain into the arms of a
woman. And we can’t keep waiting for women who
hold us accountable for our actions. We need to
deal with our woundedness before the roof falls in
on us.
And if you haven’t noticed, the roof is
caving in. The old systems are falling apart every
where we look. Our economic system is about to
collapse. The headlines in today’s paper asks,
Has the Golden State Gone Bankrupt? We are
destroying the environment and poisoning our
life-support system with greenhouse gases.
We need men of courage, men of commitment, men
of honor to stand with women of like heart and mind
to lead the way if we are going to survive as a
species. Sure, we all have fantasies about getting
“a little extra on the side.” But grow up
guys. There are more important things we have to
do. The world needs us. Our wives need us. Our
children and grandchildren need us.
©2010 Jed
Diamond
See Books,
Issues
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Wealth can't buy health, but health can buy
wealth. - Henry David Thoreau
Jed Diamond
is the internationally best-selling author of eight
books including Male
Menopause, now
translated into 17 foreign languages. Other books
include Looking
for Love in All the Wrong
Place,
The
Irritable Male Syndrome: Managing. The 4 Key Causes
of Depression and
Aggression and his
latest book Mr.
Mean: Saving Your Relationship from the Irritable
Male Syndrome. For over
45 years he has been a leader in the field of men's
health. He is a member of the International
Scientific Board of the World Congress on
Men’s Health and has been on the Board of
Advisors of the Men’s Health Network since its
founding in 1992. His work has been featured in
major newspapers throughout the United States
including the New York Times, Boston Globe, Wall
Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, and USA
Today. He has been featured on more than 1,000
radio and T.V. programs including The View with
Barbara Walters, Good Morning America, Inside
Edition, CBS, NBC, and Fox News, To Tell the Truth,
Extra, Leeza, Geraldo, and Joan Rivers. He also did
a nationally televised special on Male Menopause
for PBS. To receive a Free E-book on Men’s
Health and a free subscription to Jed’s
e-newsletter go to www.menalive.com
 .
If you are looking for an expert counselor to help
with relationship issues, contact Jed at
E-Mail.
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