The past few years of my lives, I have been attending more and more weddings of my friends. Everyone my age or younger even seems to be getting married. Heck last year one of my best friends Pierre got married and next year Hasan, another one of my best friends will be getting married.
Lets not forget KY and Haze who are getting married too.
When it’s happening around you, it’s only natural that you start thinking about it. At the same time because a lot of the people I hang out with are older than me I hear a lot about how married life is like and I’ve learned of so many of my friends who got married and are cheating on their wives/husbands now. Some got divorced, some are still together.
It really made me wonder… is being married to one person for the rest of your life really hard? That’s what we were all brought up to be like. You know… when we were in college or in high school… that was the plan. We grow up, meet somebody, marry that somebody and have a happy family together. So whenever you heard about divorces, you think to yourself that they were just a bad couple. But then I start hearing it happen to friends whom I always thought would make it and I wonder then if it could happen to them… what makes us think that it would never happen to us one day many years into our marriage? Heck are we better than Tiger Woods or Bill Clinton?
I love Kitteh and I have never cheated on her or given her any reason to feel insecure that I might but is it too early and naive for me to say that I will never ever cheat in a marriage one day?
So I woke up one night thinking about this and I pulled myself out of my bed and sat on my study. There I opened Google and typed in the words “Why do women….”
And immediately the top search on Google Suggest was “Why do women cheat”.
Goes to show that I’m not the only one asking Google that question. Then I came across an article on AskMen. I didn’t end up with one answer but 10 answers on why women cheat on men. Click on the link to see the full 10 questions.
Sure some of the answers are because of “not enough sex” or “bedroom boredom but most of the reasons seem to center around the notion that women cheat for emotional reasons. Because they feel neglected, ignored or underappreciated. Because they feel emotional withdrawal, lack of intimacy or revenge on their man’s cheating. So basically according to that article… if a woman cheats… it’s almost always because the man had treated her wrong.What the hell?
Then I decided to do a search on “why do men…”
and look at the searches that were suggested by Google. Lots of women there searching on why men cheat it seems. Even many searching on “why do men like breast” but that’s a whole other issue there altogether. The most interesting article I found there was this one.
They listed 9 reasons but the number one reason was this:
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The No.1 reason: Men crave sexual “variety,” according to David Buss, professor of psychology at the University of Texas and author of The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating (BasicBooks).
“They’ve evolved the desire to be with different women,” he says.
That’s because it’s very simple for men to reproduce (one act of sex versus nine months of pregnancy for women), so to create as many offspring as possible they’re biologically programmed to mate with many women.
“The ‘payoff’ in reproductive currencies [kids] of a short-term mating strategy generally has been higher for men than women,” Buss says.
So after thousands of generations, “this has forged in the male brain a desire for sexual variety.”
Other top reasons men cheat? They’re unhappy with their mates – and extramarital sex is cheaper and easier to get these days, Buss says.
And “power wives” beware: Being married to a high-profile guy ups the odds he’ll wander.
“Women are attracted to men who have power and status, so public figures usually have plenty of opportunity,” Buss says.
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There is actually a “biological explanation” on why men cheat… well among many other non-biological reasons (and not that this should be used as an excuse in any case). If you read on the article though it tells you the 9 other “excuses” men give for cheating like : “She’s not what she used to be, she’s a ball buster or it’s just the thrill”.
So with all this knowledge… what is it that we really need in order to have a good faithful marriage? What does it take? And how likely is that in life?
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space