Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free

by Wednesday Martin

But the participants in her study wanted sex badly enough that they willingly took these chances. They had run the calculus and considered the options: cheat for sexual satisfaction and accept the risk it entailed; don’t cheat and continue to live without satisfying sex, or any sex at all; be openly non-monogamous and risk almost certain stigma in their communities and blowback from their husbands, including, possibly, divorce; initiate divorce, thus, in the words of one woman, “dismantling my life and breaking my husband’s heart as well as my own.” Divorce could mean custody issues, financial hardship, and the loss of social and family support. In Walker’s formulation, “These women were unwilling to toss the dice a second time on marriage and risk ending up with a lesser hand than the one they currently held.” They efficiently pursued what they wanted and confounded our received script that women don’t care about or need sex the way men do, and that women who have affairs fall in love and inevitably “destroy their marriages” because “women who have affairs want emotional connection, not sex.”