Are some men hardwired to be adulterers or is it brazen opportunism? Peadar de Burca spoke to 250 unfaithful men to discover the answer.
I interviewed a 34-year-old retired London soccer player who never made the big time. He carried around that perceived failure like a weight. This man’s lack of success was everyone else’s fault: his manager’s, his agent’s, his wife’s. Unlike his career, his cheating never waned, reaching an apotheosis where he would take any woman he could back to his house, while his family lay in their beds. His life had been held together with tinsel, spit and glue, and now that he was retired, he didn’t even have the tinsel. His wife had kicked him out before I met him, and he was living in a studio apartment. I wanted to know why he put cheating ahead of his family. “I’ve had too many lows in my life,” he said. “Women are the best high I’ve ever had and no one is going to make me regret a thing.” I glanced at his badly eaten fingernails and oversized cheap jewellery and thought to myself that he looked like a ruined man.
Cheats initially project the very image of heartiness: an easy smile, a laugh, a little bit of what you fancy. Spend enough time with them, ask the right questions, and the facade starts to crumble. Social status is no insulation: The profession that popped up the most from my 250 interviews? Doctors.
A gastroenterologist I talked to wasn’t happy with himself and he wasn’t happy with his wife. I knew Phillip before I interviewed him. His late-30s face had a roguish slant to it that marked him as a man’s man. Phillip didn’t see the point of himself unless he was achieving more. And, at the same time, he wondered why his wife wasn’t achieving more. I knew his wife to be intelligent, beautiful and loving, but that didn’t stop Phillip from having an affair with a Scandinavian doctor.
To outsiders, Phillip was an ambitious, driven man with all the trappings of success. The new woman reflected a new him—a rebooted Phillip 2.0—but the neurotic virus of uncertainty was always lurking. I had never known Phillip to enjoy what he had. The cheating didn’t fulfill him either: The affair ended when he grew tired of her obsession with maintaining her athletic figure and her constant need to achieve. She was, he admitted, a little too much like himself. While being interviewed, he expressed his love for his wife, but it was perfunctory and followed by a chilling lack of compassion. “I love her, but she let me down so I’ve never felt guilty. She stopped being the woman I married seven years ago. I don’t think she would have even noticed my affair if I hadn’t been so bloody blatant.”
What women who have been cheated on have to say on the next page...
