Women Having Affairs
Peggy Vaughan, the founder of DearPeggy.com and the Beyond Affairs Network, is a noted leader in the field of infidelity recovery. Her books include “The Monogamy Myth,” “Recovering From Affairs,” and “Beyond Affairs,” among others.
After Beyond Affairs was published in 1980, I heard from hundreds of people who described their own experiences. About ninety percent of those who wrote were women whose husbands had had affairs.
By 1990, after the publication of "The Monogamy Myth," the people who contacted me were both women AND men. (In fact, almost 50% of the people I've heard from since that time have been men whose wives have had affairs. And among those who seek personal telephone consulting, about 75% are men; which no doubt reflects men's greater effort to keep others from knowing about the affair.)
While societal factors, such as the depiction of women as "sex objects," have long contributed to men having affairs, we now see societal factors that specifically affect women. For instance, in 1996 there was a successful novel about a woman having a secret affair—and the book was widely promoted with large ads suggesting, "Every woman deserves one" and "Give her what she most desires..."
Men and women express the same emotions of "devastation" when they learn of their partner's affair. In addition, men have to struggle with the idea that it's somehow "worse" for a man to have an unfaithful wife than for a woman to have an unfaithful husband. This attitude is based on a couple of outdated beliefs.
First, wives were once seen as the property of their husbands and men were expected to "keep their wives in line." It was a blemish on their manhood if they failed to maintain this control.
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