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It really is amazing how many issues both very online men and women could avoid by not getting involved with clearly unstable, messy, mentally by ill people.
At my last job I sat next to and was good friends with our team secretary, who was an avid reader of the British tabloid celeb sections and various gossip magazines / websites. One thing you quickly realized is that most of the women the soccer players and reality TV stars cheated with were much uglier than their wives and girlfriends, often objectively ugly, even. Sexiness isn’t really the point, male sexuality isn’t picky; many men seem to care about relative looks (say, a 7 vs a 10) only because having a hotter girlfriend makes them feel better and confers upon them more status and value as a man, when it comes to sex alone their standards are minimal at best, it’s mainly about convenience.
Of course monogamy is ‘unnatural’, it is literally a social institution, it is man-made. Humans pair bond in a way, but we aren’t naturally monogamous (like some birds? idk I’m not a bird scientist); if we were then so many of the institutions that stringently regulate and try to contain sexual exclusivity, from the niqab to marriage, would be unnecessary. Monogamy is a social contract. Even women are naturally less monogamous than is often socially assumed, women are just less horny.
But that something is an institution rather than natural doesn’t make it a bad idea, and monogamy was invented in many societies independently likely because it helps maintain social stability, because you don’t want a lot of unmarried, unmoored men floating around who can’t get laid.
It is almost always possible to predict whether a woman will stay or not. Usually it has nothing to do with the man’s status and surprisingly little to do with money (for example, Eric Schmidt’s long suffering wife could divorce him for many billions easily, but chooses to stay with him). Rather it has to do with a certain attitude or temperament toward other women.
This is hard to explain, but there are women who have more of a competitive, spiteful relationship with other women (especially but far from exclusively in relation to men), and those who are less likely to see them as the enemy. This is poorly explained, the reality is much more complex, but I find it hard to put it into words except in as much as I hope that gestures toward what I mean. The former go through female friends very quickly, with frequent drama and fighting, the latter have close women friends for many years. In the modern west, the former have more male friends, the latter fewer, although I think this dynamic far precedes most women having any male friends at all. I think there are subtle differences in sexuality too, but I’m less sure of these. Phrases like ‘not like other girls’ or ‘girl’s girl’ gesture toward these types, but mostly are just insults or excuses to call other women whores, which is of course one of the great pleasures of life.
But to go back to the point, it’s paradoxically the former type - the woman whose relationship with women is more adversarial, who is often more headstrong, has more male friends, is more competitive, who is more likely to stay with a cheating man. She is the person who can frame staying as ‘winning’ over the other woman (as in this case), as keeping the hot commodity. I suspect she is more likely to have tattoos. The woman who is less competitive, has more close female friends, fewer male ones, is more likely to listen to the former and break up with her cheating man, possibly has a more romantic view of affection that isn’t primarily framed in terms of competition with other women.
(Interestingly, the not-a-girl’s-girl, more competitive, more male friends type is often less likely to cheat herself, because the shame of her man finding out and leaving her scares her more than anything.)
The Coolidge effect is an incredibly powerful force. As at least one commenter pointed out before me, if you're looking to get your rocks off, having an affair (thereby exposing yourself to scandal, divorce, losing half of your assets, child support payments etc.) is vastly less "convenient" than just having sex with your wife.
I was thinking about this the other day, and I'm wondering if there might be some kind of perceptual component to the Coolidge effect. That is, it's not merely that sexual novelty is an important component of the male sex drive, but that the male brain so wants us to "be fruitful and multiply" that our brains are wired in such a way that they will literally make women appear more attractive to us than they "really" are prior to us having sex with them. La petite mort/post-nut clarity seems to be such a universal male experience, there must be something to it. (Probably the timescale is longer for women, which is why the end of limerence seems to come after weeks or months rather than minutes/hours.)
I don't know how you'd get this past an IRB board, but it'd be fascinating to do a study like this. Get a bunch of men and women who don't know each other in a speed-dating event. The men are asked to rate women's attractiveness on a scale of 1-10 (we could couple this with objective data like hooking them up to a heart rate monitor, measuring how damp their palms are, penile tumescence etc.). Some of the men will have sex with some of the women. Then, at least a day after their first sexual encounter, ask the men to rate the attractiveness of the women they've had sex with on a scale of 1-10. I would predict that the average rating would shift down by about a point, corresponding with decreased physiological excitement.
It's kind of creepy to think that, if I find a woman attractive, I might be partly hallucinating that.
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It's about many things but if it was mainly about convenience men would just fuck their wives. It's about variety and enthusiasm.
This assumes their wives acquiesce to sex whenever they want, which is surely untrue in many cases.
No, it assumes most wives acquiesce to sex a reasonable amount and that sexlessness doesn't occur ex nihilo. Men who are attracted to their wives have sex with their wives.
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How prevalent male infidelity really is? I assume most men do fuck their wives, for as long as the wives are convenient about it.
Among the popular elite who get the opportunity to engage in infidelity with enthusiasitc young attractive women? Practically universal.
I mean it’s a tabloid story every time these people do it, so I’m sure ‘practically universal’ is overstating it.
Might vary by type of celebrity too. The tabloids seem to report that many WAGs just know that it's the cost of doing business, with maybe the expectation that the athlete is discreet. Does the same apply to relatively equal status actors ?
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No, there emphatically isn't. There is a tabloid story when someone makes a stink or something egregious happens. The tabloids also make up stories because reality isn't very interesting.
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Old British political joke. "There are only a dozen women* uglier than Hilary Clinton. Do you know how much effort it must have taken for Bill to cheat on her with all of them?"
* Pre-menopausal and not visibly deformed is kind of assumed here.
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I think people interpreted my words as me being anti-monogamy. That’s not the case, I like the benefits of monogamy. I consider it a worthwhile sacrifice like going to the gym for better long-term health is. Also on a societal level it’s clearly the best arrangement. Fertility rates would plummet without it.
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