Why Do Women Have Affairs?

There are many reasons why women have affairs. The convenience of finding someone online makes it easier than it was just decades ago. Now, with many couples working different shift patterns or women longer hours and being able to lie about working late to cover up their affairs, it’s harder for them to be found out. Aside from the convenience, there are often problems in the relationship, or the marriage has become routine, and the wife wants some excitement in her life.

In many ways, married women and affairs share similarities with men who cheat on their wives. It can happen for several reasons and be purely about sex or finding an emotional connection. Sometimes it can be both.

A Girl Cheats on Her Husband: The Main Reasons

If you want to know what makes a woman cheat on her husband, let’s focus on 5 common reasons women might use for the cause of infidelity.

• Not feeling loved can lead women to seek this feeling elsewhere. If one or both partners work long and conflicting hours, causing them to hardly see each other or spend quality time together, the relationship can feel like it’s lost something important. By trying to replace what is lost, it could be a sign there is a problem in the marriage, which needs working on if you want the marriage to survive.
• As many women who work also take on most of the household and childcare duties, she might cheat because she feels lonely. It could feel like she hardly sees her husband and does all or most of the work at home with no help or support. Forming an emotional connection with someone else can make her feel less isolated, even if, in the long-term, her secret causes a bigger divide in the marriage.
• Alternatively, if a married couple is no longer having regular sex, she might crave intimacy and excitement, so she seeks that by sleeping with someone else. If there’s a problem in the marriage or the husband isn’t in the mood, it may be difficult for him to get aroused. For many women, this feels like rejection on some level. Even knowing there is another reason rarely makes it any easier to deal with. They can feel like if their husband really felt attracted to them, the other issues wouldn’t affect his performance in the bedroom.
• Husband infidelity in marriages is another reason a wife might choose to seek out an affair. If there are children involved and other commitments such as a mortgage and shared finances, the wife might stay and try to save the marriage. However, it will always be on her mind whenever he comes home late or smells of someone else’s perfume. Whether intentionally or not, she might seek out an affair or give in to an attraction to someone else as a way of retaliating.
• Another reason could be linked to low self-confidence. If at the beginning of the relationship more effort was made; romantic dates, unexpected little gifts, compliments, but now these are more infrequent, she might feel like he doesn’t feel the same way as he used to. Attention from another man could play on her confidence issues and make her feel like someone is more interested in her than her husband seems to be. There might not be the same intimacy and knowledge of each other in the affair as it was in the marriage, but she wants to feel desired.

What Drives a Woman to Cheat?

If you’re wondering how many marriages have infidelity, it really depends on which area of the world you live in, but it can be between 15 - 20%, which sounds a lot. However, it can also depend on a person’s definition of cheating. One husband will consider his wife cheating if she’s emotionally involved with another man. Another will only consider it as cheating if his woman has sex with someone else.

Knowing what causes a woman to cheat can help determine the problem, but ultimately, the husband has to be able to forgive her if he stays. Otherwise, the relationship will become bitter and accusatory.

Finding out why a woman has cheated involves the husband and wife talking and being honest with each other. This can be difficult for both of them. The wife will find it difficult to say what she really feels, and the husband might struggle to hear it. She might sound like she’s accusing him when she tries to explain, and the natural response for him is to be defensive. Then it can escalate into an argument. This is why marriage counseling exists, so that calm but honest discussions can occur in a controlled space. Talking about personal issues in front of a stranger isn’t the easiest thing to do, but if the couple wants the marriage to work, it can be the best way to get everything out in the open.

Knowing whether it’s a lack of excitement or intimacy in the relationships or a need for an emotional connection will help both of them develop ways to work on these issues. Although, it may just be that the relationship is wrong for both the husband and wife. If they married young and had few or no other serious relationships before, it can feel like they are missing out.

A wife might cheat on her husband because she’s seen her husband looking appreciatively at or flirting with other women. Even if he hasn’t taken the step of actual cheating, it can feel like a betrayal. By being the first to cheat, she tells herself that he would eventually have done the same thing. Or she might be curious about experiences with other people.

Depending on the age of the woman, she might be having a midlife crisis. Both men and women have a point in their lives where they question their decisions and how things turned out. Life can become routine, and if the opportunity comes along, they can get caught up in the moment. The thrill of having something new and different in her life could be the reason a woman lets a one-off spur-of-the-moment mistake develop into a full-blown affair.

Is It Okay to Cheat on Your Husband?

Women having affairs with women can add an extra layer of excitement for some wives, even if they have never previously thought of another woman either sexually or romantically. Of course, it’s never okay to cheat on your husband, but they are reasons it might be more understandable. If the affair with the other woman is a result of suppressing an attraction to women in general for most of her life, then it was likely to happen eventually. Being in a marriage with the wrong person and gender while pushing down your true feelings isn’t healthy in any relationship. If the husband and wife have been married for a long time, it’s possible that she felt unable to come out and admit her sexuality before they got married because views were less progressive back then. So, that doesn’t mean cheating is right, but it’s easy to see why it would happen.

If you’re wondering, does every woman cheat, then the answer is no, but if a woman has married for the wrong reasons, such as pressure from family, or unplanned pregnancy, she might cheat because her husband isn’t the right person for her.

Some women will be in an abusive marriage, either emotionally, sexually, or physically, and seek whatever is missing. That may be love or something they mistake for love, someone different from their husband, or an emotional connection where sex has little or nothing to do with the affair. These are all understandable reasons for fulfilling a need. Ideally, it’s best to work on the marriage if there’s no underlying abuse or leave if the husband if he’s abusive, but this isn’t always straightforward.

Having children together, or if her husband controls her finances, or she’s afraid of what will happen if she’s leave, can all be reasons for a wife to stay with her husband. If the connection with another man is an emotional one, the line can become blurred and feel like a close friendship, but if she finds herself sharing more personal details with him than she does with her own husband, it is still cheating, even without sex. She might welcome the escape from her own problems and fantasize about leaving her husband for him just because she wants to escape.

If a wife cheats to get revenge on a husband who cheated first, it doesn’t necessarily make it okay, but it’s another reason that people can understand, whether they agree with it or not.

Infidelity can be complex, and some instances are always going to be easier to understand than others. However, it’s important to stop and think before acting on an impulse or a long-term attraction to someone else. If you think you might regret it, don’t do it, and if your relationship isn’t working, try to fix it if you can.