ColumnWhy do women cheat? A recent study has found – prepare to be SHOCKED – that they cheat because they’re horny.

The fact that we needed a study to uncover this deep, dark mystery is the real problem here – not the fact that women are sometimes compelled to cheat. We live in a world that still – in 2014, for god sake’s – is shaken when women admit that they need sexual release.

Why do women cheat? For the same reasons men do. Yet the Internet, upon discovering this study, was shocked to find that women are not sitting around all day, waiting for our prince to deliver us from our idle housewife lives, untie our corsets so that he can have his way with us. But we won’t enjoy it!!!! No, not unless he wants us to appear as if we do, because it turns him on. (And feminism never existed, either.)

It’s fun to laugh at the Internet’s penchant for getting its panties in a twist over things that we should all know by now, yet these antiquated notions about women’s sexuality persist and persist and persist.

The study in question, even though it hints at an obvious truth, is problematic in the ways these studies of sexuality tend to be. It employs a small sample size and was led by a scientist who works for AshleyMadison.com – a website that caters to people in relationships looking for extramarital affairs. Oh, and the participants were actual women using this “cheating site” – those already looking for a fling. (As an aside, next time you date online, unless you’re cool with having your personal life, emails to potential lovers, and other information mined for studies, I suggest you carefully read the terms of service before you click “accept.”)

I’m bothered that we’re even searching for an answer to the question “why do women cheat?” — have we asked this question about men? No, we just assume, as we’re socialized to do, that they are led by their penises and cheat because they want sex. The thing about this study that seemed to surprise those analyzing the data was that women didn’t want to leave their marriages – they just wanted some damn good sex. They wanted to preserve their partnerships for whatever reason – for companionship, children, financial reasons – but they did want sex elsewhere.

Our culture is not quite at grips with the fact that women’s sexuality is just as, if not more, primed for novelty than men’s. The women in this study were between 35 and 45. Because we’re so habituated to the myth of “til’ death do us part” when we sign up for marriage, it can come as a shock when after three, five, or seven years of monogamy – it’s no longer enough.

We’re taught that if we have love, we’ll never desire another man or woman’s body – and more than that, that sex isn’t as important as companionship, financial reliability, good parenting – all the other aspects of marriage. Sex is like icing – if we meet someone who’s offering us a cake made of all the proper ingredients of partnership, we can forego the sweetness we truly desire.

Number one, I say put the icing first when you’re dating. Because if you end up marrying someone who doesn’t make your toes tingle, you’ll miss it later on. That’s the first step – recognizing and honoring our authentic desires and sexual needs, straight from the start, and not settling for someone who’s merely meeting our practical needs. We have other needs, and they must not be kept in the shadows.

Two, when and if you do put a ring on it, know at the outset that even if you’re over-the-moon hot for your betrothed, you may not always be. Don’t be afraid to have that talk. You may not always be, and hey – he might not always be either.

If you’re at the stage where your partner is still getting most of marriage right, but you’re just not sexually attracted to him anymore, first – forgive yourself. You are normal – you are the many, not the few. Those of us who can stay attracted to a long-term partner for many years are rare creatures indeed. If you’re that woman, god bless you, and rock on. But if you’re most women, you may need someone else at some point – and you shouldn’t go through a major shame spiral if you feel it.

Women are socialized to believe that our sexuality is not our own — we learn to navigate other people’s desires before we recognize ours as real. Instead of waiting, and wanting to be wanted, women need to embrace our sexual needs earlier in life — not halfway into our marriages.

Got a question for Stefanie? Email stefanie@ecosalon.com and she’ll answer it in the next Sexual Healing column.

Keep in touch with Stefanie on Twitter: @ecosexuality

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ColumnA petulant husband recently emailed his wife a sex spreadsheet, detailing all the moments she’d rejected his sexual advances during the previous month. She posted it on Reddit, where her sexcuses quickly went viral. The Internet had a solid laugh.

Aside from the much-needed LOL we got from the sex spreadsheet story during a week of grueling, awful news, it brings up an important question – is it possible to owe your partner sexual satisfaction in the same way you owe payments on your student loan? In short, no. But it’s not always that simple.

When, if, how and why we have sex within our committed relationships is generally fraught with complexity and confusion. We’re understandably made more vulnerable when our advances are rebuffed – this is true for men and women, gay and straight people and everyone in-between. Every relationship and its attendant sexual rhythm is unique — yet some gender stereotypes still prevail.

In the old story, when heterosexual men signed up for marriage, they bought a virgin with an engagement ring. Put a ring on it and your wifey will put a ring on… well, you get my point.

Three months salary is probably worth it to the men who continue to think these antiquated thoughts. After choosing a mate the “man of the house” expects that his partner’s “wifely duty” will be done as compensation for his hard work – this absurd bit of misogyny seemed to hit its apotheosis in the middle of the 20th century. Oh, 1950s – you were just the best.

This model of sexual relations is grounded in the idea that women have no sexual desire, let alone sexual agency. Forget about love, romance, or sex – this worldview says all women are seeking is a good provider. That this outmoded concept (how it was ever “moded” I have no idea) still propels so many men – and women – into marriage is unthinkable, especially to those of us who have heard of feminism.

The first husband’s sex spreadsheet begat another wife’s sex spreadsheet. Equality! (These two are not married to each other, just to be clear.)

What this sex spreadsheet-making is really doing is telling us that a lot of people have crappy sex lives and that they resent it enough to make it public. I don’t know how their sex lives got to be that way, but I can take a stab at why the womenfolk are unsatisfied.

Women aren’t taught to value sex – we hear so often that we’re biologically primed to value romance and companionship over carnal desire that we eventually believe this defines who we are. Evolutionary psychology continues to attempt to use “science” to prove that men want the sex and women want the money. Except they’re taking somewhat recently established cultural norms, ones that have clear historical trajectories, and trying to prove that our paleo ancestors must’ve felt the same way. Instead of parsing the history, they’re looking at the “Real Housewives” and reducing it to, “Me cave man, you woman.” And it ever was thus. Except it wasn’t.

More and more science is showing that, in fact, women’s sexual desire has deeper wells than men’s does. The old trope about men wanting/needing sex more than women is proving to be patently false. (I’ve often recommended Daniel Bergner’s “What Do Women Want” as a primer in this arena — if you’ve ever wondered about your own libido, or are just curious about the myths and realities of women’s desires — the history of our sexual longing — give it a read.)

So if there is indeed a an epidemic of women having classic headaches, feeling exhausted, or “sweaty and gross” to quote the original sex spreadsheet lady, and so on, what’s the deal?

Perhaps they never really wanted their husbands in the first place, but married them anyway. I think this is a lot more widespread than we ever considered. Because women are constantly told not just that their desire doesn’t matter, but that their libidos are weaker than men’s, why would they put sexual satisfaction high on their must-have list for marriage?

Also, WOMEN TRULY ARE EXHAUSTED. That’s not an excuse. We’re working full-time, raising children, cleaning houses and trying to “have it all” even though I don’t believe that’s really a thing because the wrong people are defining what “all” is. But that’s for another column.

Some women learn that it’s ok to have lots of sex in college, before marriage, but you “put those things away” once you settle down, thus settling for the good, unsexy guy. This, I guess, is supposed to be one step up from not being allowed to have sex at all, except for procreation. (There is a shockingly huge number of people that believe pleasure is a sin.)

I have nothing against good guys — long may they reign — but I do wonder if women are shutting down their natural libidos and “settling” in order to what — not be spinsters? Get the babies done? It all boils down to one thing — sexual needs are being met last. This doesn’t mean that you should spend your life chasing after bad boys — it just means you might want to consider seeking partners that meet ALL your needs. Why continue dating someone that doesn’t turn you on, with whom you have no chemistry — simply because he’s kind and seems to love you? Or that you get along really well? These are nice, important things — but check in with yourself to see if you’re devaluing your sexual needs because you think you need something else more.

Maybe you didn’t settle (or don’t plan to) but your partner isn’t trying as hard as he once did to please you. Maybe it was really hot at the beginning simply because the chemistry was off the hook — but now you need more and he’s not asking you what you need. Maybe you have secret fantasies that you’ve been too shy to share. Communication is the key to all of the above.

One final note on monogamy. I believe it’s not really possible long-term, despite every rom-com you’ve ever seen. If you’re two, three, five or seven years into a relationship and you’re feeling the itch — YOU ARE NORMAL. One way to deal with this is to tell your partner you have a headache, and live a life of quiet resignation, devoid of pleasure.

Another way is to be honest at the outset — with yourself and with your partner. Even the hottest, craziest sexual attraction can eventually wane — you have to be prepared to feel differently a few years down the road, without serving your partner a spreadsheet.

Join Stefanie on a journey to the authentic heart of your sexual self with Project 40: Sadism, Masochism, Sexuality & Shadow, an online 40-day tour through the heart of your psyche via intensive journaling, ritual, and guided daily emails. 

Got a question for Stefanie? Email stefanie at ecosalon dot com, and she’ll answer it in the next Sexual Healing column.

Keep in touch with Stefanie on Twitter: @ecosexuality

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ColumnHow do we tease apart the fundamental differences between jealousy and desire, when they are often literally and figuratively in bed together? It may seem impossible to avoid jealousy in relationships, but the polyamory community may be able to teach you a thing or two about the green monster.

A thread of fear, rage, humiliation, and abandonment: jealousy is a many-headed hydra that wells up in us from what feels like the primordial seat of our soul. It’s that dread rising up from your belly into your chest. It can make you feel like you’re going to disappear.

It’s easy to assume our jealousy in relationships comes from elsewhere – specifically from our partner’s behavior. After all, advice columns about jealousy tend to rehash the same tired territory. They’re often about an unusually jealous boyfriend who thinks his partner is cheating whenever she’s five minutes late, or accidentally glances at the waiter too long. (Note: that man is dangerous and you should probably leave him at the salad bar.) Can other people “make us” feel jealous? Or is this solely a projection of our own insecurities – relics of patterns that echo our relationship with our parents? What’s really beneath that terrible, if familiar sensation?

How we respond to jealousy says much about its essential source. Sometimes, if we’re with our partner, we say something cutting. If we’re alone, scanning through an exes’ flirty Facebook communiqués with “some girl” we might ask our friend to read them, seeking validation in our growing insecurity cum rage. Post-coitally, we might wonder if we performed well enough with a new or regular lover – is he/she thinking about someone else right now? Did they fantasize while we were making love?

There’s even the jealousy in relationships born of being with a partner who claims not to be jealous. (I have an ex who always said he wasn’t jealous, and it drove me nuts.)

In a culture (now a global culture) in which advertising drives our self-worth, and the concept of ownership informs every waking moment of our lives – is it such a surprise that we’d think we “own” our lovers, too? Compulsory monogamy is a product of capitalism, much the way that sneakers are a product of Nike. Your bare feet may not really need them, but boy oh boy – you believe you do in every cell of your body. Same for monogamous relationships – there’s a growing body of literature about why the marriage industrial complex was born.

You know who has a really sophisticated take on the subject of jealousy? The polyamory community. I’m not poly, but I’m intellectually with them 100 percent – they are incredibly evolved on the subject of sexuality. Think of their stance as the Paleo version of dating, mating, and relating. But even if you can’t imagine yourself ever experimenting with juggling multiple lovers at once, there’s much that these pioneers can teach you about feeling less jealous of your one and only. If anyone knows how to tame jealousy in relationships, it’s those who have multiple partners.

The best way to wrap your brain around the poly jealousy tutorial is to understand a concept that seems to have been invented by them – it’s called compersion. Compersion is defined by modernpoly.com as: “the experience of taking pleasure in the knowledge that one’s partner is experiencing pleasure, even if the source of their pleasure is other than yourself. The feeling may or may not be sexual.”

Ever felt it? There is definitely a learning curve here. Experiment – next time jealousy wells up in you, try flipping the script – what if you could feel joy instead of resentment? Much like meditation, when your mantra gets lost in a tangle of to-do lists and daily worries, you gently come back to it. Try that with compersion. Is there something your partner says or does that makes you smile? A gesture or sound or shows his/her pleasure? Now imagine yourself tasting that sweetness when he is talking to a pretty woman, and potentially enjoying it.

Here is what my poly friends have taught me about taming jealousy:

COMMUNICATE. That’s the key to everything. Don’t stew in your insecurity – talk about it, even if you feel silly. But don’t rage about it – wait until you can bring it up in a sensitive, non-accusatory way. After all – it’s probably about you, not about your partner. Remember that your feelings are rational – because they are your feelings. Don’t be mean to yourself about them. You’re working through them now and getting to the root of the dynamic.

Jealousy shouldn’t evoke guilt, but it often loops back on itself and makes you feel worse than you would if you were simply feeling jealous. Be gentle with yourself – this is a vulnerable moment. And then, when it comes back, as it inevitably will — just try it again. This ain’t your first rodeo (with jealousy) but it can be the beginning of a healthy, human, loving practice. It may do more than just heal your relationship – it could end up healing your relationship with yourself.

Got a question for Stefanie? Email  stefanie at ecosalon dot com and she’ll answer it in the next Sexual Healing column.

Keep in touch with Stefanie on Twitter: @ecosexuality

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ColumnI enjoy a good laugh at the expense of GOOP and Gwyneth Paltrow as much as the next person; it’s fairly irresistible material. After GP announced her breakup with Chris Martin this week, terming it “conscious uncoupling,” there was a viral pile-on of inevitable Paltrow-bashing  — but this is one bandwagon I’m not hopping on.

The now-infamous GOOP post about Martin and Paltrow’s impending divorce is embarrassingly New Age-y and steeped in various Chopra-isms, but before we throw “conscious uncoupling” out with the Italian Sparkling Mineral Water, let’s unpack what it really means. Of course, all the talk of insects and exoskeletons in the post made my exoskeleton crawl. Question for another day: Why do people insist on trying to fit everything they feel, do, see and experience into a version of the Paleo diet?

I know its hard, but let’s stop cracking jokes at Paltrow’s expense and look at our own messy lives for a moment. In many ways “conscious uncoupling” is simply shorthand for breaking up without completely breaking down (or breaking your ex-partner’s head, window, or stereo system – take your pick). It’s separating your lives without including all the ugliness we associate with divorce. It may seem nearly impossible to uncouple with grace, perhaps because we all watched “Kramer vs. Kramer” one too many times. Yet breaking up with a partner doesn’t require a war footing – even if you have good reasons to be angry at your ex.

To me, the root of “conscious uncoupling” is less about endings than it is about beginnings. If there is consciousness at the start, there is likely to be more groundedness and wisdom at the (inexorable) end. To me, conscious uncoupling is a doorway to unlearning everything you’ve ever been taught about love, romance, sex and the way relationships are forged. It’s about disentangling yourself from the complete rom-com-ification of your psyche — knowing that your life is not a fairy tale, and that finding your “one and only” is not your life’s purpose. Most of all, it’s about becoming less binary, and truly understanding why we’re not really built for monogamy. (Note to Gwyneth: this has little to do with grasshoppers.)

Perhaps our addiction to the dramatic, angry, vengeful breakup stems from our deeply misguided conception of love itself. Marriage, that sacred institution, will continue in an endless loop toward the inevitable fifty percent divorce rate if we continue to seek mates the way our ancestors did (and I don’t mean our Paleolithic ones). After all, marriage is a merely a convention – an apparatus birthed by capitalism that indicates ownership of property. We’re choosing our own partners now (at least we think we are – I’d argue that consumerism plays a huge role in our mating dance) but we’re still enmeshed in the constructs and contracts of the Victorian Age.

And as much as we’ve advanced since the first sexual revolution of the 1960s, relationships are one arena in which we’ve made much less progress than we think we have. Sure, women aren’t chattel anymore, but we continue to announce betrothals with engagement rings, a blingy down payment on a future sex partner. Considering the way we treat sex workers, it’s rather interesting that few balk at the idea of men symbolically buying their future brides with diamonds. Just sayin’.

These are institutionalized conventions that we haven’t shed yet, and it may be a while before we do. Before we can leave the antiquated concept of marriage to the annals of history, we have to first make it legal for all humans – we’re at least working towards that. Besides, it’s helpful for filing taxes.

I know I mention “Sex at Dawn” ad naseum in this column, but the poly community has a lot to teach us about jealousy, ego, and co-dependence – the downfall of many a short and long-term relationship. There’s a term often used in the poly community called “compersion” defined on Wikipedia as: “… an empathetic state of happiness and joy experienced when another individual experiences happiness and joy.” So instead of feeling jealous when our partner experiences pleasure from a source other than us, we feel pleasure derived from their pleasure.

Think about that for a moment. Do you feel joy when your partner does? Or does the idea of your lover experiencing happiness unrelated to your body, your ideas or thoughts or worldview, make you a little bit uncomfortable? What all of this really comes down to is that in an ideally balanced world, one where “consciousness” is not just a buzzword, we’d embark on relationships already whole. It is when we take our broken selves and try to solder them back together via a relationship that we fail. Not that we need to be whole before experiencing love — that would mean that very few of us would get the chance to be in relationships, as wholeness is a lifelong project.

The issue here, and the one embedded in the concept of “conscious uncoupling,” is that wholeness can only come from within. No partner can make you whole, even if you temporarily believe that to be the case. If you seek validation (sexual or otherwise) from others — you’ll always come crashing back to down to Earth, utterly defeated. Instead, the life-project, the bucket-list item, should not be “finding love” unless it starts with finding authentic self-love first.

We are fixated on forever, and we need to loosen our grip. Some of us will find and partner with people who will be our life-long loves. Some will even manage to have a thriving sex life for decades, even though this is quite rare. Some will be intentional serial monogamists (like me). Some would rather be alone, either after a long marriage, or no marriage at all. So let us go forward consciously coupling, uncoupling, and whatever comes in between. As long as we know that nothing is, or should be, forever.

Got a question for Stefanie? Email stefanie at ecosalon dot com and she’ll answer it in the next Sexual Healing column.

Keep in touch with Stefanie on Twitter: @ecosexuality

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“There’s no denying that we’re a species with a sweet tooth for sex.” -Christopher Ryan

Ask anyone who’s married or in a relationship of more than a few years: long-term commitment is HARD. Lately a few of my married friends have admitted that they’re feeling attracted to men who aren’t their husbands, and the guilt is just crushing them. It got me thinking: what makes lust for others start and what (if anything) makes it stop?

Attraction is a force nearly impossible to describe; only poets do it justice. We feel it; we don’t spend time analyzing it. And yet so many of us end up in sexless marriages or long-term relationships that deaden over time. Some get the two-year itch, the five-year itch, and the seven-year itch. But damn it – it’s quite an itch, and not scratching it can lead to frustration, projection, and depression. Also, divorce.

Here’s one answer: we’re not meant to mate for life according to a growing array of scholarship, including the seminal (no pun intended) Sex At Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha. The authors are a married couple, but that’s by far not the most fascinating thing about the book. The super-micro version of their thesis is that in terms of human history, we just invented monogamy like, five minutes ago – because we went from hunter-gathers to landowners. Before that, we lived communally – children were raised by the clan.

After the advent of agriculture, men realized that they had to know the paternity of their children, to pass on property rights. Thus, monogamy was born a mere 8000 years ago. (Romantic love came way after this – the concept was invented in the 17th century. Up ‘til then, marriage was a merely a business contract.)

So monogamy is a cultural myth, and yet so many of us fundamentally believe in “til death do us part.” Forget about applying a magical self-help fix here; it’s going to take some major consciousness-raising to wrap our brains around these conundrums.

Getting It Right the First Time

Some of us marry people we’re not sexually compatible with because we don’t value our own sexual needs enough; even “liberated” women who have lots of sex before marriage. We buy into the heterosexist view that women must partner up with strong providers, ones that will make good dads, etc. (And some of us need to admit that we’re dealing with massive father complexes.) We’re unconsciously parroting evolutionary psychology’s conventional view: women are meant to be monogamous, bring up the babes, and thus propagate the species, while men are meant to spread their seed. The underlying assumption is that women aren’t really into sex  – we value motherhood and shopping more.

Let’s get something straight: women are programmed for pleasure. It’s just society’s built-in misogyny that throws a wrench in biology’s plan for us. We’re not taught to value our bodies, our sexuality, and our desire enough.  But no matter how important it is to honor pleasure, expecting hot sex to be the only foundation for a relationship is rather ridiculous. You can’t always build authentic intimacy with someone you’re desperately chemically attracted to.

Often the one you lust for will not be the one you want to have a conversation with in the morning. (And sometimes, off the charts one-night-stands turn into long-term relationships. There’s no map for this stuff; life is messy and unpredictable.) When we know the difference between love and lust and find someone that stimulates both mind and genitals it’s all kinds of magical, but this confluence can feel as rare as a finding a peacock on your fire escape.

This is why so many of us end up with “good men” who don’t know how to properly please us. (Remember that oxytocin released at climax, is the same hormone that floods your body to make you forget the vicious pain of childbirth. It also apparently makes you forget when a guy is great in bed but a douchebag the rest of the time.) Theory: if we can get rid of the Madonna/Whore complex, maybe we can kill off the “boring but good man/sexy bad boy” complex, too.

Stay tuned for part 2 of this story next week…

Stefanie Iris Weiss is the author of Eco-Sex: Go Green Between the Sheets and Make Your Love Life Sustainable (Ten Speed Press/Crown Publishing, 2010) and eight other books. Stefanie keeps her carbon footprint small in New York City, where she writes about sustainability, sexuality, reproductive rights, dating and relationships, politics, fashion, beauty, and more for many publications. Learn more about her at ecosex.net, follow her eco-sex exploits on Twitter or join her on Facebook.

Image: Roberto TRM

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