You’re about to hook up with a married woman, and you can tell right away that she is nervous. She seems to be glancing around quickly and fidgeting with her clothes and hair. But then you two start to get into it, and by the time you’re both finished, it’s like a new person has taken over her body. Suddenly she wants more, and even when she leaves, she’s already telling you when her husband will be out next and making plans for you to come over. That is the power of the cheater’s high, a high so powerful that seemingly happily married women find themselves addicted to the rush and thrill that cheating gives them. Most people don’t see this as a real phenomenon, but if it wasn’t a real thing, why would so many people cheat? According to Psychology Today, 10 to 20 percent of men and women who are in committed relationships cheat on their partners at one point or another. Is this all the result of the cheater’s high? Learn more about what it means to have this high and what it means for you, free of a committed relationship and ready to help women discover that high for themselves.
The Fix
Think about how you met the married woman you’re hooking up with. Do you meet her at a bar or at an event? While this is a possibility, chances are you met her online in a chat room or through Tinder and other dating websites. You might have even met her on a hookup site. The truth is that in our digital world, cheating is easier than ever. Most spouses don’t share the same computer any more, and since computers are password protected (how to pick a secure password), spouses don’t always have the ability to check up on one another. In other cases, both spouses trust each other enough not to go through each other’s browser histories and Facebook messages. The high typically comes from a desire to recreate that same feeling the woman used to get when her spouse complimented her, but now she needs to hear it from other men, since her husband clearly isn’t saying it any more. So she makes a profile on a dating site to see what else is out there and see if she’s still got it, so to speak. Of course, the responses she gets flatter her and feed into that high, but as good as it is, she knows she could do better. By the time a married woman is ready to physically heat on her spouse, she’s probably been through the other steps. She’s already flirted on dating sites or sent sexy messages over Facebook, Tinder, or Whatsapp. The high that got her started wanes a little every time, so she has to push herself farther in order to get that high once more. Once she can no longer get that same high from internet chat rooms, online porn, or other websites, she will find her high in another man.
The Science behind the Cheater’s High
So long as a woman’s affair remains a secret, she may be feeling a rush from simply thinking about “getting away with it.” What she’s doing is considered taboo and wrong, but to her, it feels so right. Though there aren’t any studies on sexual activity and the feel-good high, there have been studies done linking feelings of wrongdoing and pleasure. At the University of Washington, Nicole Ruedy conducted a series of experiments to test out her theories, you can read the findings here. In one of her trials, she had two groups answer math questions and solve logic problems. One group was simply told to give their answers. The other group was able to press a button that would reveal the answer. They were asked not to press the button and instead ignore it and solve the questions on their own, but if they did wish to press it, there wouldn’t be a penalty. The researchers were impressed. Their study found that of those with the option to cheat, 68 percent of them did it. Some of the researchers believe that test subjects saw cheating as being victimless, that no crime was committed.
Another experiment showed feelings of happiness related to cheating. In this experiment, participants were told to solve puzzles, and for eh one solved correctly, they would be paid. Their work would be graded in front of them by an actor. In some of the experiments, the actor graded the work as it should have been done, but in other cases, the actor lied and inflated the score, increasing the subject’s payout.
Not one of the real participants tried to correct the error. In fact, people who were paid out more reported feeling happiness at the feeling of getting away with something.
What the cheater’s high boils down to is a mentality that says, “What my spouse doesn’t know won’t hurt him.” Some married women are able to reason away or justify their infidelity if it means getting that same high once more.