@Nia
Women do get caught less. I think it's b/c they're more detail orientated and their men just aren't paying attn. but yes it's still wrong etc. That figure (5%) was given/quoted to me by my Bio. prof. He said he got it from a clinical study about paternity. The percentage isn't meant to reflect the number of faithful vs. unfaithful wives, or the percentage of men who are knowingly raising children who are not their own biologically. It's only mean to reflect the men who don't know. I think the percentage is fairly accurate +/- 1%. I also think that more than 20% of American wives are/have been unfaithful.

@ Chinani
I don't know your professor , and i'm not trying to get technical,  but according to the American Association of Blood Banks, 30% of alleged fathers (in America) tested (in 2003) are not the biological fathers of the children they were taking care of, thinking was their child, (or paying child support for), although this is irregardless of marital status. Now the percentage of those who DON'T KNOW is debatable, for obvious reasons.  I stated the issue of men raising children who don't belong to them to highlight the effect of "normalizing" cheating or the assumption that it's a one-sided situation, like the thread seems to insinuate. Now, this number does not reflect the amount of women who cheat, and I never stated that it did, because common sense tells us that women don't get pregnant every time they have sex. Regarding the myths that everyone or everyman cheats, I'll refer you to this article by Psychology Today, maybe it can help clarify stereotypes from the actual fact. While it may be different in Nigeria in the past, based on my experiences in the US, women are just as bad as men when it comes to cheating, though, like you stated they will remain more quiet about it, making polls irrelevant, more or less.
I think people who want to cheat will cheat no matter what, but I also think the signs are always there, if you pay attention and choose your partner wisely.   

Here's the article, I think it's an interesting and somewhat more realistic perspective:




Myths of Infidelity

By: PT Staff
Summary: Everybody is unfaithful. It's normal, expectable behavior. But the truth is most people are faithful most of the time.


The people who are running from bed to bed creating disasters for themselves and everyone else don't seem to know what they are doing. They just don't get it. But why should they? There is a mythology about infidelity that shows up in the popular press and even in the mental health literature that is guaranteed to mislead people and make dangerous situations even worse. Some of these myths are:

1.        Everybody is unfaithful; it is normal, expectable behavior. Mozart, in his comic opera Cosi Fan Tutti, insisted that women all do it, but a far more common belief is that men all do it: "Higgamous, hoggamous, woman's monogamous; hoggamous, higgamous, man is polygamous." In Nora Ephron's movie Heartburn, Meryl Streep's husband has left her for another woman. She turns to her father for solace, but he dismisses her complaint as the way of all male flesh: "If you want monogamy, marry a swan."

We don't know how many people are unfaithful; if people will lie to their own husband or wife, they surely aren't going to be honest with poll takers. We can guess that one-half of married men and one-third of married women have dropped their drawers away from home at least once. That's a lot of infidelity.
Still, most people are faithful most of the time. Without the expectation of fidelity, intimacy becomes awkward and marriage adversarial. People who expect their partner to betray them are likely to beat them to the draw, and to make both of them miserable in the meantime.

Most species of birds and animals in which the male serves some useful function other than sperm donation are inherently monogamous. Humans, like other nest builders, are monogamous by nature, but imperfectly so. We can be trained out of it, though even in polygamous and promiscuous cultures people show their true colors when they fall blindly and crazily in love. And we have an escape clause: nature mercifully permits us to survive our mates and mate again. But if we slip up and take a new mate while the old mate is still alive, it is likely to destroy the pair bonding with our previous mate and create great instinctual disorientation—which is part of the tragedy of infidelity.

2. Affairs are good for you; an affair may even revive a dull marriage. Back at the height of the sexual revolution, the Playboy philosophy and its Cosmopolitan counterpart urged infidelity as a way to keep men manly, women womanly, and marriage vital. Lately, in such books as Annette Lawson's Adultery and Dalma Heyn's The Erotic Silence of the American Wife, women have been encouraged to act out their sexual fantasies as a blow for equal rights.


It is true that if an affair is blatant enough and if all hell breaks loose, the crisis of infidelity can shake up the most petrified marriage, Of course, any crisis can serve the same detonation function, and burning the house down might be a safer, cheaper, and more readily forgivable attention-getter
However utopian the theories, the reality is that infidelity, whether it is furtive or blatant, will blow hell out of a marriage. In 30 odd years of practice, I have encountered only a handful of established first marriages that ended in divorce without someone being unfaithful, often with the infidelity kept secret throughout the divorce process and even for years afterwards. Infidelity is the sine qua non of divorce.

3.  People have affairs because they aren't in love with their marriage partner. People tell me this, and they even remember it this way. But on closer examination it routinely turns out that the marriage was fine before the affair happened, and the decision that they were not in love with their marriage partner was an effort to explain and justify the affair.

Being in love does not protect people from lust. Screwing around on your loved one is not a very loving thing to do, and it may be downright hostile. Every marriage is a thick stew of emotions ranging from lust to disgust, desperate love to homicidal rage. It would be idiotic to reduce such a wonderfully rich emotional diet to a question ("love me or love me not?" so simplistic that it is best asked of the petals of daisies. Nonetheless, people do ask themselves such questions, and they answer them.

Falling out of love is no reason to betray your mate. If people are experiencing a deficiency in their ability to love their partner, it is not clear how something so hateful as betraying him or her would restore it.

4. People have affairs because they are oversexed. Affairs are about secrets. The infidelity is not necessarily in the sex, but in the dishonesty.

Swingers have sex openly, without dishonesty and therefore without betrayal (though with a lot of scary bugs). More cautious infidels might have chaste but furtive lunches and secret telephone calls with ex-spouses or former affair partners—nothing to sate the sexual tension, but just enough to prevent a marital reconciliation or intimacy in the marriage.

Affairs generally involve sex, at least enough sex to create a secret that seals the conspiratorial alliance of the affair, and makes the relationship tense, dangerous, and thus exciting. Most affairs consist of a little bad sex and hours on the telephone. I once saw a case in which the couple had attempted sex once 30 years before and had limited the intimacy in their respective marriages while they maintained their sad, secret love with quiet lunches, pondering the crucial question of whether or not he had gotten it all the way in on that immortal autumn evening in 1958.

In general, monogamous couples have a lot more sex than the people who are screwing around.

5. Affairs are ultimately the fault of the cuckold. Patriarchal custom assumes that when a man screws around it must be because of his wife's aesthetic, sexual, or emotional deficiencies. She failed him in some way. And feminist theory has assured us that if a wife screws around it must be because men are such assholes. Many people believe that screwing around is a normal response to an imperfect marriage and is, by definition, the marriage partner's fault. Friends and relatives, bartenders, therapists, and hairdressers, often reveal their own gender prejudices and distrust of marriage, monogamy, intimacy, and honesty, when they encourage the infidel to put the blame on the cuckold rather than on him or herself.


One trick for avoiding personal blame and responsibility is to blame the marriage itself (too early, too late, too soon after some event) or some unchangeable characteristic of the partner (too old, too tall, too ethnic, too smart, too experienced, too inexperienced). This is both a cop-out and a dead end.

One marriage partner can make the other miserable, but can't make the other unfaithful. (The cuckold is usually not even there when the affair is taking place.) Civilization and marriage require that people behave appropriately however they feel, and that they take full responsibility for their actions. "My wife drove me to it with her nagging"; "I can't help what I do because of what my father did to me"; "She came on to me and her skirt was very short"; "I must be a sex addict"; et cetera. Baloney! If people really can't control their sexual behavior, they should not be permitted to run around loose.

There is no point in holding the cuckold responsible for the infidel's sexual behavior unless the cuckold has total control over the sexual equipment that has run off the road. Only the driver is responsible.

6.  It is best to pretend not to know. There are people who avoid unpleasantness and would rather watch the house burn down than bother anyone by yelling "Fire!" Silence fuels the affair, which can thrive only in secrecy. Adulterous marriages begin their repair only when the secret is out in the open, and the infidel does not need to hide any longer. Of course, it also helps to end the affair.


A corollary is the belief that infidels must deny their affairs interminably and do all that is possible to drive cuckolds to such disorientation that they will doubt their own sanity rather than doubt their partner's fidelity. In actuality, the continued lying and denial is usually the most unforgivable aspect of the infidelity.

One man was in the habit of jogging each evening, but his wife noticed that his running clothes had stopped stinking. Suspicious, she followed him to his secretary's apartment. She burst in and confronted her husband who was standing naked in the secretary's closet. She demanded: "What are you doing here?" He responded: "You do not see me here. You have gone crazy and are imagining this." She almost believed him, and remains to this day angrier about that than about the affair itself. Once an affair is known or even suspected, there is no safety in denial, but there is hope in admission.

I recently treated a woman whose physician husband divorced her 20 years ago after a few years of marriage, telling her that she had an odor that was making him sick, and he had developed an allergy to her. She felt so bad about herself she never remarried.

I suspected there was more to the story, and sent her back to ask him whether he had been unfaithful to her. He confessed that he had been, but had tried to shield her from hurt by convincing her that he had been faithful and true but that she was repulsive. She feels much worse about him now, but much better about herself. She now feels free to date.

7.          After an affair, divorce is inevitable. Essentially all first-time divorces occur in the wake of an affair. With therapy though, most adulterous marriages can be saved, and may even be stronger and more intimate than they were before the crisis. I have rarely seen a cuckold go all the way through with a divorce after a first affair that is now over. Of course, each subsequent affair lowers the odds drastically.
It doesn't happen the way it does in the movies. The indignant cuckold does scream and yell and carry on and threaten all manner of awful things—which should not be surprising since his or her life has just been torn asunder. But he or she quickly calms down and begins the effort to salvage the marriage, to pull the errant infidel from the arms of the dreaded affaire.

When a divorce occurs, it is because the infidel can not escape the affair in time or cannot face going back into a marriage in which he or she is now known and understood and can no longer pose as the chaste virgin or white knight spotless and beyond criticism. A New Yorker cartoon once showed a forlorn man at a bar complaining: "My wife understands me."

Appropriate guilt is always helpful, though it must come from inside rather than from a raging, nasty spouse; anger is a lousy seduction technique for anyone except terminal weirdos. Guilt is good for you. Shame, however, makes people run away and hide.

The prognosis after an affair is not grim, and those who have strayed have not lost all their value. The sadder but wiser infidel may be both more careful and more grateful in the future.


source:  http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-19930501-000028.html

XXXdouble postXXX

@ Nia & Chinani
What are you guys up to?

chinani:

@ twinstaiye
I don't understand your post. You quoted me so I assume/think that you were refuting something that I wrote but I'm not sure what.

Computer’s devil or is it printer’s devil chinani, now edited though. peace

@ twinstaiye
What I meant was FLEE not resist!

babymine:

@ twinstaiye
What I meant was FLEE not resist!

babymine, even if you flee from it now, you may ended up bumping into another.

@ twinstaiye
Talking out of experience, I guess.

I have never and I don't plan to ever so help me God. I believe most of such is as a result of greed, wanting everything and never getting satisfied with oneself.

I have chosen to be with my wife after several years of dating and I have committed to her (out of a pool of many) and I am also committed to our children. I can truely say that I am satisfied with my life as a member of our family and I don't ever want to jeopardize nor adulterate that feeling.

Babymine sup? You asked for candid opinions. We'll ill give you one.
What is this that men are born cheats
You should also say that women are born seductresses.
Dont mis understand me. Im only saying that if you come lower, the opposite sexes have problems with each other.
Females say males are pretenders n lie alot
Males say that females are not to be trusted
you know stuff like that
You know what i think. This problem can be solved by all male n female switching sexes though thats not possible.
Well i call ladies fish brains. They fall for such cheap pick up lines. Im a guy n it makes me sick when i hear some lines ladies fall for.
You said God give me that kind of husband.
well it doesn't just come like that. There is what we call karma. If you had pre marital sex dont expect a blissful marriage. Thats ofcourse if you become born again b4 then you should be spared . Im out of time i wish to say more but any one who has any comment should BRING IT ON im all ears. Holla.

i have a friend who's father is a doctor. when he was 24 my friend discovered rudely that his dad had a parrallel family!
my friend has 3 siblings aged 16, 10, 6. the parralel family has 3 children all aged the same as these 3 complete with same names!!
oh the shame of men or is it folly!
i nelieve that all men are liars but am waiting for the one who will prove me wrong

sweets:

i have a friend who's father is a doctor. when he was 24 my friend discovered rudely that his dad had a parrallel family!
my friend has 3 siblings aged 16, 10, 6. the parralel family has 3 children all aged the same as these 3 complete with same names!!
oh the shame of men or is it folly!
i nelieve that all men are liars but am waiting for the one who will prove me wrong

sweets:

i have a friend who's father is a doctor. when he was 24 my friend discovered rudely that his dad had a parrallel family!
my friend has 3 siblings aged 16, 10, 6. the parralel family has 3 children all aged the same as these 3 complete with same names!!
oh the shame of men or is it folly!
i nelieve that all men are liars but am waiting for the one who will prove me wrong

That is sick, the guy harsh ooo

If all men are liars, then don't get married. If all women are liars, then I won't get married. Simple!

Seun:

If all men are liars, then don't get married. If all women are liars, then I won't get married. Simple!

Thats the truth if you dont trust men go to a country you can marry women simple as that.

Seun:

If all men are liars, then don't get married. If all women are liars, then I won't get married. Simple!

I agree. Bad blood between men & women doesn't help. But, I think that women are asking men to be more accountable for their behavior in this day & age. The "bitch fest" is meant to say "we know your game" of course men just see it as bitching so it doesn't necessarily change anything.

Badman888:

Thats the truth if you don't trust men go to a country you can marry women simple as that.

That is a solution isn't it? Honestly, I've thought of that one. I must consult my travel agent. . .

Come on people, we r all animals no exception here. But due to our higher instincts, we tends to be conciderate in our sexual behaviour but even at that, some people can go over the human barrier by having as many wifes or men as they want. If u fall into such group, dont think that every man or woman is like that. If u r the type that belive in swing sex, then u see ur salf having more than one partner so,

As I said before, women love this topic sha.

I suspect that privately they gloat about it, "here is something we are better at than men - being faithful. Aren't they supposed to be the stronger sex, why are they weak in controlling their willies then? Oooh?"

Any way, allow me to digress small. In my experience in settling marriage troubles (and i have had to do so severally) it amazes me that 2 issues recur freqently. It is either that woman is leaving because the man was unfaithful, or that the man is leaving because the woman nags. If men cant control their willies, I have found that most women cant seem to control their tongue even to the point of breaking their marriage. I'm not saying its the same thing. Just an observation. You guys can go back to your pillow fighting.

that may be true, women do nag at times. maybe its because they are able to express their frustrations thru words or what.men are not known to best express what their are feeling.
communication is important in any relationship.my boyfriend and i broke up becoz he din't know how to react when we had problems. he would always keep quiet when i pointed out that we needed to talk about something!!
when we finally broke up that is when he told me that he never said anything for fear of hurting me!!
communication is paramount in any relationship or union.

Sweets , communicating is important in a relationship but most women do not know how to communicate with men.  Believe me, your boyfriend communicates well well when he is with other guys (and perhaps certain women).

Most women TELL their man something, they do not communicate.

The 1st law of communication is that you have only communicated when the recipient receives what was sent accurately. To do so, you must have a common "language (medium)." Most women do not care about understanding men talkless a man's "language". If you send and it does not get received, you have not communicated and are wasting your saliva (or ink, or keystrokes, whichever).

Women who love to "TELL HIM" most invariably do not realise that they are actually naggers. I am just warning the ladies amongst us who never try to see things from the guy's point of view and focus so much on fault-finding, that they may run into problem with their future husband. Most men take nagging as seriously as you take cheating, and will walk and never return (or stay but Hate you)  if they get TOLD too often. Not only is it fatal to relationships, it doesnt work! Do not condone cheating but please please avoid nagging about it or any other topic.

(For the record, I am using  Nagging in its Dictonary meaning of: i.e continually complaining or faultfinding)

P.S. To be a little more helpful to you girls, let me suggest that to communicate with a guy, focus on realistic suggestions and volunteering to help him, avoid faultfinding and if you must find fault, mention it briefly and give him time to sort it out before mentioning it again.

@ Rottweiler

n u r proud to say it?seems like u want a gold medal 4 it

monieazie:

Babymine sup? You asked for candid opinions. We'll ill give you one.
What is this that men are born cheats
You should also say that women are born seductresses.
Dont mis understand me. I'm only saying that if you come lower, the opposite sexes have problems with each other.
Females say males are pretenders n lie alot
Males say that females are not to be trusted
you know stuff like that
You know what i think. This problem can be solved by all male n female switching sexes though thats not possible.
Well i call ladies fish brains. They fall for such cheap pick up lines. I'm a guy n it makes me sick when i hear some lines ladies fall for.
You said God give me that kind of husband.
well it doesn't just come like that. There is what we call karma. If you had pre marital sex don't expect a blissful marriage. Thats ofcourse if you become born again before then you should be spared . I'm out of time i wish to say more but any one who has any comment should BRING IT ON im all ears. Holla.

Are you implying that some married men who cheat on their wives had premarital sex with them before wedlock?

i remember at some point i told him that i feel like am nagging and i hate nagging!
i talk alot but not about problems that am facing and he was making me frustrated becoz i had made concesions(sp?) for him and it seemed like it just wasn't working!!
enuff about me. relationships are about some sacrifices and most of us unfortunately don't want to make them.
i don't want to compromise while someone else is going on with his life like nothing happened!
men should learn to talk about what they are feeling or experiencing, otherwise some of them just lock us out and we are left with no option other than voice our frustration!!

I love & respect my wife so much & would not give her up for all d things of this world,but its always exciting for men to navigate & explore new zones.That is what i called Sexcapade.Its inevitable for men.Thanks and God blessed.

@ okewole

Hmmm, You love and respect your wife but still cheat on her.

Well, I can confidently say that my husband has not cheated on me since we got married.

@alheri
You sound so confident. How do you know?

i don't think there is all men cheat on their wife and it's just that

To reply this question, yes my father! The most honest man to his marriage i have ever seen!

@ davidylan

Who told you? How do you know? He's the only one who can boldly say he hasn't. Not you or anyone else.

I remember before I repented, one day my wife today was boasting that I had never cheated on her to someone not knowing that the person she was boasting to was my girlfriend's sister.

Blessed are the pessimistic, for they shall never be disappointed. Better to believe that Nigerian men cheat (or as rather, tend towards polygamy) than to live in fantasyland and get hurt needlessly.

babymine:

@ davidylan

Who told you? How do you know? He's the only one who can boldly say he hasn't. Not you or anyone else.

He has told me countless number of times, and i trust him with my last 2 cents! Stop being pessimistic, there are many men out there who still value their integrity and take their marriage vows seriously. He's a christian in deeds and mot merely in words!