WHY EVEN GOOD HUSBANDS BECOME PHILANDERERS

Why even good husbands 
become philanderers 

"No, I don't understand my husband's theory of relativity, but I know my husband, and I know he can be trusted." ELSE EINSTEIN  

By Alex P. Vidal

As a community journalist, I normally encounter these reports: A wife shocked to receive reports her husband, known in the neighborhood and in their family as "ideal husband" who had never been linked with any girl all his life aside from his wife, died "while on top of a woman" in a motel room. Another wife, in her 60s, could not believe her husband's violent death had something to do with his sexual liaison with a young lady after police investigation showed he was murdered by the young lady's boyfriend. And so on and so forth.
Even good men and women or good husbands and wives can become adulterers.
Infidelity is a problem that needs far more widespread understanding than it has today.
According to sexologist Alfred Kinsey, about half of all the married males have intercourse with women other than their wives at some time while they are married.

TENDENCY

The tendency to be unfaithful is present in normal men, as well as in the emotionally disturbed, but is under better control. Even the normal man, in different periods of his life, and in unusual circumstances, will encounter temptations that bring the philandering urge to the surface, according to Dr. Frank Caprio.
He explained that an ordinarily ethical and scrupulous man may go into infidelity as a result of a heavy blow of life. He decides to have a love affair as a means of forgetting some intolerable grief or loss or failure.
Caprio warned that men frequently have recourse to infidelity as an escape from the disappointments in life. They take up extra-marital sex as they do alcohol, to forget. The college boy who flunks out may marry young. Feeling that the marriage was one more mistake, he forgets his troubles in drinking and infidelity. The husband who has failed socially or in business may set out to conquer other women, sexually. "I'll show them that I'm not a total failure."

HARD WORKER

"Then there is the husband who has been extremely straitlaced all of his life, a hard worker and a devoted father," explains Caprio. "It suddenly strikes him that he may have missed a lot. His may be a case of long-drawn-out chronic frustration that reaches a crisis and sends him down the garden path. Or it may be tedium and monotony that is suddenly broken in on by the attraction of a pretty girl beckoning on his horizon."
Whatever the background, he deliberately decides, in middle age or later, to try something brand new and have sex relations with someone other than his wife."In many of these cases," Caprio adds, "while the philanderer believes himself to be the conqueror, he is in reality being seduced himself by the tactics of the current inamorata. Knowing he is very susceptible to false flattery, she compliments him lavishly on the looks and the sexual prowess he hasn't got, for the sake of whatever she receives from him in the way of gifts and entertainment."

REVELATIONS

Here are other startling revelations from Caprio: 
1. The man who has made a success of himself and has let it go to his head will sometimes turn to philandering for an added thrill. He arrives at a financial stage where he has a lavish home, a couple of cars, membership in a country club and a cabin cruiser. If he had never had money until his middle years, he feels like a little god when he surveys his accomplishments.
2. In his forties or fifties, the highly successful man feels entitled to sow some wild oats. He may decide to indulge in a whole assortment of new pleasures,from filet mignon and champagne cocktails to "call girls." He feels that in exchange for money or jewelry, it is now his right to have a succession of pretty girls to show off.Usually, he is not in love with any of them. They are only an added touch of glamour to his pleasure. As a successful business man, he also has excuses for taking out-of-town trips, and he takes a pretty girl along to give him added prestige. She is to advertise that he is a success in love as well as in finance. He tells himself, "I'm entitled to it, and my wife has no kick. She has a nice home now, and a maid and a car of her own. I've earned a few special privileges."
3. In this group are many men who are in what can be termed the male menopause. They are frightened by the impending loss of virility. They feel that a young woman will be able to rouse them again to renewed potency. Unfortunately, the miracle does not come off. The week ends with the young girl are seldom the sexual restorative they had hoped for.
This sort of man finally joins the ranks of the typical fiftyish philandering husband--inadequate in sexual intercourse, resorting to various deviations with the young girl to satisfy his yearning. He will brag when he is among his fellows about being a devil with the ladies, but they will all know, as he knows, that the young woman's favors are bought to compensate him for his waning virility.

INSTITUTION

Monogamous marriage is a human institution evolved by society to safeguard the stability of family life. A reversed situation prevailed among early civilizations when polygamy was sanctioned because of the need to propagate without restriction for the purpose of expanding the tribe or group.
According to Edvard Westermarck of the "Westermarck effect", in primitive times "it was the habit for a man and a woman (or several women) to live together, to have sexual relations with one another and to rear their offspring in common, the man being the protector and the supporter of his family." Promiscuity, he says, prevailed universally among primitive men.The Westermarck effect, or reverse sexual imprinting, is a hypothetical psychological effect through which people who live in close domestic proximity during the first few years of their lives become desensitized to later sexual attraction.
This phenomenon, one explanation for the incest taboo, was first hypothesized by the Finnish anthropologist in his book The History of Human Marriage (1891).