Why Men Really Cheat: A Psychologist's Perspective on Infidelity, Revenge, and the Marriages That Last
- Sarah El Nabulsi, M.Sc., M.A., M.A.
- Jul 4
- 5 min read
When a woman discovers her husband has been unfaithful, two questions tend to follow almost immediately. The first is emotional: should I make him pay for what he did? The second is almost always the same question asked differently: was she younger than me? Was she more beautiful?
As a DHA Licensed Clinical Psychologist who works with couples in Dubai, I am asked both of these questions regularly. My answers tend to surprise people — because what I see in the clinic, and what the psychology actually shows, is rarely what cultural narratives about infidelity would have us believe.
Revenge Feels Like Justice. It Isn't.
The impulse to retaliate after betrayal is not pathological — it is deeply human. When someone violates our trust in the most intimate way possible, the nervous system registers it as a genuine threat. Anger is a protective response. The desire for the other person to feel what you feel is natural.
But revenge and justice are not the same thing, and confusing them is one of the most costly mistakes a person can make in the aftermath of infidelity.
Asserting your rights and seeking revenge are two completely different paths. One is about you: your dignity, your boundaries, your future. The other is about them — about watching them suffer, about equalising the pain.
The problem with the second path is that it keeps you attached to the person who hurt you. It keeps you oriented toward their suffering rather than your own healing. Revenge harms the person who pursues it far more than it harms the person it is aimed at.
The person who has been cheated on did not lose the moral high ground — but they lose it the moment they make their recovery contingent on someone else's punishment.
The Misconception: Age, Beauty, and the Nanny
One of the most persistent myths about male infidelity is that it is driven by physical comparison — that a man who strays is chasing someone younger, more attractive, or more exciting. The "nanny" stereotype captures this belief perfectly.
This misconception causes enormous harm. It sends betrayed women into a spiral of self-assessment — examining their bodies, their age, their appearance — when these factors are almost never the actual driver.
In clinical practice, what I observe is something more structural, and far less about the individual woman's physical attributes.
The Real Dynamic: Leadership, Direction, and What Men Actually Need
In recent years, what I am seeing more and more in my sessions is a specific relational dynamic that creates vulnerability in marriages.
Men have an innate need for leadership within the home. This is not a statement about equality or professional ambition — women's careers and accomplishments are something to be celebrated, and I would be the first to say so. But leadership in a professional context and the dynamics that sustain an intimate relationship are not the same thing, and they require different modes of being.
What many men struggle to articulate — and what I hear expressed in different ways across sessions — is a sense that there is no space for them to lead at home. That the dynamic has become a kind of competition rather than a collaboration. That they feel directionless within the relationship because the relationship itself has no clear complementarity.
The women on Kalam Nawa3em put it plainly: Arabic men, in particular, do not want another man beside them at home. They want a partner who is genuinely different from them — someone who complements rather than competes.
The 80/20 Trap
During the conversation, one of the hosts raised something worth engaging with directly: the idea that a man takes for granted the 80% his wife genuinely gives him, and goes looking for the missing 20%.
There is something psychologically accurate in this framing. Habituation — where we stop registering the positive and become more sensitised to what is absent — is very real. We adapt to what we have. Novelty draws attention in a way that reliability does not, even when reliability is the more valuable thing.
But the answer to the 80/20 problem is not to tolerate infidelity or accept it as inevitable. The answer is to rebuild polarity and presence within the existing relationship — or, if that is not possible, to make a considered decision about the marriage with clarity and intention.
Switching Gears: Ambition at Work, Femininity at Home
As our awareness is expanding, there is a growing need for us as women to hold two capacities at once.
We can and should maintain our ambitions. Our professional drive, our leadership in the workplace, our intellectual independence — these are not things to diminish. But sustainable marriages also benefit enormously from a woman's capacity to shift gears when she walks through the door at home. To move from a more directive, outward-facing mode into something warmer, more receptive, more feminine — in the truest, most powerful sense of that word.
This is not about suppression. It is about range.
When both partners are operating in the same register all the time, the relationship can start to feel more like a business partnership or a rivalry than a marriage. The marriages that retain genuine warmth and attraction over many years are the ones where both partners understand this — where ambition and femininity are held as coexisting rather than contradictory.
When to Seek Couples Therapy After Infidelity
Infidelity does not always end a marriage — and in my clinical experience, it sometimes becomes the crisis that finally forces a couple to do the work they had been deferring for years.
Whether the goal is to rebuild or to separate with clarity, working with a psychologist provides something that going it alone cannot: a structured space to understand what actually happened, why it happened, and what each person needs in order to move forward in a healthy way.
If you are in Dubai or the UAE and you are navigating infidelity — whether as the betrayed partner, the one who strayed, or a couple trying to find your way forward — I offer individual therapy and couples counselling grounded in a cognitive behavioural and integrative biopsychosocial approach.
You do not have to resolve this alone.
About Ms. Sarah El Nabulsi
Ms. Sarah El Nabulsi, M.Sc., M.A., M.A. is a DHA Licensed Clinical Psychologist (License No. DHA-75083705) based in Dubai, and UAE Director of the Transcendental Meditation Organization. She has been featured on MBC, MBC1, Sky News Arabia, Dubai TV, and BBC Arabic, and is the founder of the online courses Anxiety 101 (Level 1) and Master Yourself (Level 2).
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