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Shmuley and Rick in a Public Discussion
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Monday, December 07, 2009

Why Tigers Cheat

The Tiger Woods controversy forces us to revisit why men have affairs.  Men do not have affairs for sex, that’s one of the great misconceptions.  In fact, a majority of affairs are not even physical, they’re emotional.  They take place over the internet, they involve phone calls and they are often never consummated.  The real reason that men have affairs, especially men like Tiger Woods, Bill Clinton and people who live in hyper competitive environments, is that they are looking for external validation.  They want to feel desirable to a stranger.  They often question their intrinsic value and the more people find them sexy and seductive the more special they feel.

What we forget is that those who are in areas like sports and politics, where one defeat can spell the beginning of the end and the erosion of their self esteem, live with constant insecurities.  Rather than deal with all of those insecurities by having deep emotional conversations with their wives about their challenges and fears, they instead just paper over the insecurities by turning to women who make them feel special.  What I’m saying is that this emerges primarily from masculine brokenness as I have charted extensively in my book, “The Broken American Male”.

You may ask if a man who feels insecure and insignificant looks to a woman to make him feel special, then why isn’t it enough for them to have their wives to make them feel special?  The answer is simple: because anyone who questions whether they’re a big nobody looks at the woman dumb enough to marry them as an even bigger nobody than they are.  Someone without value cannot confer value on you.  So, I’m not surprised that so many women are coming out of the wood-work with someone like Tiger Woods.  We always thought that he and elite sport stars like him are immune to insecurity, that they have a teflon outer shell, that they’re unshakable.  It turns out that no person is.  Everyone who seeks the spotlight, whether in sports, television or politics, does so to compensate for some feeling of inadequacy, as Aristotle made clear more than two millennia ago.

I hope that Tiger Woods and his wife will take this opportunity to address the deep seeded issues that cause infidelity rather than believing that it was just him being a naughty boy and that things can go back to normal.  This is an opportunity for him to increase the intimacy at the center of their relationship and their marriage.  I wish them all the best.

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