3 Reasons Why the Married Men I Dated Sought Out Extramarital Sex

Only one of their reasons was one I’d expected

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Last year I dated a spate of men in open marriages. I was surprised by how different each of their situations were, and in multiple cases, my expectations for why open marriages happened were turned on their head.

Here are three reasons the married men I dated sought out extramarital sex:

1. Their wife wanted an open marriage

The first married man I met up with revealed to me that his open marriage had not been his idea.

Wes (not his real name) explained that a few months before he and his wife opened their marriage, she had returned from an out-of-state work conference, and confessed to him that she’d almost cheated on him with a colleague.

“We’d been married twenty years,” Wes told me. “We were high-school sweethearts and got hitched right away — she’d never slept with anyone else.”

“She told me she felt like maybe she’d missed out on a whole set of experiences. And she hadn’t given in when this colleague pursued her, but she had wanted to, because the chemistry was so intense.”