27% of mothers cheat on their partner after their first child, 19% when the latter is younger than 2. 16% did it to get payback on their unfaithful husband.
Gleeden investigates the connection between children and adultery.
The stories of 5 unfaithful moms.
We’ve been taught that conceiving a child is the highest peak a couple can reach: after all, what’s more intimate and bonding than two individuals who combine their DNA to give birth to a new life that’s the perfect union of them both?
However, as psychologists and sex therapists can confirm, 1+1 equals 2, and not 3. And believing that a child could tighten and intensify the bond between two partners is a huge mistake. It’s not by chance that the majority of men cheat right after the birth of their first child (if not even during the pregnancy!), when the couple, as we know it, “implodes” because of this third element that muddles its balance.
Something Gleeden is very familiar with. The European titan of online adultery industry with over 3 million members today counts, in fact, almost 2.200.000 unfaithful parents, both men and women, decided to run a new study to investigates the connections between motherhood, relationship crises and infidelity.
Motherhood and adultery: 27% of women cheat after the first child
What if having a baby, instead of being a bliss, was the end of the couple, as we know it? That’s the question Gleeden wanted to answer by interviewing over 23.000 women in its community.
Because, if the phenomenon of the masculine infidelity post-maternity is pretty well known (it’s not by chance that 71% of Gleeden’s men are fathers), unfaithful moms are certainly less famous but definitely much more interesting. What if becoming a mother incentivized the desire of infidelity and pushed a woman to cheat on the father of her children?
The answer is straight, at least to 53% of the interviewed moms: “Yes, maternity pushed my partner away insomuch that I thought about cheating”.
However, when does this feeling of revenge trigger? How many years after her child(ren) birth a woman realizes that she doesn’t want to be just a mother? The 27% of the interviewed confessed to have started an extramarital affair after their first child, 19% after the second and a small (but significant) 9% even before they became mothers.
And it’s not necessary to wait for the child to be old enough before a woman decides to take her femininity back. To the question “How old was your child when you joined Gleeden” a good 19% replied that he was younger than 2 years old.
Retaliation, egoism or payback? The reasons and the stories of unfaithful moms
Among the most frequent reasons why a mother decide to have an extramarital affair there’s the fact of having a partner who doesn’t see her like a woman anymore (26%).
“I joined Gleeden for the most trivial reason, I guess: at home the mother replaced the woman in the eyes of my man.” – tells Discreta_35, married with 3 children and member of Gleeden for 4 years, who, since she found her lover on Gleeden, states: “The love I fell for my husband has been replaced by a deep and honest affection, but without adrenaline. In exchange, he gained a wife, unfaithful but happy, who made home a sweeter and much more relaxed place for everybody.“
Camilla too, married for 12 years and mother of 2 kids, is on Gleeden because she’s tired of being seen by her husband only as the mother of his children: “My husband didn’t understand that I wasn’t satisfied to be just a mother and that I needed to feel first of all a woman. After many attempts to get him back in that sense, unfortunately useless, I joined Gleeden on May 2014. I didn’t forget about my children, of course… but mommy needed to live also for herself. Daddy can live without sex and be just fine, mommy cannot.“
To some women (10%) motherhood was also the litmus test of their relationships, revealing that they chose the wrong partner. Infidelity, in this case, was not a break from the couple but rather a way for finding a different man, the right one. For other women, instead, infidelity meant payback: 16% of the women confessed they cheated in response to their husbands’ previous adultery.
Lastly, there are the ones who took their time before approaching infidelity. After having completed their “task” as mothers and now wants to get some well-deserved “rest”: 23%, in fact, preferred to wait for their kids to have grown up before focusing again on their femininity and their needs as women.
Jekiss, married with 2 kids and member of Gleeden for 2 years, is one of these women and with her husband she made a real agreement: “I’m married and I’ve no intention to file for divorce. At least as long as my kids are young and don’t have their own independent lives. I love my husband and he loves me but our relationship has become platonic. We agreed to release each other from marriage commitment and to accord each other the freedom to lay the ground for the new lives that wait for us once the kids will be on their own. My husband is now my best friend and no longer my lover.“
And it’s precisely the willing of protecting the nuclear family and the wellbeing of their children that pushes many women to prefer to date online on specialized websites such as Gleeden, where they can engage with men with straight intentions: “I chose Gleeden because I want that each other intentions are transparent since the very beginning, without hypocrisy. My relationship status is clear and I want the other’s to be clear as well, not like on some websites where married men pretend they’re single.” – explains Amelievertus, married with a child. “I’ve been faithful for 17 years before surrender to infidelity. I wanted a rush of blood, to feel my body vibrate, to seduce and be seduced again. But secretly, because I’m happy about my family situation and I don’t want to jeopardize it in any way.“
Unfaithful to their husbands then, but forever and always faithful to their children. This is what all the Gleeden’s moms have in common, who also seem to agree: « What if, thanks to Gleeden, I had found the way to save my marriage for real? ». The stories of these 5 women tell us so.
*Survey run online on Gleeden.com on a sample of 23.357 women registered to the website, married and with children.