LET’S be honest about a double standard that’s existed since biblical times.
A good wife is a faithful wife—that’s what we’ve all been told. This expectation has been hammered into women through religious sermons, cultural messaging, and social pressure for centuries.
But when men cheat? It’s brushed off as a midlife crisis or a ‘boys-will-be-boys’ situation.
Think about how casually male infidelity is portrayed in our culture. A guy tells his buddies he slept with someone in Vegas, and it barely raises an eyebrow.
But when a woman does the same, it’s a scandal. This disparity isn’t accidental—it’s a direct result of patriarchal control over female sexuality.
Women who choose to have affairs are making a bold statement: they’re rejecting these unequal expectations. They’re saying, my sexuality belongs to me, not to societal expectations.
A couple of years ago, as a happily married mum of two pregnant with my third baby I began reporting out a podcast on infidelity.
When I began interviewing women for “She Wants More,” I’ll admit I was skeptical.
As a journalist, I’ve been trained to question everything, and I entered these conversations with my own judgments about infidelity.
Like many of us, I had internalized the narrative that cheating was morally wrong, particularly for women and more so for mothers.
But after dozens of intimate conversations with women who stepped outside their marriages, I’ve come to a conclusion that might shock you: affairs can be a feminist act of self-care.
We’re living in an era where women’s bodily autonomy is under direct attack.
[bc_video account_id=”5067014667001″ application_id=”” aspect_ratio=”16:9″ autoplay=”” caption=” I’m helping my daughter cover affair ” embed=”in-page” experience_id=”” height=”100%” language_detection=”” max_height=”360px” max_width=”640px” min_width=”0px” mute=”” padding_top=”56%” picture_in_picture=”” player_id=”default” playlist_id=”” playsinline=”” sizing=”responsive” video_id=”6363027234112″ video_ids=”” width=”640px”]The reversal of Roe v. Wade in the US wasn’t just about abortion rights—it was about who gets to make decisions about women’s bodies.
Many women I interviewed explicitly connected their affairs to this sense of wanting control over their physical selves.
This feeling is especially acute for mothers, who described a profound sense of bodily alienation after having children.
As one woman told me, “After starting a family, my body didn’t belong to me anymore. It was always someone else’s—my husband’s, my children’s.”
Between growing babies, breastfeeding, and the constant physical demands of caregiving, these women felt they had lost ownership of their bodies.
The pandemic only intensified this feeling, with families trapped in close quarters, boundaries dissolving, and women shouldering even more domestic responsibilities.
For many, having an affair became a way to carve out physical space that belonged only to them—a radical act of reclaiming ownership in a world that constantly tries to control female bodies.
One of our first interviews was with Nikki, a woman who had been married for 15 years and felt completely drained by her relationship.
Like many women, she was performing all the emotional labor in her marriage—managing feelings, maintaining connections, and keeping her relationship afloat while her husband remained emotionally checked out.
This imbalance is exhausting, and it kills desire. As I discovered through my interviews, it’s not that women want sex less than men—that’s a myth.
But we’re often shouldering so much more that completely drains us. In addition to our own work, we are doing almost all of the emotional and physical labor in a household.
We don’t have less desire, we’re simply exhausted.
We literally have a whole episode in our podcast called “Is Having an Affair the New Goop?”—and the women we interviewed made a compelling case that it is.
[quote credit=”Jo Piazza”]If everything else works but the sex doesn’t, why would you blow up your entire life? [/quote]While the wellness industry tries to sell women everything from jade eggs that you put in your vagina to lymphatic drainage massages, these women have found that having an affair is what has actually made them feel better.
Every single woman I spoke with reported feeling more confident after having an affair—not just in their sex lives, but in every aspect of their lives.
They performed better at work. They were more assertive in meetings. They glowed.
And here’s the part that really surprised me: most women told me their affairs improved their marriages.
They became more confident in the bedroom with their spouses. They knew how to ask for what they wanted. They felt desired again.
Even women who were just thinking about having an affair, maybe creating a profile on Ashley Madison but not going through with anything physical, reported feeling more alive and confident.
I have a close friend who’s currently exploring a sexual relationship outside her marriage, and she’s never been happier. Her career is thriving, her marriage seems better.
She glows like Gwyneth Paltrow.
One of the most common reactions to discussions of infidelity is: “If you’re unhappy, just get divorced.” But this simplistic advice ignores the reality of modern marriage.
The truth is, many women like their husbands quite a bit.
Their marriages function well as a partnership—they’re raising children together, maintaining a home, building financial security, and supporting each other’s goals.
If everything else works but the sex doesn’t, why would you blow up your entire life?
For many women, having an affair allows them to meet their needs for passion and connection without dismantling family structures that are otherwise beneficial.
[quote credit=”Jo Piazza”]Why are so many marriages failing to fulfill women’s needs for desire and connection? [/quote]I’m not suggesting that affairs are without consequences or that dishonesty in relationships is generally a good thing.
But I am saying that we need to look beyond simplistic moral judgments to understand why women are increasingly choosing this path.
Maybe instead of condemning these women, we should be asking harder questions: Why are so many marriages failing to fulfill women’s needs for desire and connection?
Why are women still performing disproportionate amounts of emotional labor? Why do we hold women to standards of sexual fidelity that we readily excuse men from?
The women I interviewed aren’t villains.
They’re human being trying to find happiness and fulfillment in a world that often denies women both.
Their stories challenge us to reimagine relationships beyond patriarchal constraints and to consider that sometimes, taking care of yourself means breaking the rules that were never designed for your benefit in the first place.
I get asked a lot these days if I want to have an affair after all of my reporting on them.
I don’t actually, but then again I’m married to a man who does shoulder a lot of the domestic burden and doesn’t exhaust me. Most women aren’t.
Wanting more isn’t a sin—it might just be the most honest expression of what it means to be fully human.
You can listen to Jo’s podcast She Wants More here.
