There are plenty women in the world. Lots of other women. For a lot of committed guys, this is quite a struggle. Men want their committed relationships, yet their minds, or their behaviors, stray to seek out other people. Some guys troll around online on dating websites, or cheating websites for that matter. Some guys get massages with “happy endings” and justify that as “not cheating”, and other guys carry on full-fledged affairs with one or more women outside of their marriage. Cheating is definitely a spectrum of behaviors, and it can mean different things to different people.

For some guys, who starts to look outside of their relationship or marriage for female gratification, it’s a slippery slope from looking and fantasizing about other women to actually engaging with them and carrying on relationships. I talk with a lot of guys who absolutely thought “I never in a million years thought I’d be doing this.” A lot of guys who are not feeling like they’re getting their needs met in their current relationship, year after year, finally start to seek out gratifying their needs outside of the relationship, when they feel that it got too bad. Others start cheating from the get go.

Learning to deal with other women in the world is a reality. We are certainly sexual beings by nature, and there are plenty of outlets in our everyday lives. But, we are so much more than primitive beings. A lot of what drives us towards seeking out the comforts of other women is not just sex. Again, for many guys, it’s the feeling of not being appreciated or affirmed by their wives or their girlfriends, and they are unconsciously driven towards seeking out those things from other women. For the great majority of men that I speak with, especially the ones that aren’t tuned into their own emotions, it can be hard to verbalize the negative feelings or reasons that drive them into the arms of other women while they’re in a relationship or marriage. Their partners never know because these men don’t know what they need. We are driven just as much emotionally as we are physically, believe it or not.

Other women also serve as ego boosters. They can help you feel good about yourself when you were not feeling good about your own self. They can also help men create these fantasy worlds, kind of surrogate worlds that man can enter when they want to, and then leave when they want to. This “fantasy world” contrasts with the stark reality or unhappiness at home or in their current relationship. It’s easy to not deal with the problems at home when you can immerse yourself in a fantasy world, where you have another woman validating you, stroking your ego, and making you feel affirmed, special, and sexually satisfied. It’s hard to not be in touch with the reality, especially when you’re creating good cover for your indiscretions.

Really getting in touch with your values, and seeing how your behaviors are aligned with, or maligned with, your value system is one way to start to choose the kinds of behaviors that you really want to be engaging in. If seeking out other women is not aligned with your value system, and nurturing your marriage and your family are, you can see how the behaviors are then maligned with your value system. The more you can align your behaviors with your chosen values, the more in harmony you can live, and a greater amount of happiness you can experience. The behaviors may have short term gratification, but don’t meet the long-term needs, which are more aligned with one’s values.

Again, understanding the reasons that drive you to seek out simulation or affirmation from other women is totally important. For a lot of guys who don’t know what drives them, learning to understand the reasons and the mechanisms that drive them to meet other women are very important. Do you want to seek out sex solely? Do you want your ego to be stroked? Do you need affection, attention, or appreciation from another woman? Do you feel inferior with women, and are trying to attract the attention of women to compensate? Do you want to have your cake and eat it too?

Basically, learning to get in touch with these things is going to help sharpen your attention and start to help you clarify those things that are most important to you. For many guys, seeking out the simulation and satisfaction from other women is more of a way out, or a fantasy world, or a way to get their needs met somewhere else. Many times, it’s not quite how one could go about getting their needs met directly, and learning to appropriately communicate those things will make you a stronger man.

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Meditation is an ideal practice one can apply in stress management, and has a host of other perks. Developing a regular meditation practice can reduce depression and anxiety levels, improve sleep functioning, and promote an overall sense of well-being and relaxation. Meditation improves the way we relate to ourselves, and others, as we can learn to experience and accept difficult thoughts and emotions that are inevitable functions of living.

Ronald Siegal, Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, recently came to Phoenix to deliver a weekend mindfulness training, and he summed up mindfulness in this way: mindfulness connotes awareness, attention and remembering. Mindfulness includes non-judgment (of our feelings, thoughts or experiences), as well as acceptance.

There are many forms of meditation out there, and some traditions include visualization practices, among other things, but mindfulness meditation is different. When we practice mindfulness, we practice sitting with what arises in the present moment in our inner experience. We’re not changing anything, or pushing out any unwanted thoughts; we’re simply tuning into our immediate experience, which happens to include our thought stream, emotions and everything else that’s happening. It’s not a ‘touchy-feely’ as one might think, and you don’t have to be a Buddhist monk to meditate. Anyone can do it, and plenty of guys find this really helpful in reducing their stress.

The old adage, “what we resist, persists”, is applicable to how we sometimes ineffectively deal with our problems. When we sit in meditation, we can greatly reduce the experience of suffering by letting that ‘which persists’ just be as it is. In mindfulness meditation, we learn to sit with what “is”, or the thoughts, feelings and sensations that unfold from moment-to-moment in our inner experience.

This is different from how most of us live our lives: we often are hurried, mindless, and sometimes reactive to others. We sometimes live on auto-pilot, and forget that our behaviors and actions are the products of thoughts and feelings that drive them.

Here’s what to do when starting a mindfulness meditation practice:

1. Start simply: try sitting for five minutes at a time in a quiet spot, either in your office or outside
2. Get comfortable, in a chair or on a cushion.
3. Close your eyes, and start to settle into your body.
4. Start with bringing your attention to your breath: slowly inhale, and let go of your breath on the exhale
5. Bring attention to other parts of your body, including your shoulders, neck, heart, stomach. Notice the tiny sensations each of these parts of your body produces.
6. When your mind pulls you away from the breath, let it. The mind will do this many times in the course of one sitting, so part of meditation is to allowing it to do that, and to step back out of the thought stream to observe it. We’re not changing, avoiding, or pushing away any thoughts, good or bad.
7. Use your breath as your anchor. Keep coming back to your breath each time you become aware of a thought.
8. Try this for five minutes for the first couple of days, and keep going if you can. Don’t make this such a big deal: making it a chore will make you not want to do it.

And here’s what not to do:

1. Think of pretty images, like sunsets or unicorns, that are more visualizations.
2. Relax the need to push away uncomfortable thoughts or difficult feelings; be aware of how you push those away in your experience
3. Try to “do” anything. This isn’t a test or a race, and when you’re meditating, you’re not “doing it wrong”.
4. Avoid distracting sounds and environments.
5. Fall asleep
6. Get yourself so uncomfortable that meditating becomes too difficult.
7. Think you’re doing it “wrong”. You’re not. You’re just sitting with whatever comes up.

Meditation is liking riding a bike. It takes a little time and practice to get started, and when you do, you’ll notice the benefits quickly. You’ll develop more peace of mind, overall well-being and happiness from your mindfulness meditation practice.

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Out of anxiety or fear, guys sometimes reside in this perpetual state of limbo when it comes to figuring out if they want to stay put in their intimate relationship or marriage. Men make excuses for staying in bad relationships, like, “I don’t want to hurt her,” or “We used to be so good – there must be a way to get back to that point.” Do these questions reflect the truth of the matter, or simply make for excuses to keep us from changing a bad deal in our lives?

Often times, fighting relationships have a happy ending. And sometimes they don’t. Then there’s other times where a weird combination of the two gets created. Guys find themselves staying in relationships that they otherwise would have gotten out of a long time ago. Then, they make up all sorts of things in their head to keep them stuck in their bad situations, like quicksand. Men tread water to cope, as to not swim away or drown, but sometimes tread for some time, not necessarily unhappy, but comfortable enough not to make a change.

It’s hard to summon up the resources – courage, strength, intuition – to do a sea change in life, and negative relationships can truly be the hardest to break from. Even if we’ve gotten comfortable in our relationship suffering and misery, at least we’re familiar with it. It’s a security blanket. Change, on the other hand, is a whole separate thing. We’re not predisposed to change as human beings, and relationship adaptation is often times a  sea change that many guys are not willing to make. So, we grin and bear it, sometimes for several years or decades, and we hope for the best.

Time gets lost really quickly when we live in this state of relationship flux. When we live like this, we’re not listening to ourselves, or our true desires for intimacy and happiness. We deny both ourselves and our partner a chance to find happiness in another relationship, or just to simply to not be trapped in the current one.

Here’s some ways guys get stuck in bad relationships:

• Fear kicks in, and we think “I’ll never attract someone like her/another woman/anyone else again.”
• We “accept our fate in life” (victimization)
• Money fear kicks in (e.g. finding a new apt./condo, front bills alone, split up furniture, paying child support)
• We make excuses for ourselves and for her, and tell ourselves that our situation is better than it really is (we rationalize it)
• Head takes over (logic), and heart gets banished (gut, or intuition). The two simply aren’t talking.
• We “cope” with it, or avoid it altogether
• We wait for her to break up with us
• We tell ourselves that our partner won’t be o.k. on her own, or that we’ll devastate her if we break up the relationship.
• We tell ourselves that it will damage our children by leaving, that there will be irreparable damage to them, so how could leave then?

Strong messages take over, like:
(a) Staying a “stand-up guy”
(b) Being a good relationship partner
(c) Feeling guilty
(d) Worried you’ll “hurt her feelings” by leaving
(e) All the above

Relationships are designed for happiness, and if you feel like you’re subscribing to the message that all relationships do is bring misery upon you, you’ve committed yourself to being stuck. There is relationship happiness out there for you, believe it or not. You can surely create the right type of relationship if you’re miserable now and want to make a change for yourself. There is hope, and if it’s not in your current relationship, maybe it’s in another one. It’s dealing with ourselves first that’s the hardest part.

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