If women don’t check, they may run into men like Steve*, a married father of two young kids, who says he initially tried Tinder after hearing it was meant for casual hook-ups. “As a married guy, I only want casual encounters, I don’t have the time or energy to devote to a serious relationship outside of my marriage,” he said. “With Tinder there was no profiles, no need to disclose personal information, just a picture and the potential for sexual attraction.”
Steve says he started to cheat when his wife lost interest in sex after giving birth. “I craved physical intimacy and ideally it would be with my wife, but since she wasn’t interested then I’d have to settle for getting it elsewhere,” he says. If they didn’t have kids, he might have considered divorce, but he decided to stay with his wife and hide his infidelity because, as he says, he didn’t have a better option. “It’s tough, but it’s better than being miserable over the lack of physical intimacy in my marriage, and the misery of having broken up the family just so I can go get laid.”
Steve says he didn’t consider checking out Tinder alone to be cheating, and that’s a common sentiment among those in Reddit’s horrifying Dead Bedrooms thread, where sexually frustrated people vent about how their partners’ libidos dried up, and many of them say they’re checking out their options online. “[I] have resorted to Tinder just to get into an interesting conversation,” one user writes. “I am disgusted with myself for this but I can’t live with these cravings suppressed. I want to feel wanted and sometimes I want to have naughty conversations.”
Dr. Tammy Nelson, a psychotherapist, says that the Internet has caused us to compartmentalize our lives. Some men may want to explore other sides of themselves, and possibly even alternative sexual lifestyles like BDSM or multiple partners, and assume their spouse wouldn’t be into it. And since many dating apps encourage a quick hookup with people nearby, married people might be tempted to what she calls “impulse cheat,” which may not feel meaningful enough to a guy to be wrong.