A Cheating Black Man Speaks

I am a black man and a cheater. Not all the time, just every now and then. The itch comes to me, and no matter what my wife does, I still can't help but want another woman. At least for a night, or two, or three.

I love my wife very much. No woman I've ever met or will meet will hold a more important place in my life. I also love my kids, our house, my job and the fish in my daughter's room. I love everything about my life at home, even though my relationship has become dull and rocky. But while I love having a strong black family, I also love being a man, and there is a part of me that just can't handle monogamy.

I see alot of misinformation in Essence and other black women's magazines about men and what we want. It's silly to me, because women don't know a thing about us. At the same time, they spend all their time talking about us. They always think they have us figured out, that we can be changed, and that they can come up with some magic formula that will control us and make us want to give them all the blissful matrimony they are seeking.

They couldn't be more wrong.

Here's the deal on cheating. Not from every man's point of view, just mine. You would never know I was a cheater, because I don't act like one. I don't think my penis is made of candy, and I don't want to have sex with every woman I see. I just want one sexy black woman, every now and then, as long as she is not my wife.

I have four confessions to make, please hear me out before you attack.

1) Love usually has nothing to do with cheating.

Women have this silly belief that if a man cheats on you, he must not love you. That's like saying that if you really love God, you won't scratch your toes. One has nothing to do with the other. I could be faithful to a woman I hate and cheat on a woman I love. Whether I love a woman is communicated by whether I continue coming home to her, or whether I visit her if she is sick, help her pay a bill or take care of her aging, yet annoying parents. The woman you love is the one that you want to see when you are NOT horny.

2) I didn't care much about being married, and many men can do without it.

I don't need the emotional security that women crave, I never wanted the ceremony or the legal commitments that come with matrimony. Personally, I would rather NOT have the state involved in my relatonship. I got married because my wife was a good black woman and she wanted to get married. That's it. If I could have had my way, I would have continued to date her forever, without ever getting married. It's not because I am a dog, but I would have been considered a dog for not marrying the woman I love.

I recall seeing all my friends who were married, bored and miserable. On top of that, they had to answer to someone every single day, take out the trash and deal with some irritable woman on her period, who feels that she can hold sex over their heads. I never wanted to be that guy.

But it was love that made me willing to be that guy. I have been that guy alot, especially when my wife was pregnant. I also support the African American family, so I do what I can to keep us together. But even though I have experienced the ups and downs of marriage, I still don't see what's so great about it.

3) You can't control us with sex.

I have heard women say things like "If you don't do this or that, then I'm not giving you any." Some men may be affected by this kind of thing, but I'm not. If my wife withholds sex, I give her 2 weeks. If she is not having sex with me within two weeks, I find someone else to have sex with. It's not her right to decide if I get to have sex, and she can't use sex as a weapon.

What she doesn't realize is a couple of things. First, men NEED sex. Again, it has nothing to do with love. We need sex the same way that a woman needs to socialize or a good daughter needs to hear from her mother. It's a purely physical urge, like when you have to go to the bathroom, but not bad enough that you're going to burst. The discomfort from the unfulfilled need is just strong enough that you sigh when you are finally relieved.

Second of all, as a black man in my early forties, there are always at least 5 other beautiful black women willing to drop their pants for me in a second. It's just a numbers game, since a black man with a job and all his teeth is considered a good prospect. So, whether she knows it or not, my wife has competition. But then again, maybe I have competition too and don't know it, I accept that. In fact, if she is tempted to cheat, then that supports my argument that we should never have gotten married in the first place. Women ask us to do something that we don't want to do, then get mad because we don't do it right. It reminds me of when my older sisters used to force me to play house with them, and then get angry because I put playdough in the teapot out of boredom.

Because I love my beautiful ebony wife, I am willing to wait for sex. But only two weeks. After that, I get resentful and start to think bout exercising my options. It's at that point that one of my many unmarried ex-girlfriends gets invited to lunch. They are always happy to meet me.

I am not trying to be conceited, but it's the honest to God truth. I hope that the truth is appreciated, but I suspect that some of you reading this might feel more comfortable with the same old lies. Perhaps if I weren't so committed to telling the truth, I could become more comfortable living the big marital lie that exists in America. It's that same lie that makes Internet Pornography the largest industry on the web, with most of the content being purchased by married men.

4) If we want another woman, there usually isn't much else you can do about it.

I truly believe in the theories which state that men are genetically wired to want more than one woman. We don't choose to be that way, we just are. We are also trained to lie about it, since there is nothing that turns a woman off more than saying that you want more than one woman. But get a bunch of guys together and ask them to describe their sexual fantasies (with no women in the room, of course), and most of them would describe something that involved at least 2 or 3 women. I have shared these thoughts with my wife and I find that she is only interested in killing the messenger. So, that throws honesty out the window.

I am not sure if I will continue to cheat, but I know that my male friends do it all the time. I envy the single guys, who can do what they want, with whom they want, and no one calls them a bad person. I share my life, my space, and my time with a woman, deal with her moods and am continuously there for her, yet, if I fulfill one fundamental need that I have as a man, I become a villain.

It just doesn't seem fair.