Timeless Wisdom: Men's Sexual Nature (Part 8) - Men's Sexual Nature: Adultery - What Is It and Ho...
Dennis Prager examines adultery’s gendered motivations, arguing men often seek sex due to dissatisfaction or weakness while women prioritize emotional connection, yet both face marital breakdowns. He critiques society’s double standard—forgiving murder but not infidelity—and defends moderation in "minor vices" like pornography via Talmudic precedent, urging compassion over manufactured outrage. Prager’s If There Is No God frames this as proof objective morality sustains relationships, not just religious dogma. [Automatically generated summary]
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Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
Hear thousands of hours of Dennis's lectures, courses, and classic radio programs.
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Women, as a general rule, when a woman has an affair, it is because things are troubled at home.
Women don't go seeking, as a general rule, another male body to touch.
They don't go to lap dances to have semi-naked men crawl all over them.
Okay, this is just not the way females are made.
This is the way males are made, and females do things differently.
That is why women regard sex as so important, because it is, generally speaking, that important to them.
Because it is very rarely utterly separated or separable from the emotional part of a human being.
In that sense, women are more elevated.
There's no question about it.
I have no compunctions about saying it.
I said in the first session that for a woman to understand a man sexually is like human beings trying to understand orangutans.
It is not possible.
We can study orangutans, but we can't understand them.
And that is how it is here.
And I'm very, that is just the way life is.
So a man's reaction to a woman having an affair should certainly not be, you slime, you low life, you slut, but rather, what's gone on that you did this?
What has happened?
How did this happen that you looked elsewhere for love?
She didn't look elsewhere for body rubbing.
She looked elsewhere for love.
And a husband who is in touch with himself and not just, again, responding as many women will when a man is unfaithful with his ego has to react that way.
He's allowed anger.
He's allowed jealousy.
If he doesn't have anger and jealousy, or at least jealousy, then obviously there's not much love there, is there?
And it's probably time to say goodbye to each other.
But the reaction of you did this and that's the end is probably not in any event in most cases what she wants.
She probably wants, in most cases, not in every, sometimes it's just too late to repair a marriage, some of that attention that she got from this man from him.
That's my 50-year-old understanding of men and women.
With men, there are two possibilities, generally speaking, for why he committed adultery.
One is the marriage may be problemed, troubled, just like it was if she commits adultery.
Okay?
In which case, she should react as I advise him to react.
What has gone wrong?
Why are you seeking love elsewhere?
The other is, it was sex.
Now, under sex, there were two possibilities, too.
One, there's none at home, or there is at home, but he's male, and he was weak.
And that's basically it.
And those fill your choices of what goes on, basically speaking, when adultery is committed.
Life is complex, but sometimes it's clarifiable, and I think in this case it is.
And all of these cases demand a reaction before the reaction of divorce.
People usually have too much invested in a marriage to say that, let us take his case.
We had three choices, right?
Sought love, sought sex, was weak and sought sex.
So let's go from the bottom up.
Weak and sought sex, honey, listen.
You can't do this.
I know that this is the way males are.
I understand you saw a gorgeous girl there.
That's not the way, it's not the way it works.
It's too painful to me.
If you do this enough, it does destroy and will destroy this marriage.
Okay, I don't expect her to say it that calmly.
I understand she will say it with the butcher knife in one hand and a glass in another.
I understand.
Okay.
Then up one level, do we not have sex?
And he'll say, like many, well, I wish we had it more.
Well, a lot of men want it more, and if they have it more, I don't know if there is a major correlation between frequency of sex at home and the amount of adultery outside.
I suspect that the correlation is not great.
I'm not talking about married to a frigid woman, and I will come to that as my last thing, or a frigid man, for that matter.
Then there is the other, which is the same as her case.
Do we have serious marital problems?
And then the woman has to decide, as the man would have to decide, if he were the one who were betrayed sexually, am I in some way responsible?
If you're really mature, that's what you could ask.
Very rarely is there one villain in a marriage.
Very rarely.
It can happen, but very rarely.
It usually takes two to make a good marriage and two to make a bad marriage.
It may not be 50-50.
It may be 70-30.
But it is very fair for the one to ask, what is my 30% contribution to your betrayal?
I don't say that you could say that the first night, but at a given point, it is worth asking yourself.
See, because I am totally convinced.
I yell, I very rarely yell at callers.
It may be once in two months, maybe.
And I yelled at a woman.
I was so angry at her.
She was married 25 years.
And she found out somehow or other looking through her husband's stuff that 15 years earlier he had an affair.
And she's now divorcing him.
And I don't think, I think she may be the only person I ever called an idiot.
I often think that, but I never say it.
I actually said, you are an idiot.
You are going to throw away 25 years of marriage because of an affair of 15 years ago.
Well, I'm too hurt.
It was all ego.
It was all ego.
I can't live with this.
Oh, he did this.
I mean, it's unbelievable.
You know, it's so, I tell you, I often feel that I live on another planet.
Half the time on my radio show, I am angry at the instant forgiveness, the automatic forgiveness.
Oh, you murdered 14 kids at school.
We forgive you.
We love you.
But if your husband committed one night stand, no forgiveness at all.
We forgive murderers, but not adulterers.
There's something strange in that, isn't there?
The same people, I'll bet you a lot of women who divorced or men who divorced their wives because of an affair the other had believes that you forgive the murderers at Columbine, at Columbine High School, Littleton.
Because that's the big thing in America, to forgive instantaneously.
So, but that you don't.
Someone who's loved you, who's given all these years to you, has made kids with you, who's raised a family with you, they don't deserve my forgiveness.
But murderers who murder other people, ah, I forgive because that's the proper thing to do.
You're allowed to forgive a husband and a wife, too.
So that's a good thing to do.
In fact, I think one of the great things, one of the great secrets of marriage is to have very short memories.
Don't you love when some, you know, four years ago, you remember, you remember that evening?
I don't mean an evening of fair, you know, that, you know, you said this terrible thing to me.
This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.
Here's something most people don't know.
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Now, back to more of Dennis Prager's Timeless Wisdom.
And finally, the last part of the adultery complexity is: can it ever be morally defended, morally defended?
This is a tough one.
I believe that it can.
Can it ever be defended in terms of religious law?
No.
The law is a law.
Would I say that any married person who had a sexual affair has committed adultery?
But it doesn't mean that it is always indefensible.
I think it's defensible.
Here's an example.
Let us say somebody has stayed together with the partner for the sake of the children.
Maybe you say they shouldn't have.
That's a fair argument, but whatever it is, they did.
It was just necessary to do so for the children's sake.
They stayed together.
They have nothing going on sexually.
Nothing.
Or one is incapable of doing anything sexually.
Or how about to give the most extreme case?
What if your spouse is comatose?
Would anybody here argue that if somebody had an extramarital affair with a comatose spouse, that it was immoral?
Raise your hand if you feel it would be immoral with a comatose spouse.
All right.
One person.
As long as the comatose person was not the one you slept with.
I tell you, got to give this guy his money back, you know.
This is really Talmudic, but what if you had the affair with the comatose spouse?
I asked that question in eighth grade, and the rabbi slapped me.
In other words, let's be honest that again there are gradations of wrong and that it's very interesting.
In this realm, I think we need, it's so funny, because I think in some realms we need to be a lot more judgmental and less forgiving, and in some realms I think we need to be a lot more forgiving and less judgmental.
Whenever I have heard about an affair in a marriage, I have felt bad for everybody, even the one who had the affair.
Most people who have an affair are not slime bags.
They're not out there.
If they wanted out, they would have had a divorce.
It's easy to get a divorce in America.
You can get a divorce.
Obviously, something is keeping them.
I feel sorry for anybody who lives a life clandestinely.
I mean, the thought of hiding from my spouse and hiding from my family and hiding and hiding and arranging, I mean, running your life like you are a CIA spy in an enemy territory, coming home and having to fake all of your vocabulary and your dialogue and your looks.
And I'm going to envy that person.
I don't care how great the sex is.
What a crappy way to live.
It's just awful.
It's a very sad thing.
That's why I go back to what I said the very first, or second week, actually, in the what to do session.
Avoid temptation.
That's the best suggestion I have.
It's not very profound, or maybe profound, but it certainly is also very simple.
You know, there's certainly with regard to men, it's particularly true.
There's a great Yiddish saying, those of you who know Yiddish will enjoy it.
It's a little risqué, forgive me.
When der Putz steht, der Sechel geht.
I will translate it, but A, no translation works as well as the original, and number two, it won't rhyme.
Where is the original rhyme?
But essentially, when the penis stands, the brain leaves.
Something to that effect.
I heard it actually, there was an American joke way of saying it.
What is it?
God gave something to the effect, I never remember jokes called it.
Yes, blood, say it again.
Enough Blood for Both00:05:25
Oh, yes, enough blood for the brain and enough blood for the penis, but not both at the same time.
That's right.
That's how it is in English.
So women need to know men, men need to know men.
People need to calm down on the issue to understand certain things about each other.
Let me tell you a story.
A friend of mine is, It's funny how the disproportionate number of psychotherapists in my private life may say something about my mental state.
But one of my friends is a woman who is a psychologist, and she was telling me that she had a couple of, she had patients who were Orthodox and Orthodox Jews, and it was very sad because she got one of these lingerie catalogs in the mail that just came in the mail.
And she caught her husband in the bathroom spending a little longer than normal in the bathroom with the catalog.
And she was devastated.
And so he's devastated on two grounds.
One, that she's devastated, so he's humiliated by her devastation.
And for religious grounds, which I have described to you about a lot of religions holding masturbation as a sinful thing.
And it's so sad to me because it should have been a non-issue.
It doesn't mean a damn thing.
It's nothing.
It's zero.
It should have been a non-issue to her.
It should have been a non-issue to him.
You know what kills me, and this is in my book on happiness.
It's a very big deal to me.
Life is filled with enough pain not to manufacture it.
I get angry when people manufacture pain.
You know, we get pain from sick children, from bad relationships, from wars, from disease, from frustrations, from things that it's right to be sad about.
But to create sadness, I want to punch people.
You don't have enough?
Was life so good you needed misery?
Just, you know what, life is too good.
I want to create some misery.
I will be angry at my husband for spending too much time with the catalog.
I mean, do you believe it?
I mean, to me, it is unbelievable.
And him, the poor soul, has the double whammy of also believing that he sinned against God.
And this is not atypical.
This is manufactured misery because of a lack of understanding of the normalcy of the way the sex drive works.
In this case, the male sex drive.
I said on the radio, I think it was on the radio, I made a point that sometimes I make points and I want to remember them because the pressure is on on the radio and it forces good thoughts out sometimes.
And it hit me.
You know, women feel uncomfortable sometimes with men in their magazines and so on and this Dean thing that came up.
But then I thought, I said on the radio, you know what?
Hey, wait a minute.
Are you telling me men do not have to put up with anything about women's nature?
I suspect that they do.
Have you heard PMS?
Do some men have to put up with anything during pre-menstrual time?
Or is it hunky-dory, hi, honey, it's so good to see you.
Mood?
Me in a mood?
God, what are you silly?
I was in the last mood in 1981.
It's not the most common way in which women deal with their time before menstruating.
Now that's not true for all women.
Nothing is true for everybody.
But is there nothing men have to put up with in women?
It's not a mirror image.
It's not the same thing.
But who says it's any easier?
So you know what you do?
You realize at some point in life, you know what?
I'm a man and I married a woman.
I didn't marry a man in a woman's body.
Men have to learn that.
And women have to learn they didn't marry a woman in a man's body.
They married a man in a man's body.
We're not like each other.
That's why I believe in marriage.
It forces you to live with the opposite of what you are.
The opposite sex is a perfectly correct term.
It's not a different sex.
It's the opposite sex.
And there are things that each of us have that are so different from the other that it could be scary or different.
A lot of men get scared by women's moods.
They do.
They don't know what to do with them.
They sink, they slink, they sulk.
I don't know.
And the woman forgot the mood ten minutes later.
He's like, what's the matter, honey?
You so are upset.
So what?
So what?
Room for the Unholy00:10:24
Because he never yells, right?
And the same thing, you know, women don't spend extra time in the bathroom with, you know, with, no, I'm thinking, you know, with male catalogs for, you know, nice men wearing suits.
It's not the, you know, it's even without suits.
This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.
Your beloved dog and a stranger are both drowning.
You can only save one.
Who do you save?
Every time Dennis Prager asks that question, his audience splits three ways.
One-third chooses the dog, one-third chooses the stranger, and one-third aren't sure.
Why?
Because we live in an age where increasingly feelings define right and wrong.
But if morality is based on emotion, then murder, rape, and theft are just opinions.
And if people feel justified, why is rioting or destruction wrong at all?
In his new book, If There Is No God, Dennis Prager explains why civilizations cannot survive without objective morality and why Judeo-Christian values shape the moral foundations of the free world.
If you claim that certain things are good, certain things are evil, independent of how you feel about it, you are, in effect, affirming God.
If There Is No God by Dennis Prager.
Available now at Pragerstore.com.
That's PragerStore.com.
Now, back to more of Dennis Prager's Timeless Wisdom.
So I call, let me end, and then I'll take your questions.
Let me end with two things.
I have a lot more, but maybe I'll do another course one day when I want to invite misery into my life.
I have two final thoughts on all of this.
How do I reconcile all of these views with my religiosity?
Because I am deeply religious and therefore take my religion very seriously.
So I ask a question that I have grappled with my whole life.
Is there any room for the unholy in a religious person's life?
Right?
Whether it's a strip show, talking, talking sex here, a Playboy, a lap dance, whatever you want to call it.
Forgetting the adultery issue.
Is there any room for the unholy in the sexual arena?
Is there any room for the unholy in any arena?
And that's how I came to my answer.
The Talmud, the compendium of law and thought, that is only superseded by the Torah in Judaism, it's a very interesting little question.
Is a Jew permitted to gamble?
Right?
It's a very interesting, simple question.
And here's the Jewish law.
Yes, but not for a living.
And I take that to mean, because gambling is not holy.
It's not a productive act.
It's not a holy act.
It's not sexual, but it's not holy.
There is unholy in life beyond the sexual arena.
And I think there's a tremendous lesson in that.
The lesson is that for the saint, no gambling should ever take place.
A saint, a true saint, we don't have that in Judaism, but tzadik, if you will, or Hasid, whatever term you want to use.
The most pious will never gamble.
Okay?
There's no room for that, if you will, in their religious life.
They have committed a life to great holiness.
Most of us are not saints.
And I told you, remember how I came to an answer on the issue of pornography when we dealt with it?
I said, what do we want our man to be?
Do we want him to be a saint?
Or do we want him to be good, responsible, and all these other things, but not saintly?
In a world of rape and murder and torture and thievery and butchery, I don't aim to create saints.
I aim to create good men.
As a man, that's my province, if you will, to work on boys to be good men.
And so I want good men.
Can a good man have unholiness?
Can a good woman have unholiness in her life and still be religious and still be good and still follow the holy?
I think there's room for it.
There's room for some drink.
There's room for some of the sex stuff.
There's room for gambling.
There's room for dirty jokes on occasion.
After all, watching speech is a very important part of my religion.
But never tell a dirty joke.
Never is a big term.
This episode of Timeless Wisdom will continue right after this.
Here's something most people don't know.
When Warren Buffett was just 13 years old, he didn't put his money into a savings account.
While other kids were earning next to nothing at local banks, Buffett put $114 into a little-known investment.
Today, that $114 would be worth over $15 million.
And it wasn't a risky trade.
It wasn't even insider knowledge.
It was an account that's been around since 1888.
And over the last 25 years, it's averaged 29% a year.
That's what happens when your money is allowed to compound.
Compare that to today's savings accounts, paying less than half a percent, while inflation quietly eats away at your buying power.
Buffett understood early.
Banks are great businesses, just not for savers.
If you'd like to see what some investors call the 29% account, go now to secretaccount29.com.
That's secret account, the numbers29.com.
SecretAccount29.com.
Now, back to more of Dennis Prager's timeless wisdom.
I think that we are like pressure cookers, all of us, every person in this room.
It's my metaphor for the human being.
And a pressure cooker needs to let off that steam or it will burst.
If the steam could be let off innocuously, not harmfully, which is another word for innocuously, it's redundant, but I just want to make it clear.
That's fine.
And I love the Talmudic answer on gambling where it said, yeah, you can gamble, but not for a living.
Don't spend your life doing it.
So you want to check out bathing beauties?
Check them out.
Don't spend your life doing it.
I actually, when I have counseled men on this, I have told them, why don't you make a maximum amount of time you will allow yourself.
Okay?
Otherwise, men can squander their whole nights this.
I know a single man who confided in me.
He goes home.
He just watches porno videos all night.
I feel sorry for him.
I don't hate him.
He's not bad.
But frankly, I'm not sure that that's any worse than if he gambled all night.
Just spent the whole night, you know, tapping into the odds on all NFL games.
Why is that any better?
It's a pretty masturbatory act, too.
For the sudden orgasm of winning, I'm sure they are even fact probably in some way related.
So I'm a moderate, even in vice.
Oh, yeah, a little tobacco.
I forgot that.
Absolutely.
A little tobacco, too.
I think that wars on vices are very, very risky.
I want wars on evil, not wars on vices.
And I get a little worried when the mayor of New York City gets real passionate over strip joints.
I'm happy he gets passionate over murder, over rape, and over that stuff.
But I'm not exactly sure who it bothered.
If in the front, nobody's hanging out and bothering anybody.
So what's the big deal?
So I think there is room for the unholy in a good person's life in strict moderation.
And finally, my bottom line on all of this is have compassion.
I think the word is wildly overused, and we have compassionate for the evil, but I think that the distinction I drew in my 20s changed my life.
The distinction between the evil and unholy, between good and holy, is a very important distinction.
Not everything that is unholy is evil.
Compassion Beyond Evil00:02:11
And we need to have compassion for people who don't hurt other people, even if they do something that is unholy.
So have compassion for your man and this demon that he carries around with him, this sexual part of him.
Have compassion for your woman and the demons that she carries around with her that are more complex.
Her needs are very different and very deep, just as different and deep as yours are.
And if we have compassion for each other and understand these demons that we all walk around with, we would fight better fights, fights against the really bad things of this world and not against the dybbuks that haunt us.
Thank you very much.
This has been Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager.
Visit DennisPrager.com for thousands of hours of Dennis's lectures, courses, and classic radio programs and to purchase Dennis Prager's rational Bibles.
Your beloved dog and a stranger are both drowning.
You can only save one.
Who do you save?
Every time Dennis Prager asks that question, his audience splits three ways.
One-third chooses the dog, one-third chooses the stranger, and one-third aren't sure.
Why?
Because we live in an age where increasingly feelings define right and wrong.
But if morality is based on emotion, then murder, rape, and theft are just opinions.
And if people feel justified, why is rioting or destruction wrong at all?
In his new book, If There Is No God, Dennis Prager explains why civilizations cannot survive without objective morality and why Judeo-Christian values shape the moral foundations of the free world.
If you claim that certain things are good, certain things are evil, independent of how you feel about it, you are, in effect, affirming God.
If There Is No God by Dennis Prager, available now at PragerStore.com.