Why Some Women Cheat When They Hit Middle Age

The reasons more and more women over 50 are crossing the line from infatuation to infidelity aren’t all what you’d expect.

I’ve been married to the same man for 18 years. I love him — but he’s not the same man I married. He no longer gasps when he sees me naked. He doesn’t laugh at all of my jokes. He’s tired of listening to Sade. (To be fair, I myself have long given up on wild sex, talking about Star Wars, and jumping up from the sofa when he walks in the door.) We used to be the last couple sitting at a restaurant, lingering over the final swill of our martinis. Now, I’m sober and we’re the middle-aged couple that gets the check as soon as we finish our crème brûlée. The thrill isn’t gone. It’s just lurking somewhere beneath mortgage statements and dirty socks.

I have no interest in having an affair, though. But I do have crushes. To me, infatuation is diet infidelity. It’s sweet and quenches my thirst, but it will never rot my teeth or go to my waist. Having a crush makes me feel giddy, taking me back to my 20s, when life wasn’t predictable and bursting with big responsibilities like caring for my teen daughter. I have two crushes at the moment: Downward Old Dog, a 50-something man in my hot-yoga class who grunts when he sits down on his mat, and Big Millennial, Little Dog, a cute guy who wears Tom Ford sunglasses and flirts with me when I walk my Australian shepherd. Conveniently, I have no interest in actually having sex with these men.

The anticipation of seeing one of my crushes tilts my predictable day. Here’s a man who hasn’t caught  me crying over career disappointment or heard me complain about my tiny closet having no room for sweaters. It’s a chance at a new identity, a do-over. Isn’t middle age all about pivoting to become the woman you were always meant to be? Also, a crush doesn’t talk about his root canal or his narcissistic sister. The dynamic is based on sharing your sexiest self. But while a crush can’t disappoint me or detonate my marriage, I can easily imagine how this seemingly innocent obsession could segue into something sweaty and physical. Could it happen to me?

For some women in their 50s experiencing similar feelings of tedium and longing to reinvent themselves, there’s a need for something a little more … explosive. And more and more of them are having full-on physical affairs without remorse, says gender-studies expert and author Susan Shapiro Barash, who has talked to thousands of female cheaters over 30 years for the three editions of her book A Passion for More: Affairs That Make or Break Us. “Women over 50 have been through a lot. They have played the good wife and the good mother,” she tells me. “Now, they have more agency. They want something just for themselves.” A 2020 study on extramarital sex published in the Current Research Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities backs up Barash, with women 44 to 55 cheating more than any other age group, male or female. On a Reddit thread entitled “Do women in their 50s cheat?” someone also uncannily echoes Barash: “I know tons of women in their 40s and 50s that cheat actively in stages. They will play the good wife and mommy for a couple months and then overnight, they start cheating.”

For Sasha, a divorced mother of two and marketing consultant in Los Angeles, an affair at 51 was a secret, shiny thing all her own: “It was kind of like when I had bulimia in my teens. With my affair, I felt like I was purging by fucking my misery out,” she says. “And that affair was 100 percent the catalyst to get out of my bad, controlling marriage.” (Sasha, by the way, is a pseudonym. All of the women I spoke to about their infidelity for this story requested anonymity for privacy reasons.)

Why not just call a divorce lawyer, I asked 52-year-old Katie, a recruiting executive whose marriage blew up a few years ago when her husband discovered her two-year workplace affair. “I didn’t know how bad it was until I found something better. Something good,” she says. Good sex? “Yes, that. But also, I hadn’t felt sexy or desirable in a long time. My husband looked at my vagina and my boobs differently after I had kids. He had so little interest in sex. I felt used.”

Barash says heterosexual women over 50 tend to stray because they’re empty nesters. With the kids out of the house, they finally have free time to reflect on their marriages and their unmet needs. Or to play pickleball, which is how one 60-year-old married woman she interviewed met her partner. “Women are out in the world,” she says. “They take French lessons, they go to the gym. It can be deliberate or random and unexpected. You’re at Bloomingdale’s and you encounter a man and feel what I call a ‘thunderbolt.’”

According to her interviews, women are motivated to go rogue for four different reasons: They want hot sex, they seek a shot of self-esteem, they’re exercising newfound empowerment, or they simply fall in love with someone else. Sasha and Katie both admit their affairs gave them a much-needed ego boost that proved more rewarding than the orgasms. (Both women also say their ex-husbands were not into sex.)

Julia, a married 56-year-old photographer who has been carrying on an emotional affair for months, doesn’t mind her husband’s ambivalence about sex all that much. Menopause and Lexapro deaden her urges, she says. What drove Julia to bond with a man she met on a shoot was his eager attention. “My husband was so tired of my stories. He’s heard them all. We would be at a dinner party and I would start telling a story and he would shake his head like, ‘Ugh! Here we go again.’ People love my stories.”

There’s a lot of talk about middle-aged women feeling invisible —  they don’t turn heads at a cocktail party, no one holds a door anymore, guys look right through them — a self-perpetuating narrative too often focused on male attention and what we think men want to stare at. I never hear women saying their friends don’t notice them anymore. In any case, the cheaters I interviewed all wanted to be heard more than seen. They craved laughter and deep conversation. “The banter we had on phone calls was amazing. This man had such emotional intelligence. Talking to him was like a serotonin hit,” says Sasha. Ella appreciated a man with depth and empathy. “We always talked before we had sex,” she says. The women also agree that their affairs forced them to have some much-needed “me” time. I get that. I mean, my crushes propel me to exercise and take walks in nature.

On her podcast She Wants More, best-selling author and journalist Jo Piazza explores the idea of affairs as self-care. The podcast series was directly inspired by Barash’s book and explores why women stray outside of a marriage. In one episode, Piazza, who has not cheated on her husband, wonders if infidelity is the new Goop. She sees why women over 50 are more likely to indulge in this frisky form of self-care. “I think it’s pretty obvious,” she tells me. “As we get older, we get more confident in owning our desire and we stop caring about what other people think of us. These women are like, ‘Who the fuck am I and what do I want?’”

What I want from my crushes as a middle-aged woman is a reminder that I can still quicken another man’s pulse — and, more important, my own. But I also bring the intoxication I get from flirting with Downward Old Dog and Big Millennial, Little Dog back to my marriage just as a lioness drags prey back to the pack. It reminds me that I actually do want to have wild sex (with my husband) and to leap up when I hear his key in the door. All of the unfaithful women I talked to said their affairs spurred them to leave a bad relationship or heightened their self-esteem. Maybe they realized they had just been cheating themselves out of what they wanted. In my mind, that’s the real betrayal.