Men and women cheat on their partners for different reasons. Men tend to cheat because they want more physical stimulation, while women generally have more psychological and emotional motives for cheating.

Chief among these reasons is loneliness. Women often look to relationships with individuals other than their partners because emotional companionship is lacking in the primary relationship. It may appear to be a contradiction that women who have partners are lonely, but often, this partnership is less than emotionally fulfilling. Women may have affairs if they feel they do not receive the attention they deserve from their partners. If a man is too involved with his work or a hobby, he may have little energy left to pay attention to the woman in his life. Women often feel lonely even in the presence of their partners at times. A man may be physically present, but emotionally absent, and this can lead a woman to look for fulfillment outside the relationship.

Revenge is another reason that women cheat on their partners. Women of today are not willing to suffer in silence as their counterparts did in previous generations. If a woman feels wronged, if she has an indication that her partner is cheating on her, she will often have an outside affair to retaliate for the pain she is feeling. Women who find their partners have been cheating on them feel completely justified in having an affair for reasons of revenge. They view an affair as way to make their partners hurt in the same way that they do.

Boredom may cause a woman to look for love outside her primary relationship. As time goes by, relationships may become routine and lose the excitement of their first days. Instead of trying to remedy the current relationship, women may try to inject excitement into their lives by having affairs. Affairs are exciting, both because they involve sex with a new person, and because they involve a considerable amount of sneaking around, hiding things from friends and family, essentially living a second life. For some women, the excitement is so attractive that they are willing to lose their primary relationship in order to pursue an affair.

Low self-esteem can also be a reason for women to cheat. They may feel unattractive and unwanted in their current relationship, even if this is not the case. Partners may not make the same efforts at reassurance that were common in the early days of a relationship, and womens own feelings of inadequacy can make them look for affirmation from new people that they are still desirable. Having an affair with a new partner who finds her attractive and interesting may be compensation for the low self-esteem that characterizes a womans everyday life. Women who have healthy opinions of themselves and are self-confident are usually happy in their relationships, while those with low self-esteem tend to look outside their relationships for affirmation and end up cheating on their partners.