NEANDERTHAL man is alive and well and boasting of sexual conquests in a locker room near you. As you put your wet socks on, you have to hear who he last bedded or is about to lay. He cares less for the objects of his penetration than for his discarded carton of Head & Shoulders; he laughs at victims' love letters, sleeps with other men's wives and he couldn't give a monkey's about the lives and families - not least his own - that he damages.
Man Alive is not scouring the indiscretions of the young who plant wild oats in experimental or transitional relationships. Rather I ask why some men who are married or in long term relationships have an affair or even do a runner? Is there a screw loose in the male psyche that predisposes the likes of Daniel Ducruet to cavort naked with a 24 year old busty model when he's married to the ostensibly highly desirable Princess Stephanie of Monaco?
Abandon, I've been alerted, isn't a politically correct word. "It almost sounds like adultery," says William Keogh, a relationship counsellor with the Marriage and Relationship Counselling Services in Grafton Street. "People don't talk about adultery now. Nowadays it's an affair. Desert, leave or separate are today's words. And abandon has connotations of men storming out indifferent to consequences."
A recent Newsweek feature had no problem using the A word. Adultery, it concluded concerns more the breach of trust than sexual infidelity: "Today the deepest betrayal is not of the flesh but of the heart". And the comedy First Wives Club, recently released in the US, starring Bette Midler, Goldie Hawn and Diane Keaton - reportedly watched by mainly female audiences - charts the revenge of three wives dumped for more firm bosomed, sleeker trade ups.
Mary O'Conor, a relationship counsellor and sex therapist at the Albany Clinic in Dublin, says it's a bit stereotypical to think of men doing a runner for the sake of a newer model. She is sympathetic to the guys who have affairs. Usually, she says, they have low self esteem.
"If the person they're involved with is constantly putting them down, withholding affection or sex, if she's constantly criticising him, he won't feel good about himself. Or if the woman wants to change things about the man it can get too much far him. She wears him down with constant, rejection." Poor spineless lamb, driven by his spouse to infidelity.
Many men get stuck on the chase: for them, the chase is everything. After they get married, they fail to see they're into a whole new ball game. The game is now about managing, rather than achieving, a relationship.
Clive Garland, a psychotherapist at the Clanwilliam Institute in Dublin, believes that many men fear emotional closeness in a relationship. He suggests that these men tend to lack a strong sense of their personal identity, fearing that they'll be smothered by intimacy. They can be tempted to flee the complexity of intimacy by seeking out someone else "but you bring the same complexity with you".
Ed McHale, a psychologist, and family therapist at the Clanwilliam Institute, says that many men tend to be emotionally illiterate. Not knowing how to be emotionally available to their partners, they can be drawn to fleeting sexual liaisons or protracted relationships of continuous infidelity, returning to the tired old game of chase they've played before. Struck by a new partner's understanding or sexual attraction, they opt for casual or opportunistic sex free of the burden of having to get involved in a relationship.
Rob Weatherill, a psychotherapist and author of Cultural Collapse, believes that men do a runner because they're confused: they no longer know what it means to be a man.
"In the past, men disguised their power over women by becoming their protectors. Women were on pedestals while being considered fair game in exclusively male gatherings. Now with men's political power exposed in the last few decades men are confused." He believes that men react to the feminist critique which mocks the traditional male values of distance, authority, strength and mastery in three ways. They take on board the feminist critique and change their behaviour; they cling to old power and lash out at women; or, in fear of the hidden power of the feminine, they run. "But it's hard to run because it's an inner problem they're running from."
Of course it isn't only men who start affairs. As Ed McHale says: "The gender with the most power will tend to initiate sex". As women gain greater power in society, the present imbalance may even itself out.
Man Alive concludes - without prejudice to any of the foregoing - with an astute observation from Garrison Keillor's The Book of Guys: "A monogamous man is like a bear riding a bicycle: he can be trained to do it but he would rather be in the woods doing what bears do."