Unless the person you’re cheating on has cold granite for gentials, whatever heightened pleasure you’re experiencing is mostly imagined. The majority of cheating pleasure comes from the drama of recklessness, giving in to your desires and the heightened stakes.

Unless the person you’re cheating on has cold granite for gentials, whatever heightened pleasure you’re experiencing is mostly imagined. The majority of cheating pleasure comes from the drama of recklessness, giving in to your desires and the heightened stakes.

All of these factors give sex with someone new an “I’m so young and free, look at me” quality, and that can feel great for someone who’s stuck in a relationship rut. Also, when you cheat (and when you sleep with someone for the first time), your brain releases a huge amount of endorphins, which are natural opiates, and that flush of brain juice often has an anesthetizing effect. So when you fuck someone new, it can quite literally numb the pain of your relationship problems. That stress alleviation makes the cheating sex seem greater than it is. The other thing that happens when you cheat is that your brain gets pumped full of dopamine, a hormone that tells us new, risky or spontaneous things feel good. Evolutionarily, that’s beneficial: if your body tells you sex with a new person is especially pleasurable, you’re more likely to bang more strangers, and that dramatically increases your chance of furthering mankind.

Keep in mind this neurochemical effect is designed to encourage conception, not tell you that the person you’re dating is right or wrong for you. People confuse those signals all day long. You can make sex feel that good by not cheating, but you have to be open and honest about your desires with you partner. It could be that trying something new and weird together will make you feel the same way you do when you cheat, but if it doesn’t, also try giving yourself some time apart. Absence does make the boner grow harder.

Or, it could be that you’re sexually incompatible with your partner, and cheating feels better because the quality of the sex is more to your liking. Either way, I have to go now.