“We Need a Witness to Our Lives”: Outside Partners as Outsourced Relational Managers

Abstract

Ultimately, men reported that their primary partnerships failed to provide much-needed relational management, which men felt they needed to bolster their sense of themselves as masculine. Outside partners helped men’s sense of their self-esteem, which lagged as a result of their perceptions of their primary partners’ lack of interest in them. The men in this study internalized that perceived lack of interest as an indictment of them as masculine beings. Outside partnerships healed their self-esteem, which in turn improved their sense of themselves as masculine. For these men, outside partnerships served as a band-aid for the hurts and injuries—imagined or real—within their primary partnerships. Ultimately, men attempted to outsource their emotional needs to an interested third party as an Infidelity Workaround.