A spouse can be responsible for making you feel a certain way, but they can never be responsible for how you act on those feelings. Spouses who cheat and say they were "driven" to it are just making excuses. Once you are in that head space where you're thinking, "gosh, I need to find my satisfaction from some other woman," you have choices before you. You can talk to your spouse, get counseling... gosh there's all kinds of things you can do. It's not like your spouse backed you into some corner where your only possible action is to have sex with some other person. The worst she could do is back you into some corner where you have to address the issue of how you feel. How you act on your feelings is your own responsibility. Even in a deterministic framework, someone's decision to cheat is based on a plethora of events in that person's life; it didn't get erected whole hog by the intrusion of a spouse into the formative causality.

I've listened to Dr. Laura plenty of times while on long drives. She's worthless as a psychologist - since she isn't even remotely one - and sometimes I feel that her advice is actually quite counter-productive. She also has a strong tendency to find fault with women who aren't acting like true lackeys of the Promise Keeper movement.

I'm not sure I agree with that. Correlation does not necessarily imply causation. Sounds similar to a statistic I read recently stating that 'couples who have sex more are more attractive'. The study concluded that if people have sex more, they become more attractive. Yes, I'm sure Johnny Depp has sex more regularly than Stan, the scruffy and unkept ugly man who works at a bait shack. No, I don't think the sex made Johnny more handsome.

Opportunity isn't necessarily related to the reasons why people cheat. Obviously a person who will cheat will do so more in an environment that makes cheating easy. Personally, I wouldn't be married to a person I didn't think other people wanted...if no one else wanted my husband, why would I? Clearly the qualities I see as desireable are likely viewed as attractive by others too. Nor would I be married to anyone I didn't trust absolutely. If I saw my husband in a bar I'd want him, and if I spoke to him for five minutes....wow. Well, anyway women come on to him all of the time, and he is a charismatic flirt with plenty of 'opportunities to cheat', but his flirting doesn't bother me, nor has he ever deceived me. After nearly eighteen years, I'm pretty sure I know him very very very very well.

At any rate, I answered 'it depends'. A spouse can make life unbearable and use their marriage vow to completely take the other for granted...including (perhaps especially) withholding intimacy entirely. I can see why that would lead another into the direction of finding intimacy elsewhere. Could anyone blame Rhett in the movie 'Gone with the Wind' for telling Scarlet he'd be going to the brothel after she said she'd never have sex with him again? Holds true for either gender. And divorce isn't always the better solution, depending. Also...some couples are just fine with finding that intimacy elsewhere. We don't actually know whether or not Spitzer 'cheated'. We do know he is a hypocritical liar for his policies against prostitution, but we don't know whether he and his wife had an understanding between them. And it isn't exactly feasible for a politician to frequent a Lifestyle club.

Edited to add:
I must say, I disagree with those who have mentioned that they believe society favors the woman cheater.

Friendship between women:
A woman didn’t come home one night. The next morning she told her husband that she had slept over at a friends house. The man called his wife’s 10 best friends. None of them knew anything about it.

Friendship between men:
A man didn’t come home one night. The next morning he told his wife that he had slept over at a friends house. The woman called her husbands 10 best friends, 8 of which confirmed that he had slept over, and 2 said that he was still there.

The above is only funny because it is so very true.

The way I see it, Dr. Laura is talking to a specific woman in most of her rants. It is the suburban housewife, who has a husband that brings home the money. This woman's job is to raise the kids and be a good wife, yet she calls in to Dr. Laura and complains about some really silly (to the listening audience) problem, at which point Dr. Laura nails her on all of her faults as a wife, which usually include being too self-centered and not paying enough attention to the very basic needs of her significant other.

Men are simple creatures. They want food, sex, TV. That is really breaking it down to brass tacks. Yet, in my experience, men are pretty basic in their needs. Much moreso than we women are.

Dr. Laura bases her advice on that one model. You keep him happy, and he will keep you happy. She is right, to some degree.

And on the subject of Michael Spitzer, she admitted that she doesn't know the situation there and would not pre-judge it. As it has been mentioned previously in this thread, his big mess up as far as the public is concerned is the hypocracy of what he did.

Edited to add: I meant to put this in gender issues, but I somehow chose social issues. I s'pose it's also a social issue