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By Andrea Peyser
June 19, 2015

Treat Mr. Mom right - or else he'll cheat on you

It wasn’t boredom or early male menopause that propelled Kristopher into the arms of a woman not his wife.

It was the laundry.

“Alexis looked at the pile of clothes and said, ‘They’re not going to wash themselves,’ ” Kristopher, 39, told me of the ungrateful woman with whom he shares a bed.

Kristopher had slaved all day over a hot stove and worked his fingers to the nubs to make a nice home for his wife, also 39, and the couple’s 7- and 8-year-old sons. And here was Alexis, crushing the little man’s delicate sense of masculinity with carping criticism.

The desperate househusband didn’t whine and he didn’t nag. He walked from the kitchen to his car as his wife cried, “You can’t leave!’’

And he left. Kristopher drove to a $40-a-night Knights Inn and hooked up with a married babe he’d furiously texted.

“It was a great way to relieve stress,’’ he told me.

Kristopher, who lives with his family in Pennsylvania, is known disparagingly as a Mr. Mom — a guy who does most of the housework and child-rearing as his well-paid wife goes to an office each day.

He’s in good company.

Spouses are more likely to cheat when they’re economically dependent on their mates, according to a new study by researchers from the University of Connecticut. But while 5 percent of housewives cheat on their bacon-earning husbands in an average year, 15 percent of men who lean on their wives for money engage in extramarital affairs annually, the study found.

And, despite bogus claims by feminists and President Obama that American women earn about 77 or 78 cents for every dollar raked in by men, some 2 million males in this country in 2012 were classified as “stay-at-home-dads’’ — known as SAHDs — according to a Pew Research analysis of United States Census Bureau Data.

Whether they’re SAHDs by choice or because of disability or unemployment, their number peaked at 2.2 million in 2010, just after the official end of the 2007-’09 Great Recession (which is sometimes called the “mancession’’), according to Pew.

While there are still more moms at home with the kids than dads, the number of SAHDs has increased from 1.1 million in 1989.

With the births of their sons, Kristopher and his wife decided it made economic sense for Alexis to continue working her six-figure job in sales and marketing, through which she also brings the family health insurance and other benefits, and for Kristopher to quit his lower-paying job as a financial counselor and consultant and to try working at home. This way, there would be a parent consistently present in the boys’ lives.

But from the start, the domestic power imbalance was a source of marital strife that Kristopher did not foresee when the couple got hitched 12 years ago. It came to a head the day Alexis griped that the chicken Kristopher had baked was too dry.

“I had a threesome with two women, one married, one not,’’ he told me.

Kristopher signed up for — what else? — AshleyMadison.com, a Web site that connects more than 36.5 million adulterers in 46 countries. But his first intimate encounter was not with someone he met online, but with a former co-worker.

With the kids at school, Kristopher has enjoyed daytime trysts with more than 20 women, most of them married, “in crappy motel rooms and in $200-a-day Marriott hotel suites. Some like sex in public, and we’ll find an alley or a car . . .”

I was aghast. “I love my family,’’ Kristopher protested. I asked him if he cared about his wife.

Pause.

“I love my wife,’’ he replied, not sounding terribly convincing.

Father’s Day is this coming Sunday. Once, Alexis spoiled her hub by dressing in sexy nightgowns and serving him breakfast in bed on that day. Now, Kristopher groused, “she says, ‘Here’s a card and a b— job.’ ’’ (Kristopher doesn’t believe that Alexis has been unfaithful or that she suspects he has been).

Ashley Madison executives expect to see a 375 percent spike in new male members on the day after Father’s Day as disappointment sets in, a company spokeswoman told me. So wives, girlfriends, gay partners and same-sex male spouses who wear the pants in their families had better give the dads in their lives back rubs on this special day. Or, provide men with something they crave most — time off from drudgery. (You thought I would suggest something else?)

Most of all, refrain from moaning about guys’ domestic incompetence.

They might make you pay.