I wonder if this is reverse psychology on the part of his wife. If Andrei was like, "Well, yeah, that one night a year I go crazy and have sex with some stripper," he comes off looking like a scumbag. As Andrei said in that article, he doesn't have any plans to use his "allowance". Of course, if he's going to truly cheat, having this privilege granted from his wife won't stop his from doing it.

It would be kind of like if you knew a couple of students tried to blantantly cheat on every test, but you never said anything and turned a blind eye to the cheating, you can't really blame them for trying to cheat. But if you were preemptively like, "Listen, I know you try to look at other kids' papers, just try not to be so obvious about it," and then while you were watching he made a less-obvious effort to cheat, that's a dick move on the student's part. By saying something like that to a student, you are calling him on it but saying, "You shouldn't cheat, not because you are afraid of getting caught. You shouldn't cheat because you should want to do things honestly."

And while cheating on a test is not the same as cheating on your wife, I'm wondering if the "looking like a scumbag" thing is kind of like that hypothetical.