The Cheater Never Feels Guilty, a New Study Reveals
- U-Report
VIVA – A new study reveals that people who are married and then have an affair, or people who known as a cheater rarely feel guilty to their partner.
Even more surprisingly, the study authors found that affairs are generally not motivated by a lack of love for a partner or unhappiness in one's marriage, and fooling around does not necessarily lead to relationship problems.
The researchers surveyed about 2,000 registered users of Ashley Madison, a website that connects married couples who want to have an affair.
After analyzing participants' responses regarding the state of their marriage, motivations for cheating, and overall life satisfaction, the authors detected some surprising trends.
"People have a variety of motivations for cheating. Sometimes they will cheat even if their relationship is quite good. We don't see strong evidence here that people's infidelity is associated with lower relationship quality or lower life satisfaction," a study author Dylan Selterman explained in a statement.
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- U-Report
Surprisingly, these cheaters reported high levels of love for their partners and rarely cited issues such as anger or lack of commitment towards a partner as the main reason for having an affair.
However, about half of the participants said they were not sexually active with their partners and identified a lack of sexual satisfaction as a driving force for infidelity, as quoted from the IFL Science site.
The desire for independence and greater sexual diversity also stood out as driving factors and most respondents reported high levels of satisfaction in their affairs.
"In popular media, television shows, movies, and books, people who have affairs have a strong sense of moral guilt and we didn not see that in this sample of participants," Selterman said.
Ratings for infidelity satisfaction were high -sexual satisfaction and emotional satisfaction and low feelings of regret. These findings paint a more complicated picture of infidelity compared to what they knew.
Results also showed that engaging in extracurricular activities was not associated with reduced relationship quality with a partner.
However, the authors point out that most of the respondents were middle-aged men and it is unclear whether this satisfaction was shared by women or non-binary people who had affairs.
The study also failed to include participants' spouses, so it's impossible to say whether those who had affairs agreed with their unfaithful partner's comments.
Moreover, Selterman says that the important point for him is that maintaining monogamy or sexual exclusivity especially across people's life spans becomes difficult.
"People just assume that their partner will be completely satisfied having sex with one person for the next 50 years of their life, but many people fail to do so," Selterman added.
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