Predictors of infidelity - thoughts?

[Southern Sun]

Cheating is only ONE way the vows in a marriage can be broken.

 

There are many ways a person can be "immoral" and even unfaithful. There are many ways a spouse can betray another.

 

Let's be careful to stay off our moral high horses here.

 

I think it's pretty easy to have an agenda when arguing a point as either a WS or a BS. We don't want to have our egos bruised or deflated any more than they already are. It's hard to admit wrongdoing or fault.

 

I say, if you can take ownership of something that's a good thing. That means you can DO something. You have some control of the outcome. Wayward or betrayed.

 

That does not mean we point fingers at the betrayed and say - look what you did to make me cheat. If you heard any of us say that, I'll eat my hat.

 

But, if as a betrayed person, you want to sit back and cross your arms and say, you're just a selfish twit and that's why you cheated and there are literally NO OTHER contributing factors...not only will the marriage likely not improve, but why would you want to reconcile with that kind of person anyway? What would make you feel safe about THAT?

[DKT3]

Cheating is only ONE way the vows in a marriage can be broken.

 

There are many ways a person can be "immoral" and even unfaithful. There are many ways a spouse can betray another.

 

Let's be careful to stay off our moral high horses here.

 

I think it's pretty easy to have an agenda when arguing a point as either a WS or a BS. We don't want to have our egos bruised or deflated any more than they already are. It's hard to admit wrongdoing or fault.

 

I say, if you can take ownership of something that's a good thing. That means you can DO something. You have some control of the outcome. Wayward or betrayed.

 

That does not mean we point fingers at the betrayed and say - look what you did to make me cheat. If you heard any of us say that, I'll eat my hat.

 

But, if as a betrayed person, you want to sit back and cross your arms and say, you're just a selfish twit and that's why you cheated and there are literally NO OTHER contributing factors...not only will the marriage likely not improve, but why would you want to reconcile with that kind of person anyway? What would make you feel safe about THAT?

 

Sun, it's easy to admit things with qualifiers...IE I cheated, I accept that but...once the but comes into play you are now shifting blame and not actually accepting responsibility.

 

It's almost like saying you have no control over your fidelity.

 

Listen, when I first found out about my wife affair, I blamed myself. If I had done this or been better at that then she would have never done it. Why? I did it because it gave me this false sense of control over her fidelity, as if my behavior could control hers. It made me comfortable for a while, it keep me there longer. The problem? It was total crap, I had/have absolutely no control over her being or staying faithful, just like she has none over me or any other married couple out there. My behavior is my behavior and hers is hers. Me created an unhappy environment I dealt with it by withdrawal and working more, her by spending time with another man. So let's say I filled my time taking trips to Vegas and bankrupted us...would it be acceptable to say "I accept responsibility, but I was lonely and felt unloved"?

[Southern Sun]

Sun, it's easy to admit things with qualifiers...IE I cheated, I accept that but...once the but comes into play you are now shifting blame and not actually accepting responsibility.

 

It's almost like saying you have no control over your fidelity.

 

Listen, when I first found out about my wife affair, I blamed myself. If I had done this or been better at that then she would have never done it. Why? I did it because it gave me this false sense of control over her fidelity, as if my behavior could control hers. It made me comfortable for a while, it keep me there longer. The problem? It was total crap, I had/have absolutely no control over her being or staying faithful, just like she has none over me or any other married couple out there. My behavior is my behavior and hers is hers. Me created an unhappy environment I dealt with it by withdrawal and working more, her by spending time with another man. So let's say I filled my time taking trips to Vegas and bankrupted us...would it be acceptable to say "I accept responsibility, but I was lonely and felt unloved"?

 

I totally get what you're saying. In fact, I've said this very thing to my husband: by the time I chose to cheat, there was very little (short of early discovery) he could have done to stop me. And later...as he was obsessing over whether I would go back to my AP, I could try to reassure him all day long, but at the end of it, both of us had to admit - there was nothing he could do to control me and it was pretty much all in my hands. I would have to choose not to go back.

 

But...and there is no better word than but!

 

We still have to have a way to talk about things that happen in a marriage OVER TIME that create an environment that can make one (or both) spouses more susceptible to MAKING THAT CHOICE. Here I say...that person still makes a choice. They are still, at the end of the day, choosing something. The betrayed did not make them choose. However, over a long period of time, things happened that created an environment that led one spouse to go a certain direction. Not helplessly. He/she made that choice because of a host of other reasons (like I mentioned before...opportunity or time/proximity or because of how they were raised or...who knows).

 

Using your hypothetical example about dealing with your pain by going to Vegas and bankrupting the family. We can say that no one made you do that. You chose to do that. But then what? How do we help things get better, after we beat you over the head with that? We probably need to understand what put you in that frame of mind to begin with. If you as a family want to recover, you will want to get down to brass tacks and talk about it. You might find out that you felt alone because of this or that reason. Maybe this happened over years. And maybe your wife had something to do with that. So this part IS something you can repair together. And if you don't repair it, if the marriage is broken, perhaps it's something you apply to your next relationships.

 

Right?

[wmacbride]

People like to refer to studies like this one because it absolves them of responsibility. I didn't cheat because my morals are easily compromised, I cheated because she didn't give me enough bj's or he didn't buy me flowers often. They'd rather victim blame their spouse than admit they screwed up.

 

I have to agree with this. How can a study measure the reasons why someone cheats when they may not even be aware of them themselves?

 

It's easy to blame it on biology ( the ever popular humans are not naturally monogamous). your spouse ( if he/she had done x, y and z I would not have cheated) the ow/om ( she/he seduced me) etc.

 

A study like this also assumes the respondents are being honest. How does the person conducting the study know this? Is the person telling the truth or are they just trying to find a way to excuse their behavior? One thing I have learned on this forum is that it can take some time, if ever, for a person who has had an affair to really understand why.

 

 

In the end, does any of that really matter? Each person who has an affair does so for their own reasons, and I just don't see how that can be simplified into numbers that really mean much of anything.

[knabe]

People like to refer to studies like this one because it absolves them of responsibility. I didn't cheat because my morals are easily compromised, I cheated because she didn't give me enough bj's or he didn't buy me flowers often. They'd rather victim blame their spouse than admit they screwed up.

 

Eh, I get why that sounds really noble. But it is possible to be totally responsible for your actions and STILL have had a crappy spouse who you MIGHT not have cheated on had they halfway tried.

 

This either/or thing is really just a lack of higher order thinking. You can be legitimately lonely and horribly unhappy in your marriage and still take responsibility for your choice to respond to that by cheating.

 

Resistance to this is usually a sign that the BS doesn't want to admit what they KNOW - that they treated their WS like furniture or crap.

[alphamale]

men and women cheat for all sorts of reasons. I don't think you can say that men cheat because of X and women cheat because of Y.

[newmoon]

i think the reasons someone chooses to cheat within a relationship can be varied and unknown. it basically comes down to come unfulfilled need - whether real or perceived - with the current relationship or partner. the best indicator is the past though - if someone did it before the chances are they'll do it again. they should limit these studies to people who've cheated on multiple partners to get a better sense of why they do it.

[Birdies]

In the end, does any of that really matter? Each person who has an affair does so for their own reasons, and I just don't see how that can be simplified into numbers that really mean much of anything.

 

Well that's the whole point of social science research. Yes every individual is different, and all generalizations have many exceptions, etc. But if you have a large pool of people with a similar trait (i.e. had an affair), and you sift through all the other characteristics about their individual lives and find which ones reappear over and over among most people, IMO there's a lot to be learned from that. Maybe because I'm a scientist. It's a way of finding patterns in what would otherwise just be anecdotal stories.

[Birdies]

i think the reasons someone chooses to cheat within a relationship can be varied and unknown. it basically comes down to come unfulfilled need - whether real or perceived - with the current relationship or partner. the best indicator is the past though - if someone did it before the chances are they'll do it again. they should limit these studies to people who've cheated on multiple partners to get a better sense of why they do it.

 

I agree that whether someone has done it before would have been an interesting component of the study. It doesn't look like that was one of questions asked.

 

Here is the actual paper, for those questioning the methods of the study. It goes into great detail on the exact methodology.

 

https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/30802407/Infidelity_in_hetero_couples.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1508865179&Signature=zcf%2FmOoAZn0fhL70%2Bl4j4UCepDo%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DInfidelity_in_heterosexual_couples_demog.pdf

[Els]

I agree that whether someone has done it before would have been an interesting component of the study. It doesn't look like that was one of questions asked.

 

Here is the actual paper, for those questioning the methods of the study. It goes into great detail on the exact methodology.

 

https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/30802407/Infidelity_in_hetero_couples.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1508865179&Signature=zcf%2FmOoAZn0fhL70%2Bl4j4UCepDo%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DInfidelity_in_heterosexual_couples_demog.pdf

 

Interesting study. My main issue with it is that while the sample size is large, it is extremely non-diverse - everyone participating is from the US or Canada and is cis-gender in a heterosexual relationship, 88% are Caucasian, and almost all have tertiary education.

 

I think it could raise interesting questions about that particular subset and the culture involved, but I would really not take it to mean anything about "men" and "women".

[William]

I'm sensing topic drift into the politics of affairs/infidelity/cheating. Let's move things back to predictors and the thread can live. Else, we'll move on. Thanks!

[preraph]

One excellent predictor is ethics and empathy. But first you have to find out what they really are, not just what they SAY they are when you first meet and they want to have sex and will say anything. It takes time. A person with ethics and empathy will not WANT to hurt someone. It may end up being inevitable at times since you can't make everyone happy, but a person with ethics and empathy will try to keep from hurting others.