Does Your Partner’s Sexual History Predict Infidelity?
Let’s put this matter to bed.
This is a guest post from
. You can find her book, Acid Sugar, at the bottom of this article to read more from her. The Science of Sex is reader-supported. Subscribe or upgrade your subscription to support us and help us spread a better understanding of human sexuality.“So I told him it didn’t mean anything,” Tania* said. “I told him I wasn’t expecting him to become my boyfriend, and I wasn’t planning on ghosting him either, it was just sex.”
She gave me a cheeky smile, clearly proud of herself.
My eyes must have widened because she insisted, “And I meant it!”
“Oh, I believe you,” I said, not sure how I felt about it.
I had witnessed her go through pretty much everything a single woman in her early thirties can go through searching for love, and I knew her priority was finding a long-term partner. It was a little hard to believe that she was ok with having casual, expectations-free sex, but there she was, telling me all about the night she went on Tinder to, in her own words, “find a guy to come fuck me.”
The irony was, a couple of months later, Tania reported back to me in a panic: Hookup Guy wanted to be her boyfriend.
The irony that she usually got casual sex when looking for a relationship but could have gotten a relationship from seeking casual sex wasn’t lost on her. It didn’t matter, she didn’t like him that way. That’s what happens with expectations, you should have yours in check or risk major heartbreak.
Tania had also asked me countless times if I thought some guy had ghosted her because she slept with him “too soon,” or if she had scared away a potential boyfriend once he insisted on asking for details of her sexual history, more specifically her “body count.”
Every time I assured her that regardless of how soon she has sex with someone, committed-oriented guys will commit, but other guys likely won’t, and that asking a woman about her body count can be a sign of insecurity more than innocent curiosity.
Men online are terrified of women’s “body count”
It seems like the Red Pill movement’s fifteen minutes are up, but until recently, it was impossible to go online and not stumble on a piece of content, in video or written format, correlating casual sex with infidelity, and claiming men should stay away from women with a high body count because these women are more likely to cheat.
Research indicates that men cheat more than women, despite the fact that women seem to be closing the gap (Rodrigues et al, 2017). Nevertheless, sexual infidelity terrifies men more than it does women, who seem to be more preoccupied with emotional infidelity. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense. Paternal uncertainty makes men afraid of dedicating effort and resources to raising another man’s child, while women fear their mate might form an attachment to another partner and leave them to raise their offspring by herself.
But evolutionary biology doesn’t explain everything. I’m sure you’ve heard this quote from Margaret Atwood before: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” But men are also afraid that their buddies will laugh at them, and buddies have a terrible habit of laughing at a man who was cheated on.
Cuckold is about the worst name you can call a man since Shakespeare wrote Othello. So-called “crimes of passion” or in the name of a man’s “honor” were justified in several countries at some point or another in history. In some countries today women are still flogged or stoned to death for being unfaithful.
As late as 1973, the Texas Penal Code contained an article that justified a husband killing his wife’s lover. But gentleman, pay attention. The husband had to catch the offending couple mid-sex since the homicide was only justified as long as the killing took place before the parties to the act had separated.
It’s no wonder men in 2023 are so worried about the possibility of their wives cheating — a culture that ingrained doesn’t change overnight. Being cheated on doesn’t feel good, and there’s no reason to celebrate unfaithfulness. Infidelity is wrong, but murdering someone is much worse.
The issue with the Red Pill gurus as I see it, however, is a marketing one. If they can terrify enough men, they’ll create a captive audience that will buy whatever course, mentorship, webinar, or ebook that teaches them apparently simple strategies to deal with that fear.
These gurus also preach that men are supposed to be the dominant ones and that a colorful sexual history doesn’t mean the same for a man as it does for a woman. Yes, the sexual double standard is alive and well. The message is that having had multiple sex partners in the past makes a woman more likely to cheat in the future, but men have no such concerns. If a man with a high body count ends up cheating, that’s not so bad, after all, he’s a man.
Can any of it be right?
Trying to control the uncontrollable
Human beings don’t handle uncertainty very well. We’re not a “live and let live” kind of animal. We tend to take an “analyze all variables and risk factors and try to predict the future” approach to pretty much anything in life, our relationships included.
When we enter a relationship, we expect to be happy. So we research correlations and, when possible, causal links between behaviors, beliefs, and personality traits and relationship stability and satisfaction.
When it comes to attitudes, there’s plenty of evidence that more liberal views on sex are correlated with higher acts of infidelity, but research has also found no gender differences when measuring the association between sociosexuality, commitment, and sexual infidelity.
To understand what that means, let’s back up a bit.
Sociosexual orientation reflects a person’s attitude towards sex and varies from restricted to unrestricted. Restricted individuals tend to have a more conservative view of sex, preferring to engage in sexual activity after establishing a committed relationship. Unrestricted individuals tend to have a more liberal view of sex, and therefore engage in casual sex more often.
Having an unrestricted sociosexual orientation predicts sexual motivations for infidelity for both genders in more than one research. In other words, being less sexually restricted improves the chances that both men and women might cheat.
For example, Hackathorn et al (2021) found that sexual motivations for infidelity were “best predicted by being male, having an unrestricted sociosexual orientation, experiencing less sex guilt, having greater Christian identification, and being less satisfied with the primary partner.”
But that’s not all.
Insecure attachment styles are also positively correlated with an unrestricted sociosexual orientation as well as with a greater propensity to cheat (Selterman et al, 2017). According to Mattingly et al, “unrestricted individuals invest less in their relationships and have less incentive to remain monogamous.”
Here’s the kicker, relationships are complex
So can you predict your future wife (or husband) will cheat on you based on her (or his) “body count?”
I wouldn’t count on it.
Pun intended.
According to Rodrigues et al (2017), when people enter a relationship, they tend to restrict their sociosexuality according to their motivation to stay in a relationship. The same paper points out that more committed individuals are less likely to engage in infidelity regardless of their sociosexuality.
Yes, I know that only a few paragraphs above I quoted that more unrestricted sociosexuality is positively correlated with less commitment, but researchers don’t always agree. Science is funny that way.
So there’s evidence that it doesn’t matter how unrestricted someone is sexually speaking, if they value the connection they formed with a partner and believe cheating will mess that up, they won’t cheat. Not all alcoholics drink, you know. They may want to drink. They may crave a cold beer or a glass of wine, but they just won’t have it because they know it’s bad for them. They know it messes up their life. Unrestricted sociosexuality is not an addiction — all the more reason to believe it can be controlled by willpower and a sense of commitment.
When it comes to infidelity, moral and religious values also play a part in someone’s decision to cheat, as well as dark triad personality traits, and whether or not there’s an opportunity to engage in an extramarital affair. A person may wish to cheat and not act on it in order to preserve the relationship or because they simply can’t find someone to do it with. Again, pun intended.
We shouldn’t be harsh on anyone’s sexual history
As
recently pointed out, it would be a great world if unrestricted sociosexual individuals not only recognized their preferences but understood what they meant in the context of a relationship.Perhaps it means they’ll have to exercise more willpower to not be led astray, or that they might prefer to stick to non-monogamous relationships only. But taking a few papers and using them as justification to shame anyone for their sexual history is a low blow.
The problem with correlating sociosexual orientation with infidelity, or better yet, generalizing “high body count” as meaning someone will definitely cheat on their partner is dangerous. For starters, everyone has a different definition of what a “high body count” means. To some people, it means 10 partners, for others, 20. And for others, sleeping with one person you didn’t end up married to is already one too many.
Different people have different criteria, and with the dating scene being what it is today, a number will never tell you the whole story.
My friend Tania has seen it all. She’s had serious boyfriends who talked about marrying her, and she’s had brief affairs that only lasted for a season. She’s had men tell her they needed to have sex with her before they could decide if they wanted a serious relationship. I don’t blame her for chasing after those dangling carrots. (No disrespect to Tania, but does this count as a pun?).
So many men and women are staying single well into their thirties and forties, and many of them are committed-oriented people searching for someone to settle down with. When you’ve been searching for that long, you can’t expect your record to remain clean, but that doesn’t make you a cheater.
It would be great if something as simple as a number could predict relationship stability, or if there was a simple equation to predict infidelity.
BC < X= Faithful; or BC > X = Unfaithful.
There is no such thing. No one was able to define a number for BC that would make a person tip over the edge and become an uncontrollable cheater.
Lastly, no one likes to be blindsided by a cheating partner, but trying to analyze every aspect of your partner in an attempt to predict if they’ll cheat on you or not is borderline victim-blaming. It’s thinking that if you do get cheated on, it will be your fault because you made the wrong choice, disregarding that you made the best choice you could have with the available information that was available, and nobody’s perfect.
When it comes to relationship satisfaction and stability, you’re better off choosing someone with similar values and working from there, without trying to control the future of blaming yourself for somebody else’s choices.
If you enjoyed this story, you can read more from Renata on Kindle. Her book Acid Sugar is available for free on Kindle Unlimited.
Great post, Renata! Nuanced and incisive in a way that is often lacking in discussions on these topics.