The Science Behind the Gender Infidelity Gap
Cheaters were always more likely to be men — until now…
Compared to the average Hollywood marriage, Keanu Reeves’ marriage to Winona Ryder has been nothing shy of saintly. The couple is married at the time of this writing and has been married ever since they worked together on Bram Stroker’s Dracula in 1992.
Seriously, Keanu and Winona both deserve applause for their longstanding, happy marriage that many people aspire to.
As I write this, several people in my life are going through the agony of the black stain of infidelity. Now, as they each dust themselves off, discussions are in order to determine where their relationships will proceed from here — if they proceed at all. For some, one instance of cheating is a wrap.
Their relationships are ruined and they need to start sorting assets.
The Problems of Adultery
Infidelity has plagued humans for as long as socially enforced monogamy has been a thing. And it’s one of the rare things that virtually everyone agrees on. Study after study has confirmed that people frown on adulterers almost universally. There’s a great stigma that comes along with adultery, for several reasons.
As I always said, beginning my voyage into ethical non-monogamy many years ago, “It was never the sex that bothered me about infidelity, it’s the betrayal.”
It’s the lying.
It’s the willingness to put the relationship in jeopardy just to fulfill a selfish emotional need, without so much as giving our partners a heads up and explaining what we’re going through.
It’s the sneaking around that bothers most people.
Cheating is a choice of the self at the expense of everyone else involved. This is because commitment is promissory, by definition. When we commit to sexual exclusivity with someone, we commit our future selves as well as our present selves. When we cheat, we quit the symbolic sacrifice that we offered to our partners as a testament to our commitment, for better or worse.
The Gender Infidelity Gap
For the longest time in Western Culture, men have been more likely to cheat than women. Theories ranging from the ubiquitous of the male gaze to men simply having more testosterone have abounded as theorists tried to explain what it was about men that made them innately more unfaithful than women.
This is the gender infidelity gap. You may have heard of the gender pay gap, well, there’s an infidelity gap as well. For the longest time, men have been more likely to cheat on women than the other way around. But that’s all been changing over the last few decades.
First, let’s go over the eight main reasons that people commit infidelity, and then we’ll explore the gender infidelity gap and why it’s finally closing.