Dedeker: It was like the first three months of the relationship, maybe I was unclear and I did it
This is from the article. This is a takeaway that shows what I just said, that the method by which researchers collect data, it can determine the results. In the article it said, in the Journal of Family Psychology, for example, researchers from Kroatian naiset avioliittoon the University of Colorado in Texas A&M surveyed 4,884 married women using to face to face interviews and anonymous computer questionnaires. In the interviews, only 1% of women so that they had been unfaithful to their husbands in the past year and on the computer questionnaire more than 6% did.
Dedeker: What can see with these studies is that there have been demographic changes in terms of who is cheating and how often. For example, women are just cheating more often than they used to. Again, it’s not clear if this is actually cheating more often or just more likely to lie about it or be honest about it, perhaps, or more likely to admit it.
As our researcher pointed out that is a good argument to make because if we look socially just at the fact that there’s for a very long time, been a lot higher consequences for women who cheat then there have been for men who cheat that it’s much more likely that either a woman be less likely– again, talking in a traditional sense, that would be perhaps less likely to choose a cheat or at least choose not to admit it and take that risk.
Jase: Right, that’s the thing. Even with that argument, it still could be either thing. Even if you’re like, it is because there’s a higher social cost if it’s found out, does that mean you’re less likely to do it or just less likely to admit it or both? It still doesn’t quite get us to the answer.
Dedeker: I think there’s many reasons why it’s probably so difficult to actually pin down a number. I think not the least of which is the fact that if you just ask someone the question, have you ever been unfaithful or have you ever cheated? That does leave it up to the person’s interpretation of what that actually is and then that further is left up to their own cognitive biases about how they’ve decided to square it.
That can all really get lost in the weeds. I think that’s why we end up with these numbers that are such a wide range.
Jase: That’s a perfect segue into our next section here, which is talking about what is cheating? It is hard to define and like you brought up, there’s all these caveats of well, I don’t know if we were totally exclusive yet or we hadn’t quite hit this point or the other one is oh, well this wasn’t cheating because it was just like an emotional thing or that is emotional in fidelity.
We’re going to start off with this question of what does cheating look in monogamous, like traditional monogamous relationships?
That’s a type of cheating or sexual infidelity is fine, but emotional’s not. There’s like all these little caveats and different opinions people have. It is not always one uniform definition of what cheating means. There’s not one definition of what monogamy means even if people think there might just be one definition.
They define in infidelity as the breaking of a promise to remain faithful to a romantic partner, whether that promise was part of marriage vows, a privately uttered agreement between lovers or an unspoken assumption
Emily: That’s very true. There was an article titled Infidelity from Psychology Today, and it defines a couple different things regarding cheating.
