Infidelity. It’s one of the top reasons couples end up in divorce court. According to researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), about the same amount of men and women forgive these indiscretions. How the genders view different types of infidelity however, is very different. What you need to understand about this study is that this is a study of BIOLOGICAL patterns found in males and females.
The study finds men are most upset when their partner is physically intimate with another person. Women on the other hand feel most threatened by a deep emotional connection between their partner and another person. This is true even if the relationship does not involve sex.
While both sexes go through similar thought processes to arrive at a conclusion about their cheating partner, the degree of forgiveness (or lack thereof) is about equal whether the injured party is the man or the woman.
Although researchers expected to see a greater contrast in how men and women respond, they believe some of the clues reside in cultural gender roles and evolutionary psychology passed down from generation to generation.
They point out that until recent times, men had to manage their “paternity insecurity” inside their own heads. Women in traditional gender roles did not have the question of paternity hanging over their heads. They instead had to establish that the father of their child(ren) would stay and continue to provide for them. So these women were always on the lookout for any rival who might beguile their mates and threaten their survival.
For the current study on infidelity, the NTNU team recruited 92 couples to answer a questionnaire about hypothetical scenarios involving unfaithfulness. In one scenario, the partner sleeps with someone else but never falls in love. In the other scenario, the partner develops an emotional attachment to someone else but abstains from having sex.
The results reveal that participants of either gender thought it was improbable that they would forgive a partner’s cheating. Researchers add the thought processes involving cheating and possible forgiveness are almost identical for both men and women. What makes the difference is the perceived threat to the relationship.
“Whether or not the couple breaks up depends primarily on how threatening to the relationship they perceive the infidelity to be,” according to first study author Trond Viggo Grøntvedt.
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