Do you think men are more likely to cheat?

[nikki1978]

Feeling a bit sad as a couple of good friends have found out in the last month that their husbands have been cheating on them for over a year (one while his wife was pregnant with a baby they had tried to conceive for many years through IVF!).

Don't get me wrong I love my DH and am sure he would not do the dirty on me but I feel a bit disillusioned with other men at the moment.

MIL and I were having a chat on Boxing Day and she was telling me about how many of her friends husbands had affairs over the years. Of course there were a few women who did too but it was mainly the men.

I am pretty sure my Dad used to cheat on my Mum. My GM cheated on my GF. DHs Gf cheated on his GM. 3 of my uncles have cheated on their wives.

I feel like I am surrounded by it. Are humans just not able to be monogamous? I am sure that I will be for life and DH says the same. Why do people do it? And why does it seem to be mainly men?

Well... either just as many women as men are up to it, or a very few women are very, very busy.

I think a lot more extramarital affairs go on than anyone realises (and that includes couples with "open" marriages who don't publicise the fact). I think just as many women have affairs as men, but are probably better at not getting found out.

Men have to have someone to cheat with, so it can't just be them. In the days before good contraception they reckoned that at least 10% of children had biological fathers who were not their mothers' regular partners.

I think that women are just better at keeping affairs secret.

I know a woman who has cheated on her husband with 16 men in 2 years 3 months of marriage. He has never cheated on her. I would never say anything though as I dont want to get involved.

It's a complex question. Biologically we are supposed to seek the best sperm/spread our seed around.

Monogamy is a social construct designed to keep society harmonious and previously to secure wealth and continuation of family line.

Men may also cheat more because of the way the previous generation and of course some of this generation raise their boys. Ie. In a less intimate way, control your feelings, don't cry and give in to 'weakness', compartmentalise.

Lack of true intimacy contributes to cheating so bringing up our children to be open and nurturing in relationships is very important.

The pat answer to this Nikki is that most of the time, the men you describe are cheating with a woman and you acknowledge yourself that women also have affairs, with other men and other women, but I think the social conditioning argument is more interesting.

I think the gender politics at the moment are fascinating. I have noticed that there is still an expectation amongst men (and OW) that men would be mad to turn down the opportunity of extra-relational sex, at a time when more women are considering and offering no-strings attached sexual relationships.

Since we are in an era of increased technology and mobile phones, emails, messaging and social networking sites feature so heavily in modern affairs, these act as an accelerant to infidelity, but are also the most significant tools of detection too.

What I also see causing a new crisis of fidelity is that despite the realities of people having opposite-sex friendships, working closely with colleagues away from home, contacting old friends on FB and FR, couples blindly assume that they are invulnerable to temptation and consequently never discuss fidelity and the challenges that will happen in most of our lives, when we develop a crush on someone else that is reciprocated.

I think the biggest threat to fidelity is the under-estimation of how difficult it can be to resist temptation and this applies equally to men and women. However, to progress this, it makes sense to look at the opportunities for infidelity and where they are most likely to occur. Societally, since we still pursue a model of men working and women child-caring, proportionately more men are at work where opportunities are greater.

I believe that if we ever saw a society where women felt a pressure not to turn down the opportunity of free sex and where child-care was undertaken by mainly men, while women worked, the gendered disposition to infidelity would also change. Other things would change too, such as the current greater societal distaste for a woman who leaves her H and DCs for an OM, or the assumption that even if a woman is unfaithful and leaves her H, she will retain custody of the children and her H loses not just his wife, but daily contact with his DCs.

I'd rather see a society where relationships were more egalitarian and where there were no expectations that one gender prefers sex more than the other and where there was a cessation of the bargains we see on here all the time, whether it relates to porn consumption, infidelity or any other marriage-reducing behaviour - the ones that start from the premise that it is only to be expected, because the people doing it are men.

Logistically I think it tends to be easier for men to cheat than women once children come along

The statistics indicate that more married men cheat than married women. I suspect the men's affair-partners are often younger than they are and so quite likely to be single.

Women cheat far more than men do they're just a lot better at hiding it. Most of a man's sperm have absolutely no intention of trying to fertilise an egg, they are just there to kill any other man's sperm that comes along - things like that don't evolve for no good reason. Evolutionarily speaking it makes more sense for a woman to cheat than it does for a man because the best man to help raise your children is not the best man to actually father them. You want a kind and caring man to help raise your children but you want an alpha male to provide the sperm - alpha males have great DNA but make shit fathers. All women are hard wired to cheat but not all men are because the most evolutionarily stable strategy is for there to be more kind and caring men than alpha males. The reason why it seems that men cheat more is that the ones who do actually benefit from it being known that they are a cheater, it's like having a great big neon sign above your head saying "alpha male - get your good sperm here". If women broadcasted the fact that they cheated they would end up in a much worse situation because the kind and caring men normally need to be tricked into thinking that they're raising their own children so the woman would end up having loads of nice alpha male sperm but nobody to help them deal with the product of it.

" All women are hard wired to cheat"

WTF? What a complete and utter load of bollocks.

I would say that, in general, men have more opportunity to cheat than women which would skew any statistics.

"You want a kind and caring man to help raise your children but you want an alpha male to provide the sperm - alpha males have great DNA but make shit fathers."

Surely if this were true then natural selection would have meant there are no sensitive (and.. weak?? Sorry I am having trouble seeing why this alpha male sperm is supposed to be superior) men left.

You want alpha males to father your sons because alpha males father more sons - it's a self fulfilling prophesy. The kind and caring men aren't going to stick around for very long if they aren't getting anything out of it. If they don't have a good reason to think that a child is theirs then they probably won't help you raise it. This means that most of the children raised by the kind and caring men have actually been fathered by them. Take away the need for a nurturing father and society will change so that every man is an alpha male and we'll end up like lions where every man is competing to be the alpha male who is the one who gets to have sex with all of the females. The welfare system has already done this to some extent which is probably why we're seeing a rise in thuggish behaviour from the benefit class - they're battling to become the alpha male.

Riiiiight...

Monogamy isn't natural, that's why. THough some people seem to have a monogamy fetish ie be inherently monogamous, the majority only engage in monogamous relationships because of the intense social pressure to do so (monogamy is forever being peddled as the 'only' way to conduct one's sex life when it is simply one of many options). For people who are really not very monogamous, they often get bored with their officially sanctioned partner and look elsewhere. Some then dump the primary partner, others have sex elsewhere and conceal it from the primary partner.
IN general, people would be a lot better off if they thought the whole business through before committing to a monogamous relationship, and asked themselves if it was really what they wanted, rather than feeling that it's 'just what you do, really, everyone settles down' and then finding out that actually it doesn't suit them at all.

Oh, and monogamy is a male invention, which is about ensuring that more men than just the alpha males get to have sex and also that as many men as possible get to own a woman and benefit from her domestic servicing as well as from her breeding potential.

DontLetTinselDragOnTheFloor: Sorry - did I forget to mention that I'm an evolutionary biologist and therefore actually know what I'm talking about?

" All women are hard wired to cheat"

WTF? What a complete and utter load of
bollocks.

I saw a survey, admittedly a while ago, that showed that married women are about twice as likely to cheat as married men.

I would say that, in general, men have more
opportunity to cheat than women which would
skew any statistics.

I don't see how that is necessarily the case. Even now there are plenty of stay at home mums, who would presumably have ample opportunity to entertain at home during the working day. Working women presumably have it just as easy or as hard as working men.

QueenStromba wins this one. Any behaviour seen across cultures has to have an evolutionary origin, and she's explained this one quite clearly.

I think both sexes are as "bad" as each other. Amongst my friends, the women seem to cheat and want their lives to change (ie expect a new man to rescue them - which makes me despair) while I think the men who cheat aren't usually looking for anything more than a bit of excitement on the side.

I find it odd that all the responses to OP's question focus on sex, and the biological impulses to have more/fewer casual partners.

but in real life, few extra-marital relationships are mainly about sex. In fact very many extra-marital affairs are not about sex at all (non-sexual affairs well known to any readers of MN as EAs).

and cheating which IS just about sex - the stupid bonk at the office party - is the easiest to the forgive. It's the extra-marital relationship that is normally hardest to deal with. People have affairs for the excitement, the affection, the newness, because they meet soulmates, becasue their marriages run out of steam and - yes - sex is part of all that.

I think married women are just as susceptible to having affairs as married men (with the important rider that SAH child-carers have much less opportunity than men/women who go out to work, and SAHPs are mainly women).

It could well be that SGB is correct - we are not biologiacally engineered for monagamy.

I consider that QS's ideas about evolutionary biology are bunk, together with the idea that alpha-males' sperm is better in some way. If that were so, there would be far fewer betas and good fathers in the world. My suspicion is that betas sneak in some illicit sex very successfully while the alphas are off drinking with the lads / hunting mammoths / whatever; the betas are happy gathering nuts / snaring birds / keeping the women company.

WWIFN's idea that the recent changes in working habits are facilitating cheating is also flawed. Pre 1960's, when far fewer women worked outside the home there were also many more men with travelling tradesmen jobs, home deliveries, door-to-door salesmen etc. hence the jokes about milkmen & postmen. Housewives were much more likely to be alone at home more when working hours were longer. 6-day working weeks were common until the early 70s.

Evolutionary biology is not an exact science, though, is it? QS: Have you read Cordelia Fine yet?

No. I think selfish, immature people are more likely to cheat. Mature, unselfish people who have no interest in being monogamous will generally avoid relationships in which it's expected or be honest from the get go.

Evolution takes rather longer than a generation or two to happen though- more like thousands of generations. So to blame the violence of the "benefit class" on a biological imperative- well, sorry, but that would have any serious scientists clutching their sides.

I agree with Talleyrand that increasingly, affairs are not just about sex (for men and women actually) and Taghain if you read my post in more detail, the increase in collegiate working relationships was just one of the vulnerabilities to infidelity I mentioned. This on its own doesn't produce more infidelity, but alongside the other factors I cited, that were not in existence 20 years ago, there are increased opportunities for infidelity.

I don't think men and women differ very much at all, but our social conditioning certainly does.

BitOfFun: How exactly does alpha males fathering alpha males equate to evolution? Your argument is basically the same as saying it would take thousands of generations for blue eyes to be an inheritable trait. If blue eyed men started fathering a lot more children all of a sudden do you not think that you would find a lot more people with blue eyes within a couple of generations?

Taghain: You've also missed my point completely. We are a very sexually complex species. Because of the fact that we are completely incapable of looking after ourselves for a long time after birth we require a prolonged period of intensive parental care. Back in the stone age a woman would not have been able to take care of herself and a baby without a lot of help - can you imagine trying to forage enough food from nature to feed yourself and a small child? I'm sure the tribe would help if something happened to the father but I can see how they would be less willing if the father was someone from outside of the tribe. Even if the tribe wanted to help if food was scarce then they're own family would come first. This is why you needed a man who would stick around and help you when times were tough. This is why the genes that produce nurturing men are around - without them the human race couldn't have survived. Populations go extinct all the time and I'm sure that there have been many human populations that have gone extinct due to a lack of beta males.

Alpha males don't necessarily have "good" DNA but they do have fit DNA (i.e. DNA that is going to get passed down through several generations). A lot of evolution is driven by sexual selection which is why we've ended up with things like peacocks - their tail is a great big flashing sign saying "look how much effort I can waste on being this flash and I can't run away from predators but that's ok because predators run away from me". And that's what females want for their sons - they want them to be a major stud who will pass on their genes to even more people.