Couples Who Have Amazing Sex Are More Likely to Cheat
A new study reveals why couples who have great sex tend to be less faithful.
If you have a particularly amazing sex life, I have some potentially bad news for you: A recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that, weirdly, couples who have great sex are more likely to cheat than couples who aren’t as active between the sheets. Weird, right?
For the study, which was conducted at Florida State University, researchers had 233 newlyweds document their relationship in fine detail for three and a half years, and had them include details on marital satisfaction, sexual satisfaction, long-term commitment, whether they’d cheated or not, and if they were still together.
The results revealed that people who were highly satisfied with the sex in their relationship were more likely to cheat, which suggests “they felt more positive about sex in general and would seek it out regardless of how they felt about their main relationship.”
Moreover, in order to assess their likelihood of cheating, the participants were also asked to look at various pictures of attractive and average men and women and rate how hot each person was, and were timed on how long they looked at each picture.
It was found that those who quickly stopped looking at pictures of attractive people were less likely to be unfaithful, and even though the time difference between cheaters and non-cheaters was a few minuscule fractions of a second, those who remained fixated on the pictures for just a little too long were 50 percent more likely to cheat.
Furthermore, the participants who were faithful to their partner rated all of the pictures as significantly less attractive than the cheaters did, meaning committed partners psychologically downgrade the hotness of everyone else. That’s actually super sweet.
But here’s one of the more interesting findings from the study: The more objectively attractive a woman is, the more likely she is to stay faithful to her man. Interesting! I would have thought the opposite.
Attractive men, on the other hand, were found to be more likely to cheat compared to their unsightly counterparts.
“With the advent of social media, and thus the increased availability of and access to alternative partners, understanding how people avoid the temptation posed by alternative partners may be more relevant than ever to understanding relationships,” the researchers concluded.
Now, this obviously isn’t true for all couples, and there are countless people out there who have stellar sex and don’t cheat on their partner, so please, take the findings of this study with a giant grain of salt.
H/T: New York Post
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