Adulthood is a tricky business. Lots to worry about……….Do you worry about cheating? 

An article was recently brought to my attention that suggests that cheating is not as prevalent and widespread as originally thought.  10 Things You Should Know About Cheating shares that:

Cheating is not as common as you might think. 1 in 5 men have strayed at least once during their married lives, and that figure drops to half in women. 

I thought, hurray – that’s not that bad!  It’s one of those things that we worry about unnecessarily? Cross it off the worry list – it’s not a problem!  Then, I started looking into it further for this post. Unfortunately, those numbers did not hold up. 

Most statistics sit at around 45-50% and they aren’t backed up by any named study. Usually they are quoted as “recent studies.”  In your life, how many of your friends have had cheating affect their lives?  Maybe we should figure out a way to rank these statistics ourselves?   Should we grab the number that seems most workable, most comfortable, most believable?

If that’s the case, then I’m going with this one from The Art of Manliness, because they then list ways to avoid cheating and I’m a fan of both good advice and insightful lists:

25% of all American men (and some studies put the number even higher) will have extramarital affairs during their lifetime.

And how to avoid cheating?  Well here are examples of the Art of Manliness’s good ideas that work equally well for committed men or women:

*Make your relationship your #1 priority

*Date your partner (or don’t stop with the wooing of your wife/husband or girlfriend/boyfriend, I’d say)

*Give up the porn

*Be romantic

*Talk to and with your partner

*Have a sense of honor and duty  (I love that one – we should all live our life that way)

*Establish boundaries with the opposite sex

*Evaluate your weak spots

*Avoid temptation

*Think it through – what are the possible consequences? Are they worth it? (No!!)

Being a responsible grown-up takes some work, sure, but are you ever going to regret being a good person?  Are you ever going to say, damn, I sure wish I’d cheated more, screwed over more people?  At some point in your life, you are going to have to decide what kind of person you are, what you can and cannot live with.  You are going to have to be a grown-up.

Any good anti-cheating advice you’d like to share? Any cautionary tales of cheating partners you believe might help other readers to avoid heartache?

Image credit: Michelle Smith

Post from: Blisstree

The Grown-Ups Guide To Avoid Cheating

In an experiment published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in July, researchers at McGill University in Montreal asked 150 men and women to imagine chatting with an attractive member of the opposite sex. For comparison, another 150 imagined boring encounters with people of the same sex. After the visualizations, all participants played fill-in-the-blank word games designed to reveal subconscious thoughts.

Additionally, test subjects interacted with both male and female actors (participants were unaware they were actors) who were attractive and flirty or aloof, then were asked questions about how they would react to hypothetical situations with their partners.  The men appeared more critical of their partner’s bad behavior (for example, arriving late) after spending time with the attractive, flirty women.  Women were the opposite, they played it off, made excuses for their partner after hanging out with the “hot” guys.  In short, the men saw the attractive women as possibilities for romance, while the women saw the guys as a threat. 

According to this study, women are apparently better wired to avoid infidelity.  There is hope for the future of long term relationship, however.  Men can learn to train themselves to avoid that wandering eye. 

Studies have shown, for example, that New Year’s resolutions succeed more often when people first form a plan of behavior for specific situations. So the researchers had another group of men visualize a scenario involving a cute woman at the bar and a girlfriend gone for the weekend. Then they had the men complete the following sentence in detail: “When the girl approaches, I will [blank] to protect my relationship.”

When let loose in a virtual reality building, these trained men tended to avoid certain areas: the rooms with pictures on the wall of pretty women flickering imperceptibly, flashing for only a few thousands of a second — so fast that only their subconscious would notice. Untrained men, however, virtually flocked to the flashing-women rooms.

A reminder of their loved one helped the men to avoid encounters with attractive women. Interesting. For the complete article, check Love and infidelity: How our brains keep us from straying – Los Angeles Times.

Post from: Blisstree

Real Science – Are Women Better Wired To Avoid Infidelity?