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EnglishWhen one of the few studies to ask directly surveyed people who had cheated, more than seven in ten said nothing about sex. They talked about feeling unloved, overlooked, or wanting something different. Many described their relationship as basically working.
That's the uncomfortable part. Cheating isn't confined to broken relationships; people who'd tick "satisfied" on paper do it too. So infidelity isn't a reliable diagnosis of a relationship's health. Sometimes it says a great deal, other times almost nothing.
This piece won't excuse cheating or call it a catastrophe. It explains why cheating happens, separates fact from myth, and offers something usable for when it lands on you or someone close.
How common is infidelity, really
Nobody knows the exact figure, and nobody can. Infidelity is measured with questionnaires, and people lie about their own cheating or stay quiet. Every statistic is a floor, not the truth.
With that caveat: the American General Social Survey, asking since the 1970s, keeps finding that roughly 20 to 25 percent of married men and 13 to 15 percent of married women report extramarital sex. Widen the definition to include emotional affairs and intimate contact short of intercourse, and the figures jump, per the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, to about 45 percent of men and 35 percent of women. Whichever estimate you trust, this is a story shared by millions, not a fringe quirk.
The gender gap also narrows with age. Among the youngest married couples it's near zero, and in some data women even edge ahead. Cheating as a strictly male habit is more stereotype than measured fact.
Why people cheat
The best map of motives comes from Dylan Selterman, Justin Garcia, and Irene Tsapelas in a 2019 study in the Journal of Sex Research. They asked nearly five hundred people who had cheated why they did it. Eight recurring reasons came out, and sex was nowhere near the front.
| Motive | Reported by roughly |
|---|---|
| Fallen out of love, or in love with someone else | 77% |
| Craving variety, boredom | 74% |
| Feeling neglected | 70% |
| Situation and opportunity (drink, chance) | 70% |
| A need to boost self-esteem | 57% |
| Anger, wanting to punish a partner | 43% |
| Low commitment to the relationship | 41% |
| Sexual desire | 32% |
Notice the order: sexual desire finished dead last. The top motive was falling out of love or falling for someone else, with variety right behind it. The rest is mostly emotional: feeling overlooked, or needing to feel wanted again. Sometimes it's plain anger with nowhere to go.
Men more often cited variety, situation, and sexual desire; women more often cited neglect. The old cliché that a man cheats for sex and a woman for feeling holds up only halfway. Even for men sex isn't the main engine; it just shows a bit more than for women.
Motives also blend. Take Mark. At home he felt invisible, hearing mostly what he had done wrong again. At a work party a colleague listened and laughed at his jokes, and for once he felt he counted. Neglect drifted into self-esteem and opportunity in one evening. Pin him to a single reason and none exists.
Avoidant attachment and the pull toward cheating
One personality pattern tracks with infidelity especially tightly: avoidant attachment. For them independence is the top value, closeness a weight. C. Nathan DeWall's team tested this across eight studies (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2011), and the finding held. Avoidant people took a more permissive view of cheating, noticed attractive alternatives more, took more interest in them, and cheated more often over time.
The revealing part is what powered it. Not appetite but lower commitment. An avoidant person invests less, and the smaller the commitment, the weaker the brake on a step to the side. Less an excuse than a mechanism.
It doesn't mean avoidant people are fated to cheat, or that anxious and secure types are immune. Attachment only nudges the odds. To see how the four styles differ and where they come from, our guide to attachment styles lays it out in detail.
Four myths that get in the way
Only the unhappy cheat. As the numbers show, infidelity turns up in relationships that feel good from the inside too. Sometimes it's boredom or a one-off situation rather than a deep fault in the couple. The reflex to read it as "they cheated, so I failed as a partner" often isn't true.
Cheating always means the end. Some couples stay together, and some end up in better shape than before. It's never free and can't be planned, but a breakup isn't the only script.
Emotional cheating doesn't count. A bond that never reached the bedroom but rerouted attention, intimacy, and secrecy elsewhere can hurt as much as a physical one. Each couple draws its own line, and concealment is often a truer marker than what happened physically.
The betrayed partner is to blame. Here you have to be precise. Both people shaped the relationship before the affair, but only one chose to cheat. Responsibility for that choice can't be dissolved into "well, you pushed me to it." Understanding context isn't the same as handing over blame.
What to do in the first days
Right after discovery a person is in acute shock, and shock gives terrible advice. The body runs on adrenaline, sleep vanishes, thoughts loop. This is no time for decisions that shape a life.
- Don't do anything irreversible in the first few days. Moving out or calling a lawyer can wait until the first wave passes. A decision that lasts gets made afterward.
- Don't interrogate your partner down to the last detail. The images a "where, how often, how" cross-examination produces can't be un-seen, and come back for months.
- Cover the basics: food, sleep, water, a walk. It sounds trivial, but you think more clearly once the body settles.
- Choose who you tell. One or two people you trust, who steady you rather than wind you up. Broadcasting it to the family or onto social media almost always backfires.
When did you last make a major call at three in the morning on no sleep and feel proud of it the next day? That's why the acute phase has one job: get through it, not settle the future inside it.
Stay or leave
Both choices are legitimate. There's no morally correct answer you're supposed to hold, and people who know exactly what they'd do "in your shoes" are no help. A few questions beat other people's opinions.
- Was this a one-off slip or a pattern? A repeated, long-running affair is a different situation from one drunken evening.
- Did your partner own up on their own, or did you find out? Carrying it to you voluntarily says something that getting caught does not.
- Is the other side willing to face the fallout and do the work? A heartfelt apology with no willingness to change anything is only brief relief.
Couples who survive an affair rarely manage it without deliberate work, often couples therapy. Rebuilding trust takes years, not one repentant night, and the point isn't to excuse the cheating but to decide whether something worth keeping can be rebuilt. When it can't, leaving isn't a loss; even that road beats panic, as the piece on how to get over a breakup describes. And if you stay, much hinges on whether you can talk about the hard things, which is where a guide on how to improve communication in relationships earns its place.
When cheating is a symptom and when it is just an impulse
Sometimes cheating genuinely is a symptom. The relationship has been hollow for years, two people running side by side like flatmates, and the affair is just the shape the exit takes. Other times it's an impulse in an otherwise working relationship: an opportunity, or a weak moment after a few drinks they'd take straight back if they could. The two need different responses; blurring them is a mistake.
The therapist Esther Perel offers a lens in The State of Affairs (2017) worth weighing, though it's a view, not proven fact. In her reading, someone in an affair often chases not a different partner but a different version of themselves. The cheating is then less a flight from the other person than a return to something they silenced long ago. It explains why people who still love their partner cheat.
Watch one trap. The explanation for why the affair happened must never curdle into blaming the person betrayed. "She was cold, so no wonder" isn't analysis, it's an alibi. Context helps you understand; it doesn't move the guilt. And when cheating appears where one partner is steadily belittled, controlled, or cut off, the real question is whether you face a toxic relationship rather than the affair.
The pattern you carry into your own relationships
Infidelity never has one universal cause, but it's often fed by a pattern carried for years without being seen. Avoidance that bolts the moment a relationship deepens. Anxiety that hunts for certainty the relationship never supplies. Or a habit of picking, again and again, the sort of partner with whom betrayal is nearly built in.
Understanding your own attachment style doesn't mean digging for a flaw or assuming you're bound to fail. It means catching your tendencies before they catch you. To start with yourself, take the attachment style test. It measures your anxiety and avoidance and sorts you into one of four styles, so you see where your weak spot sits and why it pulls you toward a certain kind of partner.
Whichever side of an affair you're on, or if you only want to make sense of it, the most useful question isn't "whose fault is this" but "what now." That one has an answer, even when it stings, and only with a cool head, not in the thick of the first wave.