Science says: this makes cheating twice as likely to happen

Cheating is not done but it happens (unfortunately) a lot. About 20% of men and 13% of women have indicated that they have had sex with someone else while they were married. About a quarter of people cheat via the phone and 37% of people in managerial positions indicated that they had been unfaithful in the past. Quite high numbers, therefore.

Still, it remains something that you cannot control in a relationship. If your partner wants to cheat, they will do it anyway, and keeping them on a leash at home won't make any difference. However, there are signals that significantly increase the chances of cheating.

That ‘friends turn into lovers’ or ‘out of their own insecurity’ cliché we have all heard a million times. Very often, this is also one of the reasons someone goes outside the relationship for affection. But research from Texas Tech University  has revealed something else: cheating can also just run in the family.

Researchers from a university interviewed their subjects about the history of their parents and family. And what turned out? Almost half of the people raised by cheating parents honestly admitted to having cheated on their partner as well. This makes the chance of cheating twice as high if your partner was raised in a family where loyalty was lacking.

The author of this research, Dana Weiser, was not surprised. According to her, this is even the number one reason for infidelity; you are raised by your parents, and everything they teach you about relationships, you also carry into your own love life.

Now I must admit that this is quite black-and-white. Therefore, you should certainly not write someone off on the spot if they come from a family where the parents were not loyal to each other. More often than not, they want nothing to do with that kind of scenes because they have seen with their own eyes that it brings no good.

But do you have a dark brown suspicion that your partner is not telling the truth or are you looking for an explanation for why you have been cheated on? Then the outcome of this research can explain a lot.

One thing you should never do if you think your lover is cheating you can read here.

Source: menshealth.com, image: Anyone but you