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Why married people have no regrets when they cheat

“Sometimes they’ll cheat even if their relationships are pretty good."

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By Alice Clifford via SWNS

Married people who cheat have no regrets, a new study reveals.

Instead of feeling guilty, those who cheat found having an affair highly satisfying and believe cheating didn’t hurt their otherwise healthy marriages.

Sexual dissatisfaction was the top reason to cheat, with less common motivations including the desire for independence and sexual variety.

Fundamental problems with relationships, like lack of love or anger toward a spouse were among the least-cited reasons for wanting an affair.

Those who took part in the survey, who were generally middle-aged men, reported high levels of love for their partners but around half said they were not sexually active with them.

The survey also found that having great marriages didn’t make cheaters any more likely to regret their affairs.

Study author Dr. Dylan Selterman, an associate teaching professor in Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, said: “In popular media, television shows and movies and books, people who have affairs have this intense moral guilt and we don’t see that in this sample of participants.

“Ratings for satisfaction with affairs was high – sexual satisfaction and emotional satisfaction. And feelings of regret were low.

“These findings paint a more complicated picture of infidelity compared to what we thought we knew.”

Participants generally reported that their affair was highly satisfying both sexually and emotionally, and they did not regret having it.

(Photo by Gabby Orcutt via Unsplash)

The researchers suggest that infidelity isn’t necessarily the result of a deeper problem in the relationship.

Participants sought affairs because they wanted novel, exciting sexual experiences or sometimes because they didn’t feel a strong commitment to their partners, rather than a need for emotional fulfillment.

Selterman, who studies relationships and attraction, added: “People have a diversity of motivations to cheat.

“Sometimes they’ll cheat even if their relationships are pretty good. We don’t see solid evidence here that people’s affairs are associated with lower relationship quality or lower life satisfaction.”

The study surveyed nearly 2,000 active users of Ashley Madison, a website for facilitating extramarital affairs.

Selterman hopes to advance this work by looking closer at how other populations of cheaters compare to the Ashley Madison population.

He said: “The take-home point for me is that maintaining monogamy or sexual exclusivity, especially across people’s lifespans is really, really hard and I think people take monogamy for granted when they’re committed to someone in a marriage.

“People just assume that their partners are going to be totally satisfied having sex with one person for the next 50 years of their lives but a lot of people fail at it.

“It doesn’t mean everyone’s relationship is doomed, it means that cheating might be a common part of people’s relationships.”

The study was published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.

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