It’s time to rethink our long-standing assumptions about affairs starting with the whole sexless-marriage myth. When we picture cheating, we likely picture sexy, stolen moments. Titillating trysts in tucked-away hotel rooms and near-cinematic levels of espionage. The cheater is starved in a sexless, even hostile relationship back home — basically forced to cheat or suffer a miserable life.
But a new survey throws cold water on that pop-culture myth: It suggests that many cheaters continue to sleep with their partners the whole time they’re prowling about. A cheater’s main relationship can look an awful lot like a normal, happy one from the outside, suggesting we are far more in the dark than we thought when it comes to infidelity why people cheat, what it really looks like and what it really means.
The idea that people cheat because they’re deprived isn’t the only long-standing assumption about affairs that experts have slowly overturned. In other words, often someone is cheating not to escape you, but to escape themselves. This might be why some men are more likely to cheat, some research found, before big milestone moments like birthdays.
Taken together, much of what leads to cheating is not exciting in the least: It’s often quite boring and sad. Such revelations might lead us to realize that there’s nothing to be envious of in a cheater’s shortcut to vitality.