Cheaters gonna cheat? The data might surprise you.

We tell ourselves the same old story about cheating. It goes like this: there are the ever-faithful people that never cheat and then there are the cheaters — irredeemable, selfish, narcissists who just can’t keep it in their pants and will never change. Once a cheater, always a cheater is an adage as old as time, and your only hope is to be smart enough or lucky enough to spot one before you do something as miserable as marry them.

If that is your view, then you might be surprised by what the data tell us.

More than 20 percent of married men and 15 percent of women say they have cheated. But that’s just the ones who admit it. If we extrapolate from the rate at which people lie about drug-use on surveys, the real number could be as high as 50 percent for married men and 40 percent for women.

As alarming as that may seem, the data could help you (I am assuming, dear reader, that you are an ever-faithful one) avoid at least some of the heartbreak that inevitably comes with the ultimate betrayal.

As Dr. Esther Perel says, “the affair itself is rarely the whole story. It is usually the final chapter of a story that began much, much earlier.” This is not an argument to let the cheater off the hook — actually quite the opposite — but by the end of this article, you might feel sincere pity for them.

Let me explain by going through some of the biggest misconceptions about cheating that are shockingly counterintuitive.

First, the data cut against the idea that sex is the primary driver of affairs. When friends of mine have been cheated on, our first activity — before settling down with multiple bottles of wine and a comforter — is to stalk the affair partner. Is she prettier? Is she cooler? “Of course not!” I invariably exclaim. “She’s a troll!”

We immediately reach for the physical explanations of infidelity — a moment of weakness at a bar, a workplace friendship gone way too far. While this might be the symptom, it most certainly was not the cause. Moreover, what will you be told in therapy? Well, you’ll be told that 70 percent of women and 50 percent of men cite emotional neglect as the primary driver of their affair.

So what, it’s the cheated-on person’s fault? Of course not. The correlation between those who cheat and a crippling narcissistic, insecure, and rather pathetic need for attention is overwhelming. Yes, I work in statistics, and we all know that correlation is not necessarily causation, but the numbers are just too overwhelming to ignore.

But couldn’t it be the other way around? Could emotional neglect lead to insecurity? Sure, but it does not cause narcissism, which is a hallmark of cheating spouses. The silver lining to being betrayed, then, is that if you leave your cheating spouse, you are getting away from a really pitiful person — someone that no amount of therapy will change.

Beyond this, perhaps the most counterintuitive aspect of infidelity is that it happens in supposedly happy marriages too. Again, this makes sense if you understand that people don’t cheat for sex — they cheat because of their own internal narcissism and insecurity. They could even identify as happy in their relationship. In fact, 56 percent of men and 34 percent of women who cheat rate their marriages as either “happy” or “very happy.”

Even more confusingly, the numbers on hypothetical cheating are through the roof. Over 70 percent of men and almost 70 percent of women say they would have an affair if they knew they could get away with it. The research is still out on whether this means that more people than you imagine are actually insecure and narcissistic, or whether the subset that “would cheat if they could” would do it for different reasons and simply have better impulse control.

Does that mean that those who actually follow through with it fall under the “once a cheater, always a cheater” adage? It depends. Probably nothing will help you spot a cheater faster or more easily than this: Those who cheat in their first marriage are more than three times as likely to do it again. If they cheated with you then they will cheat on you, and even if you are their second spouse but not the affair partner — please repeat this after me — you cannot change them.

Unfortunately, this is the only data-backed sign of a cheater that you can recognize. Although you may have an intuition that your partner is cheating, all the research points to you being in the dark. Many of us must be, if almost half of married people cheat.

Research on deception in relationships shows clearly that we are absolutely terrible at knowing whether our partners are lying to us: “Our emotional investment makes us worse, not better.” To me, this is also counterintuitive. We use our intimate knowledge of our spouses to devise whether their behavior is “normal.” One would imagine that, in a marriage,  you would have more than enough time to understand what “normal” is for your spouse. But over and over again, it is proven that our emotional investment creates a powerful motivation not to see the truth — so we don’t. 

If you get cheated on, then I’m sorry, that stinks. But, given that it happens to a lot of people, move on and find someone better. That advice works great — except in one very important, case.

Probably the worst aspect of cheating I’ve seen when researching these topics is the effect on the children of the couple. Whether the children are old enough to know at the time, or when they find out later about the infidelity, it shapes more than 80 percent of children’s outlooks on relationships and love. Even scarier, you are setting your child up for terrible hardship later on — children who had an unfaithful parent are more than twice as likely to be unfaithful themselves. That is an intergenerational transmission that is terribly difficult to break.

The cheaters out there need to think about that one. Maybe your spouse will get over it, and maybe you will get over it, but there is no one you have done more damage to than your children. I love my husband deeply and have never fallen into the insidious trap of cheating. But an even more powerful motivation, it seems to me, would be a desire not to screw up my child for the rest of his life. In fact, I can’t imagine that wouldn’t be any mother or father’s biggest motivation.

After all of this doom and gloom, is there any upside for the faithful? Well, I’ll leave you with this, as I did one of my best friends just a few days ago when she discovered her husband’s infidelity: The affair partner is almost never an upgrade, and the cheaters’ relationship almost never works out.

The perceived intensity of an affair is usually rooted in the secrecy. Those heightened emotions vanish quickly once that secrecy is gone. That may explain why only about 3 percent to 5 percent of affairs even develop into long term relationships. And even if they do, there is an 80 percent divorce rate within two years in marriages that started from an affair.

So if the ultimate betrayal happens to you, the research shows that you can take petty solace in the fact that your betrayer’s new relationship won’t make it. Just be sure to get your children into therapy immediately.

Liberty Vittert is a professor of data science at Washington University in St. Louis and the resident on-air statistician for NewsNation, a sister company of The Hill.

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