If you believe a study published in the Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy in 2002, flip a coin to see if your wife is cheating on you. Heads you’re okay. Tails then someone’s getting some..er, tail that is.
55 percent of married women engage in extramarital sex at some time during their relationship…90 percent of them didn’t feel guilty about doing it—they felt entitled to do it [Source, Men.Style.Com, THE NEW INFIDELITY]
On the positive side, a third of all these marriages survive! The study also said 60 percent of men cheat (maybe we aren’t supposed to be monogamous). So, getting quick with the math*, doesn’t that mean 5 percent of the women are doing 2 men? It seems to me that with a little open communication, and perhaps open relationships, half the married population would be a lot happier. Alrightee then. Now where did I put that keystroke logger?
*Yes the math is wrong. It presupposes that married women only cheat with married men and vice-versa. But it was funny!
Actually, according to our biological nature, as animals, we are not meant for mating for life. Anthropologists have found in primitive cultures, a man and a woman will bond for a period of time, usually long enough to produce 2 or 3 children, and when the youngest has weaned, around the age of 3 or so, they will split up. This repeats three or four times in their reproductive lifetimes.
It was the Jews, then Christians, that introduced marriage and lifetime bonding into our culture. Relying on faith and adhering to the doctrine of religion to overcome the biological urges to seek out new mates every 10 years or so is what created our modern expectations of mating for life. It wasn’t until recent years, with the advent of the culture of “If it feels good, do it” that sex became no longer a special part of marriage but more of a casual form of entertainment, that we started devaluing not only marriage, but also sex and the babies that result from it.