Is Being Faithful Overrated?

Researcher Dylan Selterman discusses his latest study that casts suspicion on the conventional belief that infidelity destroys relationships.

By Mark Travers, Ph.D. | June 15, 2023

A new study published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior finds that cheaters are likely to be "highly satisfied" in their affairs and tend to express "little moral regret" when it comes to cheating on their partner. This study challenges the long-held notion that cheaters are typically dissatisfied with their partners and reshapes our understanding of infidelity dynamics.

Here is my conversation with the lead author of the study Dylan Selterman of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University.

Could you explain the motivation behind conducting this research on romantic infidelity? What were the main reasons for focusing on registered users of Ashley Madison specifically?

I've been working on studying romantic infidelity for a while now, over 10 years. Most of my prior work focused on young adults in dating relationships (which is true of most studies in this field), and those samples skew slightly towards women, so I was excited to study a different demographic of Ashley Madison users who are mostly middle-aged, married men.

This was also an opportunity to address unanswered questions about how initial motivations to have affairs may predict relationship outcomes. We did this with a longitudinal design.

Previous research on infidelity often suffered from restricted sampling and retrospective accounts. How did your study address these limitations, and what advantages did the use of questionnaires with registered Ashley Madison users provide?

That's correct. Most prior studies (including my own) asked people to recall past experiences in which they cheated on a partner. Whereas in this study on Ashley Madison users, we were asking people about their affairs while they were having them.

We surveyed Ashley Madison users at two points in time, about three months apart, and some of our participants (over 250 of them) completed both survey measures which meant that we could test how their relationships may have changed over time as a result of their affairs.

We found little evidence for changes in relationship quality or well-being, although it's definitely possible that we would have gotten different results if we had covered a longer time span (years instead of months), or if we surveyed the spouses/partners who mostly were unaware that their partners were cheating on them.

The findings of your study challenge widely held notions about infidelity experiences. Could you elaborate on the specific notions that were challenged and the key findings that contradict previous research?

Yes, most prior studies have shown that the quality of people's relationships (i.e., how satisfied they are) is linked with lower rates of cheating, and that when people cheat, their relationship quality goes down.

But, among Ashley Madison users, we did not find evidence for this. In addition, prior studies have shown that people who are in more satisfying relationships tend to find other people less attractive (this is known as the "derogation of alternative partners") but we didn't find evidence for that either.

We also surprisingly found no association between having an affair and feelings of remorse or regret, nor did we find a link between affairs and life satisfaction. Basically, we didn't find evidence for a lot of associations between relationship variables that other researchers have reported finding.

One interesting finding mentioned in the abstract is that participants reported high satisfaction and expressed little moral regret about their affairs. Can you discuss the factors that contributed to this positive experience and shed light on any unexpected findings related to participants' attitudes and emotions?

Well, we don't know exactly why people had positive experiences with their affairs and why they felt little regret. We were hoping to answer those questions (at least somewhat) by examining other variables in people's lives, such as their moral concerns, but those results didn't pan out because they were statistically unreliable.

I hope to see more research examining moral variables. In the meantime, all we can say is that affair satisfaction was high and regret was low, which is kind of surprising in itself and we still don't know exactly why.

A small subset of participants in your study reported having consensually open relationships. Could you delve deeper into this subset and provide insights into the dynamics of these relationships, including how partners' awareness of the activity on Ashley Madison influenced the outcomes of the affairs?

Great question. I am particularly fascinated by consensually open relationships. They are different from affairs in the sense that (as you noted) people's partners know about it, and are okay with it, which makes it a more ethical approach to relationships in my opinion.

Those relationships typically have better relationship outcomes compared to those where cheating happens. However, there are similar underlying motivations across these two types of relationship experiences.

In the case of those who cheat and those who have open relationships, these folks are often driven by wanting more sexual partners and more excitement, and are not necessarily satisfied with just one partner. We didn't assess this in our study, but other studies have found that STDs are more likely to be spread among the "monogamous" cheaters compared to the folks in open relationships.

Can you discuss any other factors that seem to motivate individuals to seek affairs and how these affairs affected their primary relationships, if at all?

Yes, in some of my other studies we found an array of different underlying motivations to have affairs. Some of them stem from underlying problems in people's relationships such as feeling angry or neglected, but some alternative motivations have nothing to do with people's relationships.

Sometimes people are just really strongly desiring sex with multiple partners (wanting sexual variety), or they want to boost their feelings of independence and autonomy in life, or they were influenced by the immediate situation such as being intoxicated or stressed out.

In this recent study on Ashley Madison users, it was a mix of the two types of motivations that stood out. People strongly desired affair partners because they were:

1. Feeling dissatisfied with their sex lives (half our participants reported no sexual activity with their spouses)
2. They also wanted to boost their feelings of personal autonomy and have more variety.