In our mythbusting session this month, we’re going to look at the myth that most American men have been unfaithful in their marriages. And we know that Americans believe this because they say it all the time, and also because in studies that have been done, both by myself and my team at the Kinsey Institute, and other colleagues, Americans tend to believe that to be true. In fact, Americans believe that between 50 and 80 percent of men have been sexually unfaithful to their wives. And you might perhaps not be surprised that women think that a higher percentage of men have been unfaithful than men believe have been unfaithful. In the national survey that we did asking this question, 83 percent believed that at least 3 out of every 10 men (that is, 30 percent of men) had had an extramarital affair, at least one. And 55 percent believed that at least one out of every two men had been unfaithful, and 20 percent believed that at least 7 out of 10 – that is, 70 percent of men – had been unfaithful to their wives. 50 percent more women than men believed the 7 out of 10 men had been unfaithful to their wives sometime during their marriages, at least once.

So what do we know is the case in reality? That is, when you actually ask people “have you had an extramarital relationship, a sexual relationship outside your marriage” – what are the facts? Now that’s what people believe to be true, and now let’s see if it really is true or not. A 1994 study found that 23 percent of men and 12 percent of women reported that they had been involved in at least one extramarital affair. So it’s quite a bit less than what Americans believe to be true. In men over 40, approximately 30 percent, or 3 out of 10, reported that they had had or were having sex with a partner outside of marriage. The percentage of women in that study was between 10 and 20 percent. Of ever-divorced men, asking people who had already been divorced, 38 percent reported having at least one extramarital affair. Still less than 4 out of 10, less than the majority. Only 20 percent of divorced women reported having an outside sexual relationship while they were married. In another study that took place in 1991 of 2000+ Americans, one third of married men and women (that’s about 33 out of 100) said that they had had, at some time during their marriages, at least one extramarital affair during the time that they were married.

So it’s not as many, I think, as a lot of people think. There’s not as much extramarital sex going on. And again, remember that a lot of these people have had one experience and didn’t like it, or felt too bad about it and never did it again. Of course there are people that have multiple affairs, and they are a special group.

Now what do we know about extramarital affairs? We know something about them, people have been asked about them. First of all, we know that the average affair lasts approximately one year. That is data that has been collected from multiple surveys. And here’s something very interesting. When men are asked about their feelings about their mistresses and their wives, men report that they like their wives better than they like their mistresses. But when women are asked about how they feel about their lovers and their husbands, women report that they like their lovers better than they like their husbands. That’s an interesting thing. And what does that say about marriage? Interesting.

Of those couples who are involved in an extramarital affair, only 17 percent of males in the study that asked these questions, or looked at these questions, and only 10 percent of the females say that they are planning to leave their spouses. So people who are having extramarital affairs are not doing it on their way out, in general, because only 17 percent of the males and only 10 percent of the females (at least in the study that asked that question) said that they were planning to leave. Only 9 percent of the males and only 6 percent of the females planned to marry their present lovers. So that myth maybe is not a myth – when people say “Oh well, he’s not likely to marry you if he’s having an affair with you” or vice versa, because in fact that’s what people say. Another idea that people have that turns out not to be true is the story about the “seven-year itch” – that that’s the time when people are most vulnerable to having an affair is somewhere around the seventh year. Well, when we look at the data, it’s more like the five or four-year itch. Actually, the most vulnerable period in a marriage appears to be between the fourth and fifth year, and not the seventh year. So that’s the dangerous time, when people are looking – maybe feeling uncomfortable in their marriages. And we don’t know exactly why that is, I can’t answer why that is. Maybe it’s when you’ve got your second kid and marriage is feeling rather heavy. Or maybe it’s at a time where people are not looking to really work on their marriages as much as they should be. Maybe that’s when that really starts to come in, I don’t know. But anyway – it’s not the seven-year itch, it’s the four to five-year itch.

Now another study asked couples how important sexual exclusivity is to them. This study was of 6000 couples. And it turned out that the vast majority felt that sexual exclusivity should be a goal in a marriage; that is, staying faithful was very important. But there was less agreement on the consequences if one or both of the persons didn’t live up to this idea. Some people said it would have no effect on the marriage. But most believed that even one incident would put an end to trust, to love and commitment, and maybe even to the relationship. So for a lot of people, just even one experience, if they found out about it, of breaking that exclusive bond, would have serious effects on the marriage. Now my feeling is that one has to look at an infidelity as a symptom, and one has to then go and try to figure out what’s going on and why did that happen, and work on that. The infidelity is not the disease, it’s the symptom – and you’ve got to find out what the disease is and work on that and resolve that. But that’s for another time.

Husbands and wives who report extramarital sex are more likely to divorce, whether it happened at the beginning or after many years. So when you look at relationships in advance of the problem, and you know whether those marriages have had an incident of sexual infidelity, it is more likely that those marriages will break up sometime in the future than the ones in which there hasn’t been an incident of sexual infidelity. There have been studies that have shown that. Now, is infidelity the number one cause of divorce? A lot of people believe that that’s true, that’s another kind of myth. And the answer to that is no – it is not – it actually is number three. Although 54 percent of wives and 46 percent of husbands in one study say that a partner strayed when they’re getting a divorce, only 20 percent report that infidelity was the cause of their divorce. The top two causes, at least in this major study, was, number one, lack of communication. The kind of things that they didn’t communicate about, the disagreements that they had were about money, family, personal goals, and how to spend non-working hours. That is, when he’s sitting in front of the TV drinking beers and watching football games all the time with his friends and not spending any time with her, or she’s doing whatever she does and not spending any time with him – that’s a major problem, as well as what do you do with the money, how much time do you spend with his family or her family or the kids, these are major problems. 64 percent of couples said that that was the reason that they were divorcing. And the number two reason was constant fighting. I have a feeling they’re constantly fighting about what they’re not communicating about! That was 58 percent. And one of the things that I’ve always believed is that the best aphrodisiac is communication, and we need to do a lot more communicating and working on communicating if we’re going to have good marriages. So infidelity is the number three reason that people gave in this study, and I believe that’s probably where it stands as the cause, and I have a feeling that it’s really the lack of communication and the constant fighting that led to the infidelity, it’s not really the infidelity that was the problem.

I thought we might end by talking about other kinds of couples, because what about exclusivity in gay and lesbian couples? Is it the same problem it is in heterosexual couples? Who would you guess would be more likely to stay together longer and to be the most exclusive – male couples or female couples? I think most people would think that female couples would stay together longer – that lesbian couples would be the couples most likely to have the longest relationships. Well let’s see what the data tells us. First of all, let’s look at couples overall, in all kinds of couples. There was a large national survey that looked at couples who were together – heterosexual couples, gay male couples, and lesbian couples. And then they looked at them 18 months later to see where they were at. And they wanted to see who were the most likely to stay together and who were the most likely to fall apart. The ones that were least likely to fall apart were the heterosexual couples – they were most likely to be together. Then came the cohabiters – that is, heterosexual couples who were living together. But they rarely lasted more than 10 years. So cohabiters, they either get married or they fall apart before 10 years. The next group, which turned out to stay together just about the same amount as cohabiters, were gay male couples. And the ones that were most likely to fall apart – or least likely to stay together the longest – were the lesbian couples. So it’s not what we would most likely predict. 69 percent of the lesbian couples were together less than three years. 24 percent of them were together four to eight years. Only 7 percent of them were together nine years or more. So the lesbian couples are the least likely to stay together a long time. Now, what percentage reported being committed for a lifetime or longer? 92 percent of the lesbian couples reported that they were committed for a lifetime, 96 percent of the gay couples said they were committed for a lifetime, and half of the couples had been through some kind of commitment ceremony. But it’s interesting that more of the gay male couples said that they were committed for a lifetime or for a long time. So the longest relationships were found among gay male couples, when comparing gay men and lesbian couples, even though the lesbian couples had more agreement with regard to exclusivity. So lesbian couples were more agreed among the members of the couple that they would be exclusive and nevertheless, their relationships didn’t last as long. Exclusivity was preferred by male couples but they accepted more exceptions to the rules. Gay male couples had more sex together than lesbian couples, but lesbian couples seemed to enjoy the sex they had better than the gay male couples did. The exclusive agreement was broken approximately four times more often in male couples than in female couples. Long-term partners were more likely to have broken exclusivity arrangements, but interestingly, partners with children broke their exclusivity agreements less often than partners who didn’t have children. So that’s interesting. And it brings to mind this whole disagreement about gay marriage. It would be interesting to know if gay couples can marry, whether they’re going to be less likely to break up, since the people who break up the least are heterosexual married couples. And it may be that that commitment, that public commitment, is very important in keeping couples together.

So – the answer to our major myth this month, which is about whether men are unfaithful or not in marriage, is that they are not nearly as unfaithful as we think they are. So we can have a lot more confidence in them, I think, than we give them credit for.

© 2004