What percentage of men are unfaithful?

>>  Sunday, May 27, 2012

There was a discussion on Radio 4's More or Less (a program generally about statistics, probability and other interesting number dances) about infidelity and the general belief that men are more likely to be unfaithful than women.  After all it takes two to tango so shouldn't the statistics by gender be equal.

What amazed me was that the people doing the research (the national survey of sexual attitudes and lifestyles) would not use the term 'infidelity' as this has a stigma attached to it and is a loaded word (errr, for a reason love) and they prefer to use the term 'crossover' or 'overlap' (hmmm, moral slippage me thinks).

But this survey was only discussing 'sexual relations'.  (Who will ever again believe a man who says 'I did not have sexual relations with that women')

I think infidelity goes further than sex.  It's easy to throw something away as 'just sex' but to me, allowing any level of intimacy or flirting that could lead to it is just as bad.

My marriage is our intimate bubble, our togetherness, if HWMBO created another bubble with someone else whether that involved sexual relations or not then he just burst my bubble and to me that is infidelity with a capital I.

How about prostitutes then? No intimate bubble there, just sex.   Definitely infidelity.

Lapdancing clubs etc? Hmmmm, I don't like the idea that my partner would engage in this sort of thing.  Maybe it's my insecurities, but if I've made it clear that this isn't ok by me, then yes if he did it without discussing it with me first then I press the unfaithful buzzer.

I think there are many ways to be 'unfaithful' to a partnership without engaging in sexual crossover at all.

This all reminded me of an analogy I was once told:

"If you have to stop at traffic lights whilst driving to the shops, do you think "must get a new car". No, of course not. I see my marriage as that car. It has to stop at traffic lights. Occasionally it has to go into the garage but you don't think about trading it in every time"

Oh yes, if you are interested the final result was that 15% of men are unfaithful (sexually) and  9% of women.

Some of this could be explained by the fact that men tend to go for a younger model and by virtue of that, the women is more likely to be single leaving the disparity between the statistics.  I'm not entirely convinced by this, but maybe.
There was also the feeling that women just don't admit to it and are less likely to be honest in a survey, again I'm not convinced.

Maybe if you throw in prostitutes too, which tends to be a male past time, then all 3 things would head up a 6% gap.

Well it's either that or that are a lot of men running around with other men...actually I've been completely thinking about men/women relationships. If men are more likely to be unfaithful generally then it follows that gay relationships would put a weighting on the statistic.  Whereas if women are generally more likely to be faithful then lesbian relationships would do the reverse to the female 9%.

It's a complicated world.  I'm going to bed with a book and a cup of cocoa to ponder the perils of 'sexual relations' or maybe, as HWMBO pointed out, that it still means 85% of men are faithful.

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