'Too many good explanations' for why women cheat, researcher says

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It is widely believed that when it comes to infidelity in relationships, men are bigger cheaters than women.

While women cheat, too, scientists wanted to pinpoint what prompted them to do it — and their findings may be surprising.

In the study, published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, Australian and British researchers surveyed more than 250 heterosexual people who had cheated, 116 of whom were women, and asked them to rate their attraction to their partner and their side piece using three factors: Physical, personal and parental.

The researchers found that unfaithful females wanted “good genes” for their offspring.

Participants were asked to rank the physical attraction using responses that included: “He was very sexy looking,” “I didn’t like the way he looked,” and “He was somewhat ugly.”

As for questions about their parental attraction to their affair partner, the responses they could choose from included: “I thought he had good fatherly qualities,” “I thought one could depend on him to care for a child,” and “I believed men like him made bad fathers.”

Women ranked their affair partners’ physical attraction as 1.93 points higher than their relationship partner, while the parental attraction was 3.33 points lower, according to the findings.

The data backed up the “dual-mating theory,” where women tend to seek out more attractive affair partners for their genes, but stay with the person who would make a better parent.

The study also found no evidence that the participants preferred their affair partner over their long-term mate.

“Infidelity is a tactic that serves a variety of evolutionarily coherent strategies, including obtaining additional resources, switching to a new primary mate and, especially in our study, acquiring genetic benefits for offspring,” Macken Murphy, study author and PhD student at the University of Melbourne, told Psypost.

“However, while humans evolved to cheat, that doesn’t mean we should and most people don’t.”

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It wasn’t all about children and parenting; some participants admitted stepping out in a relationship because they were bored or simply not invested in the person they were with.

Other respondents said they cheated as an act of revenge and to get back some balance and power in the relationship after their partner’s infidelity.

And some women noted they were unsatisfied in their relationship, including feeling neglected, unhappy and not getting enough emotional support from their partners.

“It might sound funny, but the evolutionary drivers of female infidelity in humans is an area of vigorous debate in my part of academia,” Murphy said. “In a way, there are too many good explanations for it!”