While men tend to be more unfaithful, women also have their share of infidelity, and a new study claims to know why.
Researchers have found that females are unfaithful because they want “good genes” for their offspring, which is known as “dual mating theory.”
Women tend to seek out more attractive partners for their genetic material, but stick with a long-term partner who would be a better father.
However, some participants reported that they walked away due to boredom or lack of investment from their current partner, saying they simply wanted to have everything they had and eat it too.
Women are more likely to cheat on their partners because they are looking for a more attractive man to have offspring with. However, researchers found that women are more likely to want to stay with their current partner because they are good fathers.
The study was conducted by Australian and British researchers who surveyed 254 heterosexual people, 116 of whom were women, and asked them to rate their physical, personal and parental attraction to both partners.
Participants were asked to rate their physical attractiveness by indicating, “He looked very sexy,” “I didn’t like the way he looked,” or “He was kind of ugly,” among others.
Questions about their attraction to their partner included: “I thought he had good fatherly qualities,” “I thought he could be trusted to care for a child,” and “I thought men like him were bad fathers.”
He studyPublished in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, found that women rated their romantic partner’s physical attraction as 1.93 points higher than their primary partner’s, while parental attraction was 3.33 points lower.
Their findings supported what is called the double-mating theory, according to which women cheat to obtain “good genes” for their offspring while relying on their primary partners to be good co-parents.
However, the researchers reported that they found no evidence that participants preferred their affair partner over their long-term partner.
A significant number of women reported being dissatisfied with their relationship, including experiencing feelings of abandonment, unhappiness, and lack of emotional support.
“Infidelity is a tactic that serves a variety of evolutionarily coherent strategies, including obtaining additional resources, switching to a new primary partner and, especially in our study, acquiring genetic benefits for offspring,” said Macken Murphy, a PhD student at the University of Melbourne. Psychopostal.
‘However, even though humans evolved to cheat, that doesn’t mean we should, and most people don’t.’
These findings echo previous studies that have also indicated that whether or not your partner cheats on you could be due to how attractive he or she is, according to researchers at Harvard University.
In the new study, researchers also speculated that infidelity could be caused by partner-switching theory: when a woman has an affair while looking to replace her current partner with someone better.
Although some women reported this as their reason for cheating on their boyfriend or spouse, the results indicated that this was not the main reason.
The researchers reported that some women said they had cheated on their partner because they were “bored,” suggesting a drive to find new sexual or romantic partners and experiences, and others said they wanted revenge in response to their partner’s infidelity to maintain a sense of fairness and balance in the relationship.
A significant number of women reported being dissatisfied with their relationship, and even experienced feelings of abandonment, unhappiness and lack of emotional support.
“It may sound funny, but the evolutionary factors driving female infidelity in humans is an area of intense debate in my academic field,” Murphy told Psypost, adding, “In some ways, there are too many good explanations for it!”
