You may have heard about married couples getting the “seven-year itch”. The term suggests that around the seven-year mark of marriage, individuals become more distant from each other as their happiness and satisfaction with the relationship begin to decline, and the urge to stray gets stronger.
According to research, there may be some truth to this idea.
A research team from Israel looked into reasons why people who have been tempted to cheat have managed to resist. As reported in the Journal of Sex Research, they were able to identify the time that people are most at risk of cheating in a marriage.
Their findings revealed that, for women, the window of time when they were more likely to cheat on their partners was between the six to 10 year mark.
However, the study also showed that when it came to men cheating in heterosexual marriages, they were most likely to cheat after 11 years, showing they’re no angels either.
To reach these findings, the researchers asked 423 participants to answer a questionnaire rating the importance of 29 different reasons to avoid and resist cheating, as well as state the likelihood of them cheating if the opportunity presented itself. The research saw that there were numerous reasons why those who took part in the questionnaire resisted being unfaithful, mostly to do with their moral compass and the fear of being single.
Back in 2017, Superdrug’s Online Doctor ran a survey of over 2,000 Americans and Europeans to work out why men and women cheated. Interestingly, the number one reasons for both heterosexual men and women both sides of the Atlantic were the same.
For both American and European women, the top reason was down to feeling like they weren’t being given enough attention from their partner. For American and European men, their top reason was that the other person was “really hot”.
An earlier version of this article was first published in November 2017.
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