When Partners Cheat, Who Do They Do It With?

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There’s a lot of research out there looking at how many married people have committed infidelity. The results vary a bit across studies, but the best estimates suggest that between 1 in 4 and 1 in 5 spouses cheat at some point in their relationship. However, surprisingly little work has looked at who people are actually having sex with when they commit infidelity.

Do cheaters usually do it with someone they know, or with a stranger? And does this differ for men and women? A recent study published in the Journal of Family Psychology offers some insight.

In this study, researchers analyzed nine waves of data from the U.S. General Social Survey, a nationally representative survey that is conducted most years. In total, they looked at the responses of 13,030 Americans collected between the years 2000 and 2016.

Who Married People Have Affairs With

In each year of the survey, a question was asked of those who were married and reported having engaged in extramarital sex about the other person with whom they’d had sex. The response options included: (a) close personal friend; (b) neighbor, coworker, or long-term acquaintance; (c) casual date or pick-up; (d) person you paid or paid you for sex; and (e) other.

It turned out that most people reported extramarital sex with a close personal friend (53.5%), followed by the category of neighbor/friend/long-term acquaintance (29.4%). So, by and large, affair partners were well known to the persons committing infidelity.

It was far less common for people to report cheating with a casual date or hook-up (21%) or to engage in some type of transactional sex (i.e., buying or selling sex; 7.9%). About 8% selected the “other” option. (These numbers add up to more than 100% because participants could select more than one choice, given that they didn’t necessarily only cheat with just one other person.)

Men Are More Likely to Have Affairs With Strangers

Men and women did not differ when it came to the percentage reporting cheating with someone they knew well. In other words, across gender, affairs are most likely to occur with friends. That said, men and women did differ in their odds of committing infidelity with a stranger. Specifically, whereas 24.3% of male cheaters had sex with a casual hook-up, the number of female cheaters who had done so was 15.5%. Likewise, whereas 7.2% of male cheaters engaged in transactional sex, just 1.3% of female cheaters did the same.

Put another way, men were more likely to cheat with a casual or paid partner than women, a finding that appears to reflect men’s greater willingness to engage in casual sex in general. This may also reflect the fact that there are gender differences in when and why people cheat. For example, men are more likely than women to engage in opportunistic cheating (e.g., while on vacation or a business trip away from their spouse).

Takeaways

It is important to highlight that these findings are limited to the context of extramarital sex and, more importantly, that this survey didn’t distinguish between infidelity and open marriages (a common limitation in this type of research), meaning both categories were lumped together. As a result, some caution is warranted in generalizing these findings, and future research would do well to make an effort to separate consensual from non-consensual non-monogamy. However, given that the base rate of marital infidelity (20-25%) is much higher than the base rate for open marriage (less than 5%), the findings do speak more to infidelity.

In sum, these findings suggest that when married people cheat, they seem disproportionately likely to do so with someone they know. Why is that? One possibility is that there are simply more opportunities for cheating to emerge with someone you see frequently.

However, it could also reflect the fact that when people cheat, they’re often looking for more than just sex. Many people are also looking for intimacy and emotional connection—things that may be easier to obtain when you already have an existing friendship with someone.

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