Who Is Unfaithful Once, Will Always Be Unfaithful?
One of the great fears that unites most monogamous relationships is that the couple is, or may be, unfaithful on some occasion. This fear is even more accentuated if one of the two knows that the other has been unfaithful on other occasions or even in the same relationship.
Therefore, a person who has experienced a infidelity on the part of your partner Can you be sure that it will never happen again? Or put another way, is a person who has been unfaithful once more likely to be unfaithful again in that as in any other relationship?
Traditionally, couple relationships considered monogamous are based on sexual, sentimental or emotional exclusivity. However, infidelity is a real fact that occurs in a large number of couples and in both men and women.
It is not easy to know the exact figures about how many people have committed one or more infidelities throughout their lives, since it is an answer that is often falsified quite a bit with the intention of maintaining a good social image. Even in private psychology or sexology consultations, people are not always able to confess infidelity.
Although the main issue of this article is to clarify whether a person who has committed infidelity is more likely to commit it again, both in their current relationship and in subsequent relationships, first of all we are going to review what risk factors influence when it comes to that someone is unfaithful.
According to various research related to relationships, there are a series of common risk factors when committing infidelity. These include:
Personality, context and other variables
Besides, the personality and character of the person It also greatly modulates all the risk factors mentioned above. Generally, hedonistic people, with egocentric tendencies and a high need for positive rewards, will be more likely to commit a greater number of infidelities throughout their lives.
Likewise, the context in which the couple lives can also have a powerful effect in making it easier for a person to have an affair. That is, if in a relationship the only elements that unite both people is a mortgage or the children they both have in common, there will be a much greater chance that one of the two (or both) will end up seeking relationships outside the couple. .
However, there are no determining rules, patterns or symptoms that ensure that a person will be unfaithful for sure.
Finally, when we are faced with the doubt of If an unfaithful person will be unfaithful for life or if, on the contrary, you are capable of maintaining a monogamous relationship with total exclusivity; Researchers in psychology and sexology determine that there are no absolute laws, since recidivism is conditioned both by the person’s personality and by the reasons or causes that motivate it.
Who is unfaithful tends to repeat the betrayal?
Historically, studies on infidelity in a couple have focused on its predictors to try to determine what leads a person to be unfaithful repeatedly; through the development of retrospective and cross-sectional studies.
However, a latest study carried out by the team at the University of Denver and led by psychologist Kayla Knopp, has carried out real-time research, and for five years, of stable romantic relationships (both married and unmarried) from a sample of more than 1,200 people.
However, the study only intended to collect information from those people who during those five years had gone through at least two different relationships, so the sample was finally reduced to more than 400 individuals, both men and women.
Every so often (approximately six months) the following question was asked to the participants: “Have you had sexual relations with someone other than your partner since you started dating seriously?” Furthermore, they were also asked if they suspected that their current partner had sexual relations with other people
Of course, the research took into account both the social desirability of the participants and the possible consensual agreements they could have with their partners when maintaining extramarital relationships.
The conclusions
The results obtained after five years of research revealed that 40% of the sample had had sexual relations outside the couple, both in the first solo and in the rest of the relationships. Likewise, 30% of the participants reported that they suspected or knew that their partner had been unfaithful to them on some occasion.
Although the chances of cheating on your partner are much greater if you have already done so in the past, a person who is unfaithful in one relationship is not inevitably destined to be so in the next.
On the other hand, Knopp’s study also revealed that those people who perceived their partner as unfaithful were more likely to think the same in subsequent relationships. They were also more likely to infidelity if the partner was thought to be cheating or had cheated on them on occasion.
In conclusion, the study determined that people who had been unfaithful in a relationship were three times more likely to be unfaithful in the next compared to those who had not cheated on their partner in the first one.
However, and as mentioned at the beginning of the article, it is extremely difficult to determine the real probability that a person who has been unfaithful once will be unfaithful for the rest of their life. The combination of factors: the main motivation for the first infidelity, the person’s personality and the state of the current relationship are the best predictors when trying to find out whether a person can be unfaithful again or not.
