A study conducted on users of Ashley Madison, a dating website geared towards facilitating affairs, found that low quality of the relationship with the primary partner was not a major driver of infidelity and infidelity did not predict decreases in the quality of those relationships over time. Participants, who were mostly men, expressed high satisfaction with their affairs and little moral regret. The study was published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior.
Extradyadic romantic experiences, commonly known as infidelity, refer to a person being emotionally or sexually intimate with someone outside their committed romantic relationship. Extradyadic romantic experiences can occur in different forms ranging from one-night stands to long-lasting affairs.
Extradyadic romantic experiences are also a source of great controversy and paradoxical views and behaviors. Polls on large samples show that nearly all people see infidelity as a moral transgression. They typically report great distress at the mere thought of their own partner committing infidelity.
Infidelity is a leading predictor of divorce and intimate partner violence. In spite of all this, substantial numbers of people choose to cheat on their romantic partners. Estimates say that around one in five married people cheat their partners. The share rises to one in three among young adults in dating relationships.
Most studies have tried to explain this contrast by proposing that infidelity happens because the relationship a person is in is lacking. On the other hand, studies have shown that many people engaging in infidelity despite rating their marriages as happy or very happy. This led researchers to explore other ways to explain the discrepancy between the general social attitude towards infidelity and the fact that it is very common.
Study author Dylan Selterman and his colleagues, wanted to better understand the psychological experiences of those who seek and engage in extradyadic romantic behaviors. They focused their attention on Ashley Madison, a dating website explicitly geared towards users who are in committed romantic partnerships or marriages i.e., towards promoting infidelity.
“I’ve been studying infidelity for over 10 years,” explained Selterman, an associate teaching professor at Johns Hopkins University. “It began based on a result from my dissertation research on dreams about people’s romantic partners. One of the themes that emerged was that people had dreams about their partners cheating on them, or about themselves cheating on their partners.
“From there I started thinking about how to study people’s motivations to cheat and their experiences with infidelity. One of the things I learned is that infidelity is not monolithic. There are many factors that contribute to people’s decisions to cheat, sometimes not having anything to do with their primary or spousal relationships.”
The researchers conducted online surveys of samples of users at two time points three months apart. The first wave included 810 users and 868 were included in the second, but only 260 completed both waves. Over 90% of participants were men and straight. The mean age of participants in both samples was around 52 years. Around 85% were married or in a relationship. 10% in the first survey and 6% in the second reported being in an open relationship.
Participants were asked if they ever had an affair or engaged in infidelity (which the researchers defined in a very inclusive way), about the degree to which they felt enthusiastic about findings affair partners, whether they are monogamous (“Do you and your spouse/partner have an agreement to be sexually exclusive?” and “Have you and your spouse/partner ever had an ‘open’ relationship?”).
Participants also completed assessments of relationship quality (five items capturing love, satisfaction, conflict, sexual satisfaction, and intimacy), well-being, attitudes about sex in the context of social relations, sexual desire, and motivation to have affairs (eight items asking about anger, sexual dissatisfaction, lack of love, low commitment, neglect, situational change, independence/autonomy, and desire for sexual variety).
In the second survey, participants were additionally asked about how satisfying their affair was emotionally and sexually, the extent to which they regretted the affair, and sexual behaviors participants engaged in with their affair partners, or their views on why they did not have an affair (if they did not have an affair by the time of the second survey).
Results showed that around half of participants reported having an agreement to be exclusive with their primary partner. Around two out of three reported that they had cheated on their partners at some point in their relationships, but only around one in five reported that their partner cheated on them.
Around 65% of participants reported that they already had an affair or affairs prior to starting with the Ashley Madison website. However, most participants had not yet found an affair partner through Ashley Madison. Up to 30% of participants reported finding an affair partner through this website.
When asked about their primary partners, they mostly reported high levels of love for the primary partner, but low levels of sexual satisfaction. Around a half reported not being currently sexually active with their primary partner. Sexual dissatisfaction, autonomy, and low commitment to their primary partner were the most highly rated motives for having an affair.
“The fact that we did not observe significant correlations between relationship quality and whether/not participants had an affair was very surprising,” Selterman told PsyPost. “Having an affair also did not predict breakups/divorce. The specific motivations for pursuing affairs mattered a lot more. If participants were motivated to have affairs based on sexual dissatisfaction, then they were more likely to breakup. But people were less likely to break up if their affairs were motivated by a situational factor such as being intoxicated or stressed out.”
When those who were successful in having an affair were asked about their experiences, participants most often reported high sexual and emotional satisfaction, but very low level of regret. Around four out of every five participants reported that their partner did not know about their affair.
The findings highlight that affairs are often complex and can be driven by motives that are contradictory.
“Past studies have found correlations between people’s marital satisfaction and whether they cheat (people are more likely to cheat when they’re generally unsatisfied, and that cheating leads to greater unhappiness). But we did not find evidence for this in our study,” Selterman told PsyPost.
“In our sample of Ashley Madison users, we found that overall, sexual dissatisfaction was high and a large number of participants reported not having sex at all with their partners/spouses. So they looked for affairs, and some of them had affairs, and among those folks who did have an affair, they experienced high satisfaction with their affairs and low levels of regret.”
“They seemed to still maintain love and intimacy with their spouses (with only moderate conflict),” Selterman continued. “It seems like they genuinely feel like they didn’t do anything wrong, which is remarkable given how highly stigmatized infidelity is. When I described these findings to a class of students one of them said, ‘that’s terrifying!'”
The study makes a valuable contribution to the scientific knowledge about romantic behavior. However, it also has limitations that need to be taken into account. Notably, study participants were users of a dating website focused on facilitating infidelity. They are, thus, a strongly self-selected group. Results on the general population might not be the same.
“The big caveat to consider is just how similar are Ashley Madison users to the general population of cheaters,” Selterman explained. “We just don’t know. It could be that there is an unknown variable that motivated Ashley Madison users to have affairs which doesn’t appear in others who have affairs.”
“But I’m treating this as an open question. It could be that there are no differences between Ashley Madison users and other cheaters. Aside from that, our sample was heavily skewed male (85-90% men), so perhaps the findings wouldn’t generalize as well to women. Given how few participants in our sample were not men, we couldn’t do any statistical comparisons across gender.
“I think one can look at these results from a glass half full or empty perspective,” the researcher added. “On the one hand, people cheat on their partners even when they love them and there’s not a lot of conflict. They feel like their relationship is worth preserving even if they’re not having sex. That doesn’t excuse the behavior. One can make a compelling ethical case that it’s wrong to cheat regardless of the reason. But it doesn’t mean that there is something objectively wrong with relationships in which one member is having an affair.”
The study, “No Remorse: Sexual Infidelity Is Not Clearly Linked with Relationship Satisfaction or Well‑Being in Ashley Madison Users“, was authored by Dylan Selterman, Samantha Joel, and Victoria Dale.
