Cheater Red Flags

Recent research has confirmed CH wisdom in the matter of which kinds of women are more likely to cheat.

To help, researchers from Florida State University have identified some of the key predictors for infidelity, based on a three-year-long analysis of the marital behaviours of 233 newlyweds.

Ok, great start, half-decent N. But as usual, the rag doesn’t link to the original study, so I don’t know if this is based on self-report answers. If it is, take the results with a flat of salt.

Surprisingly, they found that those who were satisfied with sex in their relationship were more likely to cheat on their partner, possibly because they “felt more positive about sex in general”, the study suggests.

Pomo poopytalk. This is the high libido effect, which in men means the Coolidge Effect.

Age, attractiveness and sexual history all have a crucial part to play, too, they found. In addition to those who were sexually satisfied in their relationship, younger people and less attractive women were also found to be more likely to be unfaithful.

Options = instability (younger people — really, younger women — have more options, so they have more temptations).

What about the seemingly contradictory finding that less attractive women are higher cheat risks? This is explained by the inherent instability of LSMV partnerships. Plain Janes are usually hitched to boring asexual beta mediocrities who are nonetheless reliable emotional tampons and open wallets. Beautiful women may get more attention (and have more tryst options), but they also are more likely to have a relationship with a high value man who gives them both the alpha fux and the beta bux, tamping down their urge to illicitly merge. Given the sexual market reality of men fucking “across and down” (and women dating “across and up”), it’s not surprising that average looking women would have both access to alpha males willing to pump and dump them *and* the motivation to seek out that exciting extracopulatory affair.

This is why, btw, sluts are more often than not less attractive than their peers. Sluts NEED to be slutty to get laid; no man will invest his energy into an unattractive chaste woman. Men WILL invest in chaste hot babes, because the payoff is so much higher.

And ladies, there’s useful info for you too.

The same was not true for men, who were conversely more likely to cheat when their partners were less attractive.

Men have to find that balance between a less attractive but no muss, no fuss woman, and a more attractive but harder-to-get woman. Men who choose the former are more apt to cheat to fulfill their desire for the latter.

The researchers found that men who had a higher number of short-term sexual relationships prior to marriage were less likely to stay faithful whereas women in this same category were less likely to cheat.

Sociosexuality 101. If you like to fuck around, marriage ain’t gonna stop ya. At best, it might slow ya down. As for the second part of that finding, I call bullshit. Every study I’ve seen to date has found the opposite — that women with lotsa cocksas under their felt prior to marriage were a much greater cheating and divorce risk in marriage.

One plausible explanation for the latter finding that isn’t explored by the researchers: women who had racked up many short-term sexual relationships prior to marriage got married later in life, when their SMV was well into its decline, inhibiting their ability to act on their urge to cheat.

The research did, however, find two techniques which could minimise the chances of infidelity occurring; ‘attentional disengagement’, and ‘evaluative devaluation’ of potential romantic partners.

Those with higher levels of attentional disengagement (avoiding thinking about a potential romantic partner’s attractiveness) and evaluative devaluation (downplaying the potential partner’s attractiveness in their mind) were less likely to cheat.

AKA meta-death.

Ironically, ‘evaluative devaluation’ is a fancy term for an Inner Game technique to help men approach hot babes. Mentally priming oneself to view women as interchangeable makes it easier to hit on any one of them, because “another is always right around the corner”. As Outer Game, evaluative devaluation takes the form of DQs (teasing disqualifications of girls for not meeting your standards), negs about girls’ beauty (“nice eyes, especially the left one”), and self-DQs (“hey now, don’t get the wrong idea, you’re not my type”).

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Update

I located a link to the original study. A couple of additional thoughts I have now that I know better what exactly the study concludes about cheating predictors.

Another predictor of infidelity was attractiveness. A person’s own attractiveness was negatively associated with infidelity among women but not men—meaning less attractive women were more likely to have an affair.

Like I wrote above, less attractive women are more likely to have settled way below their ideal, which makes alternative romantic possibilities more enticing. Not so for men. Less attractive men are more likely to be in a relationship with the best looking woman they can get; one, because men aim high when they have to sacrifice their natural male urge to polygyny and two, because women are holistic mate assessors and will choose long-term lovers based on a multitude of male SMV factors that include but are far from limited to his physical looks. What this means in practice is that less attractive men are more *grateful* for their main squeezes, and thus less inclined to risk losing it all on an infidelity.

A partner’s attractiveness was negatively associated with infidelity among men but not women—meaning men were more likely to be unfaithful when their partners were less attractive.

Ok, this is cheating risk assessment based on partner looks rather than one’s own looks. And it comports with CH wisdom: men hitched to hot babes won’t risk losing them to a dalliance (and those men are already getting great sex since male sexual fulfillment is directly proportional to female lover beauty). But men hitched to unattractive women (or to women those men perceive being below the best they can get) will think a lot about cheating with more attractive women.

A person’s history of sex was a predictor of infidelity, too. Men who reported having more short-term sexual partners prior to marriage were more likely to have an affair, while the opposite was true for women.

Another possibility occurred to me that may explain this study’s unintuitive (and stand-alone) finding that women who have more short-term sexual partners prior to marriage were less likely to have a marital affair. It could be simply that these are the lower value women who got pumped and dumped a lot by men, and when they finally found a doting beta to wife them up they were overjoyed at their good fortune and, like the men in LTRs with hot babes, wouldn’t dare risk it all on a momentary illicit fling.