Breadwinners are more likely to get cheated on by their economically dependent spouse than those in financially equitable relationships. Why?
This link between dependency and infidelity occurred in both genders but was strongest for men, perhaps because dependent men feel that their masculinity is threatened, said study leader Christin Munsch, a sociologist at the University of Connecticut. “He felt like his partner had all the friends, all the money, all the success, because this person wasn’t working, and his wife was,” Munsch said.
Loyal breadwinners
Munsch gathered data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a nationally representative data set of people who were between 12 and 16 years old as of December 1996. She used data from 2001 to 2011, so that all of the participants in the study were 18 to 32 years old when the data was collected. Munsch ferreted out cheaters based on their answers to two questions: One, whether they’d had sex with a stranger during the past year, and two, whether they’d had more than one sexual partner in the last year. This method isn’t perfect, Munsch said — there might be some cheaters missed because their marriages lasted less than a year, or some people in open relationships unfairly classified as cheaters — but those people are probably rare outliers.
For both men and women, dependency bred infidelity, Munsch reported today (June 1) in the journal American Sociological Review. For example, the women in the study who brought home no income had about a 5 percent chance of cheating in any given year, whereas women who were breadwinners almost never cheated. In earlier studies, female breadwinners report shouldering more chores than their partner at home, compared with women who are dependent or women who are in equal-earner relationships, Munsch said. In the same way, women who hold the breadwinner role may avoid infidelity at all costs.
Benefits of equality
For males, the relationship between money and fidelity looks like a skewed letter U: Men had a higher chance of cheating if they were earning either much more or much less than their partners, whereas those in the middle had a lower chance of being unfaithful.
Munsch controlled for outside factors that could influence cheating, including hours worked per week, race, age, religious attendance and number of children. She also found that neither relationship satisfaction nor conflict could explain the different levels of cheating she observed.
Notably, the long-term design of the survey let Munsch compare the same people to themselves over time. She found that in years when the female half of the couple made more, men were more likely to cheat. When men’s earnings went up relative to their wives, they became less likely to cheat. Similarly, women’s likelihood of committing infidelity changed with their relative earnings. In general, people are uncomfortable in unequal relationships, she said.
The best bet, Munsch said, is to worry less about the numbers flowing into the bank account, and more about cultivating a supportive and noncompetitive relationship. “I think the more important thing to do is marry somebody who is really secure in their masculinity or femininity, and their career,” she said. “We probably shouldn’t marry people where so much of their identity is based on being better than you.”……..
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