Why Are Straight Women Less Likely To Forgive Husbands Who Cheat With Other Men?

If you found out your partner is cheating on you, are you going to call the whole thing off? The chances of you doing so depend if a man or a woman. And if your partner screwed around in a straight or gay way.

Straight guys are more likely to stick things out if their girlfriends get it on with a lady; but if it's a heterosexual affair, that's when they're ending things. But straight chicks are more likely to end things if they find out their man snuck away with another dude. That's all according to psychologists Jaime Confer of the University of Texas and Mark Cloud of Lock Haven University, in new research published in Personality and Individual Differences. Overall, men are more likely to find cheating inexcusable.

Alas, it doesn't appear the psychologists quizzed their respondents — some 718 undergraduates at two Pennsylvania public universities, featuring 324 men and 394 women — on whether they are gay. Or how they would react if they were. Miller McCune says respondents "were asked to imagine themselves in a romantic, heterosexual relationship. They then completed a questionnaire in reaction to a specific infidelity scenario." It's unclear whether the respondents were actually heterosexual, or just instructed to imagine they were in such a relationship.

But couple these results with a study that concludes men who earn less than their female partners are more likely to cheat, and we've basically found the most doomed relationships: straight couples where the woman earns more and cheats on her boyfriend with another man.

The question, of course, is Why? Why does the gender of the homewecker matter? Because of jealousy and insecurity, researchers conclude. For straight men, a woman who cheats with another woman apparently doesn't put his masculinity in jeopardy. Meanwhile, a straight man (insert airquotes) who cheats with another man sends the signal to his female partner that she can't give him everything he needs.

article by queerty.com