CHEATERS

THE

TRUTH

ABOUT

ACCORDING TO RECENT STATISTICS, MORE SOUTH AFRICANS THAN

EVER ARE CHEATING ON THEIR PARTNERS – WITH BOTH MEN AND WOMEN

GUILTY OF STRAYING. AOIFE STUART-MADGE REPORTS

ON WHY INFIDELITY IS MORE COMMON THAN YOU THINK

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LOVE LUST

APRIL 2017 | COSMOPOLITAN 117

From Scott Disick to Kristen Stewart and Jude Law, celebrity cheating scandals

are nothing new. And while the biggest scandals can fi ll tabloid pages for months (we’re looking at you, Tiger Woods and Arnold Schwarzenegger), what happens to the couples when the dust settles? For Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale (who was reportedly cheating with the nanny), it was divorce court; others stick together somehow, with an even stronger marriage as a result (hello, Bill and Hillary).

But it’s not just celebrities who are doing the dirty on their partners: during the 2015 cyberattacks on extramarital dating site Ashley Madison, hackers claimed there are 175 000 cheating spouses in South Africa alone. A previous survey by the website – whose tagline is ‘Life is short. Have an affair’

– found that 62% of South African cheaters are male and 38% female, and that while male cheaters average four affair partners in their lifetime, women chalk up an average of two. A separate study by Victoria Milan, another website dedicated to extramarital affairs, assessed adult women of all ages in various countries and found that the average age for South African women to cheat was 35,8 years (typically 6,8 years after they got married).

Globally, the stats are just as shocking. The number of women having affairs has shot up by 40% in the past two decades, according to recent statistics from the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey, meaning that almost as many women as men now admit to cheating. In fact, the Kinsey Institute in the US reports that a whopping two-thirds of women have thought about hooking up with someone else, while fi gures from the Archives Of Sexual Behavior say that 19% of women (compared to 23% of men) have acted on this impulse.

So what happens to a couple when an affair sends shock waves through their relationship? Three years after her husband’s 15-month affair with a co-worker, Cindy*, 33, is slowly getting her marriage back on track. ‘People underestimate the effect of an affair,’ she says. ‘It shatters your life from the inside out.

The offi ceis the mostlikely place

for a cheater to meet an

affair partner

Recovering from that takes time.’ Since Cindy’s husband confessed (‘At fi rst, he thought he’d fallen in love with her, but deep down he knew it was a mistake’), she has worked through a spectrum of emotions from anger to depression and eventually forgiveness. ‘I had to forgive him for my own sanity, more than anything,’ she says.

Affairs in the workplace are a common occurrence; in fact, the offi ce is the most likely place for a cheating spouse to meet an affair partner. And the leap from fantasising about that cute co-worker to embarking on a full-blown affair is not as big as you might think, says Nina Atwood, relationships expert and author of Temptations Of The Single Girl and Date Like A CEO. ‘Often it’s fantasising about someone in your orbit – the cute guy in the next cubicle at work, an old fl ame you found on Facebook,’ she says. ‘A little fantasy is okay, but when you start obsessing about someone, you’re heading down the wrong path. The rule of thumb is this: if you’re doing something you wouldn’t want your spouse to overhear or witness, it’s outside the marital boundary and therefore wrong.’

But the workplace is not the only hotbed of extramarital activity: the advent of social media has created a whole new generation of cheaters. In fact, researchers at Auburn University at Montgomery

0417_COS_116_119_Life After Cheating.indd 2 2017/03/02 4:17 PM

118 COSMOPOLITAN | APRIL 2017

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believe that opportunity (through the explosion of social media) and means (through greater female fi nancial independence) have given rise to the perfect storm for married women cheaters.

And while the number of female cheaters is rising, it would seem the motivation for female infi delity is also shifting. Staggeringly, sex is now a bigger motivator than emotions for women, with research from the Archives Of Sexual Behavior suggesting that women who didn’t feel sexually compatible with their partner were three times more likely to have an affair than those who did. Those who were emotionally unsatisfi ed were deemed to be 2,6 times more likely to cheat.

As taboo as it is, the number of women who are cheating for sexual rather than emotional reasons is on the up – something that Mina*, 31, can identify with. She cheated on her husband of six years after becoming dissatisfi ed with her love life at home. ‘When I married David*, there were never exactly explosions in the bedroom,’ says Mina. ‘But I told myself I could live without the fi reworks – after all, David was kind, funny, thoughtful and perfect in every other way. So what if our love life wasn’t exactly a-thrill-a-minute? I was spending my life with my best friend and that’s all I cared about.’ But when Mina met Cam* through work, all that changed. ‘Sparks fl ew immediately,’ she says.

‘We fl irted for months before starting an affair on a business trip out of town. We could barely keep our hands off each other. It was so different than anything I’d had with David. It was extremely passionate, fi ery and electrifying. Just looking at him turned me on. I felt like a light had been turned on inside me.’

Inevitably, a few months later, the relationship burnt out almost as quickly as it had started. Racked by guilt, Mina confessed all to David. To her relief, he forgave her; the couple are now in counselling to try to rebuild their relationship.

While David’s magnanimous act may seem unusual, cheating is not the relationship deal-breaker it once was, and it is now commonplace for a relationship to survive an affair. In fact, according to Lisa Penn, owner of a cheating-statistics website, as many as 78% of couples at least attempt to rebuild their relationship after an affair.

‘The damage that happens to a relationship after infi delity is that trust is completely broken,’ says Laurel Wiers, a therapist who specialises in infi delity. ‘Whether or not that relationship can regain trust is different for each couple. How quickly the relationship can be restored often depends on how willing the cheating person is to rebuild the trust. The majority of relationships do survive infi delity, and are better in the end, so cheating is not necessarily a death sentence for the relationship.’

Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale gotdivorced in 2016 aft er the ‘nannygate’

Kourtney Kardashian’s baby daddyScott Disick is a serial cheating off ender

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Rumour has it Tiger Woods cheated onGF Joanna Jagoda with Elin Nordegren

Kristen Stewart was caught stepping outon Robert Pattinson with Snow White AndThe Huntsman director Rupert Sanders

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