Affairs usually begin with an attraction to someone you know fairly well, someone you spend time with each week — your friends and co-workers.
Surprisingly, these full-blown affairs almost never start at a bar or club. Instead, they usually begin in much more wholesome environments: The workplace. The workplace is where most affairs begin.
The work environment is one of the most common places for affairs to start. In this setting, mistakes can happen and affairs can blossom. Why? Because people spend a large amount of time together and bond over a poor working situation, such as bad management.
Affairs: Why They Happen. There is seldom just one reason for an affair. The state of your relationship, the stresses and pressures of your life (finances, kids, job loss, depression, etc.), and your personal belief systems can all influence your vulnerability to an affair.
Out of the 2,099 people surveyed, 32 percent of them said they had their first affair between the ages of 30 and 39. With the average age of marriage being 28, Mise said "this data shows us that it's not that long after getting married that people first think about straying from their marriage."
First and foremost, the study crunched some numbers and found that the average age women marry at is 29 years old. Next, they found that the average age women cheat is 36.6 years old, which means the spark of fidelity and passion begins to dwindle about six to seven years after the wedding.
Supporting data from the IFS 1990s survey also says that men have always been more inclined to cheat than women. But during this period, older men have the same tendency to cheat as their younger peers. The survey says that infidelity among men peaked at the age of 50 to 59 (31%).
Research from the past two decades shows that between 20 and 25 percent of married men cheat and between 10 and 15 percent of married women cheat, according to professor Nicholas Wolfinger.
Look up the length of affairs on Google and apart from one-or-two-night stands, the consensus is that most run their course in six months to two years.
Cheaters are more likely to start an affair in September than any other month, according to a new survey.
According to a survey of 1,000 people on how affairs get exposed, 39% of the respondents said they were caught when their partner read a message or two on their phones.
Yet, most affairs usually end one of two ways: with divorce or a stronger current relationship.
A 2021 survey by Health Testing Centers polled 441 people and reported: a little over 46% of respondents in a monogamous relationship said they had affairs.
Prevalence: Extramarital Affairs/Infidelities are common. Most estimates indicate that around 60% of men and 45% of women are willing to report that an affair has occurred sometime in their marriage and it suggests that 70% of all marriages experience an affair.
How Many Couples Stay Together After an Affair? In one study, researchers found that with instances of secret infidelity, only about 20% of couples were still married after 5 years. However, for couples who revealed infidelity, that percentage jumped to 57%.
Even those affairs that seem to be going really well often end in a breakup. Affairs don't usually last, and even if a serious or committed relationship comes out of an affair, it is unlikely to be sustainable and thriving for very long.
Infidelity is associated with several personality traits: loneliness, extroversion, anxiety, depression, moodiness, narcissism, openness to new experiences, frequent use of alcohol, a history of child sexual abuse, and knowledge that one or both of one's parents had been unfaithful.
According to WebMD, the “in love” stage of an affair lasts 6 to 18 months, on average. And around 75% of marriages that start as affairs end in divorce. Considering only 5 to 7% of affair relationships lead to marriage, that's a grim statistic for couples hoping their affairs will last forever.
People who cheat are likely impulsive and destructive at decision making. Instead of thinking about you and what happens to the relationship after cheating, they go based on what they want right now. Impulsiveness can be seen in other areas of the relationship, too. So keep an eye out.
My strong opinion is that a person cannot make a wise and thoughtful decision about much of anything when they are having an affair. I am well aware that the euphoric state cannot just be turned off like a bath faucet, so telling a person to end the affair and expect that to happen is a fool's game.
When you put the data together, about 15-20% of married couples cheat. The rate of cheating increases with age for both married men and married women. In a study titled America's Generation Gap in Extramarital Affairs, 20% of older couples noted that they had cheated during their marriage.
The Reasoning
There are many reasons people cheat, but according to Campbell, they usually fall into three categories: individual, relationship, and situational.
First, testosterone may drop in newly paired men who are in committed relationships, and lower testosterone in this situation is associated with being a more devoted partner. Conversely, higher testosterone is more characteristic of men who are keeping an eye out for opportunities to cheat.
Just because they're happy together, doesn't mean they're not sleeping with others. We would all like to believe that affairs are the refuge of the discontented, that only people in unhappy marriages cheat. But “happy,” it turns out, is not a sufficient antidote to affair.