“Affairs Boost Married Women’s Self-Esteem and Life Satisfaction”, a New Study Out of the Netherlands Reveals.

Researchers from Tilburg University in the Netherlands examined 947 German couples over a 12-year period with 609 being involved in an affair. The reasons for affairs were due to low relationship satisfaction.

The researchers found that women benefited more from engaging in infidelity than their male counterparts. This may be due to validation and the sense of being desired, which “boosted their self-esteem, put a kick in their step and increased life satisfaction”. While the researchers didn’t encourage people to engage in infidelity, they were nonetheless, promoting infidelity as a source of well-being for women.

Evidence in opposition of this comes from a study conducted in 2018 by Evolutionary Psychologist, Dr. Buss and colleagues out of the Norwegian University of Science & Technology. They took a sample of 560 women and 369 men and found that women are more likely to regret casual sexual encounters due to their greater feelings of worry, disgust and experienced pressure. It was found that men receive more physical gratification from sexual encounters, as opposed to women who are more likely to invest more emotion into an encounter.

Cheating is destructive and should not be encouraged, regardless of gender. To posit that cheating leads to higher self-esteem and life satisfaction in women would be to completely misinterpret the true definitions of self-esteem and life satisfaction. A temporary rush received from external validation via sex does not equate to long lasting life satisfaction or genuine self-esteem. In fact, I would make the argument that it has the opposite effect for both genders when done in such destructive ways.

In conclusion, while women may gain immediate satisfaction from engaging in infidelity due to feeling as though they are desired, they are also more likely to regret these sexual encounters when they are casual in nature.