Lovers cheat. And sexual infidelity isn't limited to soap opera characters or married couples suffering from the seven-year itch. According to a Stanford researcher, fully two-thirds of college-age men and women have been in a relationship where sexual betrayal has taken place.
In fact, among 18- to 21-year-olds surveyed on several college campuses in Northern California (but not Stanford), 40 percent have cheated and 56 percent said they have been the victim of cheating. "A majority of late-adolescent relationships have been characterized by betrayal," says S. Shirley Feldman, senior research scientist in the division of child and adolescent psychiatry and child development. "Those numbers are high, very high."
How does sexual betrayal affect a young adult's ideas about trust and commitment? Feldman is trying to figure that out. "We've raised a generation where commitment and obligation are blurred by a need to prove oneself popular and sexy," she says. "It raises real concerns for me about how these young people will respond when they are married and the stakes are higher."
Feldman and her co-author, Elizabeth Cauffman of the University of Pittsburgh, described their findings in the Journal of Research on Adolescence. The surveys show that although young men and women betray their lovers at about the same rate, they play by different sets of rules. Men, for example, were more likely than women to condone cheating, but only when the perpetrator was a man. Men and women also differed in their attitudes toward betrayal of a friend versus betrayal of a lover. Male respondents tended to view betraying a lover as more acceptable than betraying a friend's confidence. Women tended to condemn both forms of betrayal, regardless of the gender of the perpetrator. Then again, that didn't keep them from cheating.
