What is it about?
Young adults in dating relationships made a number of predictions about the likelihood that their current romantic partners would be unfaithful. We compared those predictions to several benchmarks (e.g., the lowest published rate for infidelity in a dating relationship) and investigated whether trust, commitment, and disapproval of infidelity predicted them.
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Why is it important?
People's expectations about whether their dating partners will "stray" may guide how they approach their relationships with these partners (e.g., whether they engage in mate guarding behaviours). Our findings suggest that young adults in dating relationships believe that cheating is common but, nevertheless, do not believe their partners will cheat on them. Future research is needed to explain why this may be so, but one possibility is that such expectations may promote relationship maintenance (if people believed their partners were reasonably likely to cheat, this could compromise their commitment to and satisfaction in their relationships).
Perspectives
For me, one of our most interesting findings was the size of the disparity between what participants expected to be true of their peers' dating relationships (they expected fairly high odds that the average University of Calgary student's partner would cheat on them) and they expected to be true of their own dating relationships. More generally, it is interesting that our results converge with the results of studies conducted with married couples. There are excellent reasons to think that people in dating relationships might expect their partners to stray more than people in marriages would (e.g., commitment tends to be lower in dating than in marital relationships, dating relationships are more easily terminated, etc.), but our findings suggest that people in dating relationships are just as unlikely to believe their partners will cheat on them as married individuals are.
Dr Susan D Boon
University of Calgary Calgary Centre for Clinical Research
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Expectations regarding partner fidelity in dating relationships, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, March 2015, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0265407515574463.
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