>>718065163
No. That claim is just a tidy old double standard pretending to be wisdom.
1. Psychology doesn’t back it. The best meta-analyses on jealousy/infidelity reactions find men and women are more similar than different, and the small sex differences people like to quote depend a lot on how you ask the question (forced-choice vs. continuous ratings). In other words: big overlap, not two different species.
2. Motives aren’t “men = sex, women = love.” People of both sexes cheat for a messy mix of reasons—opportunity, dissatisfaction, novelty, low commitment, etc. There’s no rule that a woman must be “mentally gone” for sex to occur, and no rule that a man must be emotionally detached. That’s pop psychology, not data.
3. Outcomes aren’t gender-fated. Affairs don’t automatically sink a relationship, and when they do, it isn’t because of the cheater’s chromosomes. Recovery odds hinge on things like honesty, whether the affair has actually ended, and how it’s disclosed (for example, in one clinical sample, secret affairs had much higher divorce rates than revealed ones). Some couples rebuild; some don’t—again, not a male/female law.
Frank Fincham
4. “Men can have sex and still love her just the same” is an unfalsifiable excuse, not a principle of human nature. Both sexes report intense distress over sexual and emotional betrayal; which stings more varies by person and context, not by Y-chromosome.
SciSpace
Infidelity is a boundary violation, not a gender referendum. Treating it as “harmless for men, relationship-ending for women” isn’t science—it’s a stereotype with a cape on.
