FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
The other day I invited you all to complete a survey regarding your experiences of infidelity. As I mentioned in the post, one of the fine people over at rDrama linked to the survey and invited his fellow users to populate it with troll data. As a precaution I closed the form and intended to delete any responses submitted after the rDrama post was made. However, after a cursory inspection of the responses, I only found one submitted after this time which was an obvious troll response (the person gave their preferred relationship style as "Warlord"), which suggests that not many rDrama users bothered to complete the survey. My apologies to those of you who would have filled out the survey had I not closed it prematurely.
Demographics
(All percentages are rounded to the nearest whole number.)
Excluding the single troll response mentioned above, I received 172 responses.
- 159 respondents (92%) gave their natal sex as male, while 13 (8%) gave it as female.
- More than 80% of respondents listed their age as between 25-44 (46% as 25-34, 36% as 35-44). 22 respondents gave their age as between 45-54. 3 gave their age as <18 – mind the cussin' fellas, there's children present!
- 83% gave their sexual orientation as heterosexual, 12% as bisexual and 3% as homosexual. In the "other" field, exactly 2 users listed their sexual orientation as asexual, one of whom complained "quite frankly im offended the option isn't there": given that only 1% of respondents reported their sexuality as such, I think my reasoning for not listing it as a default choice is abundantly clear.
- 89% of respondents listed their preferred relationship style as monogamous, 5% as open relationship and 4% as polygamous. One respondent described their preferred relationship style as "I'm monogamous, but have no preference if partners are mono or poly", which sounds like polygamy with extra steps, but what do I know.
- 157 (91%) of respondents reported having been in at least one romantic relationship.
- Of these, 137 (87%) of respondents have only been in monogamous relationships. 18 (11%) have been in a mix of monogamous, polygamous and open relationships. 4 (3%) have only been in open or polygamous relationships.
According to this survey, the modal Motte user is a 35-year-old heterosexual male who has only been in monogamous relationships and likes it that way.
Sex differences
As noted above, the number of female respondents was very low (there were more bisexual male respondents than female respondents of any type), meaning the data is bound to be noisier, but for completeness's sake I thought I'd highlight ways that the female respondents differ from the group and build a profile of the modal female Motte user.
- Female respondents skewed younger, with an average age of 32.
- Every female respondent reported having been in at least one romantic relationship – not one femcel to be found!
- There was an almost perfectly even split between heterosexual and bisexual females (but no lesbians, curiously).
- Similarly, female respondents were much more likely than average to describe their preferred relationship style as polygamous, with a whopping 31% describing their preferred relationship style as such. They were also slightly less likely to have only been in monogamous relationships, with 77% reporting having only been in monogamous relationships (including one respondent who described her preferred relationship style as polygamous, curiously).
On the whole, the modal female Motte user doesn't differ that dramatically from the modal Motte user: she's a 32-year-old heterosexual female who has only been in monogamous relationships and likes it that way.
Infidelity (on the receiving end)
On to the juicy stuff. Of respondents who have been in at least one romantic relationship, 69 (44%) report at least one unfaithful partner. The most common type of infidelity was non-penetrative sexual contact (kissing, groping etc.), reported by 37% of respondents. The next-most common type was penetrative sex (27%). Almost as many (26%) reported a partner who had an "emotional affair" or "affair of the heart" (i.e. romantic infidelity without any corresponding sexual infidelity). Only 20% reporting a partner who had cybersex (phone sex, sharing intimate photos etc.) with another person.
A significant number of respondents report repeated infidelity: of the 69 respondents, 30 (44%) report multiple acts of infidelity. (Given answers to other questions, the impression I get is that most such respondents had a single partner who was repeatedly unfaithful, rather than multiple unfaithful partners.)
Holy matrimony seems to offer a significant protection against infidelity: of the 69 respondents who report at least one unfaithful partner, only 13 (17%) report having been cheated on by a spouse.
Demographic observations
- Female respondents were more likely than average (54%) to report at least one unfaithful partner. Among female respondents, the unfaithful partner was equally likely (46%) to have had cybersex with someone else as to have had non-penetrative sexual contact.
- Only one female respondent reported having been cheated on by a female partner.
- By far the most common age at which partners cheated was between the ages of 18-24: of the 73 reported unfaithful partners, 37 of them (51%) were in this age bracket.
- There is an interesting sex difference to be observed here. Just looking at unfaithful female partners, 54% fell into the 18-24 age bracket, falling off to 22% for the 25-34 bracket, 5% for the 35-44 bracket and 2% for the 45-54 bracket. For unfaithful males, however, the picture is quite different: although males are most likely to cheat between the ages of 18-24 (30% of male partners were unfaithful in this bracket), a male aged 25-34 is just as likely to cheat as one aged 35-44 as one aged 45-54. This finding can be interpreted in a variety of ways, but suggests that a partner's propensity to be unfaithful is heavily determined by their sexual desirability (qua Chris Rock, "men are as faithful as their options" – and he would know). As I've noted before, women's desirability to the opposite sex peaks at 20 and declines steeply thereafter, while men's increases from 20 onwards and peaks at 50. There are, of course, other interpretations: perhaps women's sex drives peak between the ages of 18-24 and decline steeply thereafter, maybe their likelihood to be unfaithful at this age is a function of their emotional immaturity. I'm sure people in the comments will propose alternative explanations.
- LGBT people (62% of bisexuals and 67% of gay men*) were more likely than heterosexuals (41%) to report at least one unfaithful partner. Four male respondents report having been cheated on by a male partner. I regret failing to ask about the unfaithful partners' sexuality, to see if this finding bears out the old joke that dating a bisexual entails being twice as paranoid.
- Far and away the biggest thing that jumps out at me is the difference between monogamous respondents vs. poly/open relationship enjoyers. Among people whose preferred relationship style is monogamous and who have been in at least one romantic relationship, 40% report at least one unfaithful partner. But of the 18 respondents whose preferred relationship style is something other than monogamous, 14 of them (78%) report at least one unfaithful partner, nearly double the rate for monogamous respondents. Here I will quote directly from Gemini's analysis of the data: "There is a notable correlation between preferred relationship styles and the reporting of unfaithful behavior... [which] suggests that even in non-traditional structures, boundaries regarding 'knowledge and consent' are frequently crossed."
- However: of the 14 respondents mentioned above, 12 of them (86%) state that they were in monogamous relationships with their partners at the time the partner was unfaithful.
Infidelity (on the committing end)
Now we find out how many of you are dirty, dirty dogs.
Among the 157 respondents who have been in at least one romantic relationship, 53 (34%) report being unfaithful to at least one of their partners. As with those respondents who have been cheated on, the most common type of infidelity respondents reported committing was non-penetrative sexual contact (31%), followed by penetrative sex (22%), cybersex (19%) and emotional affairs (18%).
The majority of unfaithful respondents are repeat offenders: of the 53 who report unfaithfulness, 33 (62%) have been unfaithful more than once.
As with respondents who have been cheated on, marriage seems to offer some protection: of the 53 unfaithful respondents, only 11 (21%) report having been unfaithful to a spouse.
Demographic observations
- Female respondents were more likely than average (62%) to report having been unfaithful to at least one partner, compared to 31% of male respondents who have been in at least one romantic relationship.
- Of the 8 female respondents who report being unfaithful to at least one partner, 2 were unfaithful to a female partner while 6 were unfaithful to a male partner. By contrast, only one male respondent reported being unfaithful to a male partner, with the remainder (44 male respondents) being unfaithful to female partners.
- Curiously, the age pattern among unfaithful respondents is radically different from those who report having been cheated on. The most common age at which respondents reported being unfaithful was the 25-34 bracket, with 21 respondents (38%) of respondents reporting unfaithfulness at this age. This was also the age bracket male respondents were most likely to cheat, whereas for female respondents it was <18 (4 respondents) followed by 25-34 (3 respondents). One female respondent answered this question with the response "Don’t like the word 'unfaithful' but I have never not been so in a relationship". Your guess is as good as mine as to what that's supposed to mean.
- Of the 24 respondents who listed their sexuality as bisexual or homosexual and who have been in at least one romantic relationship, 15 (63%) report being unfaithful at least once. This was more than double the equivalent rate for heterosexual respondents (30%). Dating a bisexual means being twice as paranoid, confirmed.
- Of the 18 respondents who have been in at least one romantic relationship and who listed their preferred relationship style as something other than monogamous, 12 (67%) report being unfaithful at least once. Once again, however, only two of these individuals report having been unfaithful in a polyamorous relationship, with 8 being in monogamous relationships at the time, 1 describing his relationship to his cuckqueaned partner as "it's complicated" (c'mon bro, this isn't Facebook) and the last giving an obnoxious troll answer I probably should have omitted entirely.
The "revenge" hypothesis
Of the 157 respondents who have been in at least one romantic relationship, 34 (22%) have both committed infidelity at least once and had a partner cheat on them. Among female respondents, just under half have both cheated and been cheated on. Among male respondents who have been in at least one romantic relationship, 28 (19%) have both cheated and been cheated on.
Of respondents who have both cheated and cheated upon, the majority (79%) report that, at the time they were unfaithful, they were in the same age bracket or older compared to the partner who was unfaithful to them. Only 15% report being younger at the time they cheated compared to the partner who was unfaithful to them, with the remaining 2 respondents giving ambiguous answers. Assuming that people tend to date within their age brackets, one hypothesis for this finding might be that, after getting cheated on, some respondents seek revenge for this slight against their character: either directly cheating on the partner who cheated on them, or cheating on their subsequent partner.
Recommendations for those seeking to avoid getting cheated on
The single demographic most likely to be unfaithful to their partner is young bisexual women who are interested in polyamory. But I very much doubt you needed me to tell you that.
In infidelity, rehabilative justice seems about as effective as it does anywhere else. As mentioned above, 62% of unfaithful respondents were unfaithful more than once. Among respondents whose partners were unfaithful to them, 44% were unfaithful more than once. A simple average of these two metrics indicates that 53% of unfaithful partners are repeat offenders. If your partner is unfaithful to you once, the odds are slightly better than chance that they will be unfaithful to you again. My recommendation is to cut your losses.
Housekeeping
Anyone looking to see the raw data, DM me.
Ross from "Friends"
One respondent responded to the question regarding non-penetrative sexual contact with the answer "We were on a break".
*Bear in mind that only three respondents listed their sexuality as homosexual, all of whom were male.
UPDATE: My analysis available here.
In yesterday's small-scale questions thread, @cjet79 asks why the song "Mr. Brightside" by The Killers has had such staying power, famously staying in the UK singles charts decades after its initial release. Some explanations (including my own) point to its compositional elements; others focus on its lyrics and subject matter. @100ProofTollBooth argues that it's a very universal and relatable song, as "The experience of infidelity (to some degree) is common to many (most? idk) people."
I'm curious if this is really the case, so I decided to go Aella mode and created a simple survey to find out about people's experiences with infidelity. It consists of a few demographic questions (age, sex, sexual orientation, relationship style), then asks you if you've ever had an unfaithful partner, then asks you if you've ever been unfaithful to a partner.
Completely anonymous, and I've set it up so the form doesn't collect email addresses if you're logged in.
Note: This post contains unmarked spoilers for Hamnet. For the full experience, read it on Substack.
The Oscars are this evening, not that anyone gives a shit anymore.
The smart money says that, having snagged the equivalent award in the BAFTAs and the Golden Globes, Jessie Buckley is a lock for Best Actress for her starring turn in Chloe Zhao’s period drama Hamnet. I went to see it in the cinema last weekend and can attest that such an accolade would be well-deserved: her performance as Agnes Hathaway1 is an intensely physical (even primal) portrayal of a woman overwhelmed by grief. In a way, the excellent performances from Buckley and Paul Mescal are almost better than the material deserves, elevating a screenplay which struck me as somewhat undeveloped and underwritten. I also think we need a temporary moratorium on Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight”, quickly becoming this generation’s “Adagio for Strings” and the go-to soundtrack for movies about mothers grieving the deaths of their children.
For those of you who haven’t seen it, a brief synopsis. William Shakespeare marries Agnes Hathaway, with whom he has three children: a girl named Susanna, and a pair of twins named Hamnet and Judith. William moves to London to pursue his career in the theatre, while the rest of the family stays behind in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of eleven, the already sickly Judith contracts a serious infectious disease which she appears sure to succumb to. Armed with her knowledge of herbal medicines, Agnes makes every effort to treat her illness, while William races home from London. Alas, in a tragic reversal, Judith makes a full recovery, but Hamnet contracts her illness, which proves fatal. Agnes and William are devastated by Hamnet’s death, with Agnes harbouring resentment towards William for his absence. Several years later, William channels his bereavement into his masterpiece, the tragedy of Hamlet. Agnes goes to see it being performed in the Globe theatre, with William portraying the ghost of Hamlet’s father and the title role by an actor who bears an uncanny physical resemblance to Hamnet. The sight of what her son might have looked like as a young man has an immense effect on Agnes, and she smiles for the first time since his death. It’s an affecting tribute to the power of art to move and to heal.
Emerging from the cinema and wiping tears from our eyes, I remarked to my girlfriend that, as moderns, it’s difficult for us to comprehend the kind of relationship that people in the sixteenth century had with death. For most of human history, mothers dying in childbirth was a routine occurrence. In modern Western countries, a child dying in infancy is exceptionally rare, but in the sixteenth century, raising children was a numbers game. Parents would have eight or nine children, fully cognisant that half of them would not live to see their fifth birthday. Even in the most underdeveloped countries in the modern world, the infant mortality rate is a fraction of what it was in Europe in the seventeenth century or earlier.
A graph of child mortality over time. I struggle to envision a society in which literally half of all children would die before turning five. Note that this chart only dates back to 1751, over a hundred and fifty years after the setting of Hamnet, in which I can only imagine things were even worse.
In light of this, William and Agnes’s reactions to the death of their son are unavoidably anachronistic: they find his death just as shocking and unexpected as any modern married couple would. In the last decade of the sixteenth century, there’s simply no way that two adults of this socioeconomic status could have three children without understanding that at least one of them likely would not live to adulthood. The film even sort of acknowledges this when William’s mother points out to Agnes that three of William’s siblings died before the age of ten.
My mother once explained to me that, with infant mortality being such a horrendous commonplace in earlier eras, parents would deliberately avoid forming strong emotional bonds with their children until such time as they could be reasonably confident the child would survive to adulthood. Such an attitude might strike us as cold and heartless, but that’s only because we’re fortunate enough to live in a time and place in which infant mortality is an extreme rarity. In the sixteenth century, parents had operate under the assumption that one of their children might die young, and prepared accordingly.2 It’s a defensive strategy not unlike the emotional distance doctors are encouraged to maintain with their patients: a doctor who emotionally fell apart every time one of his patients died simply would not be able to do his job effectively.
A clip from Scrubs in which Dr. Cox explains how important this is.
This got me thinking about attachment theory.
This is a concept in psychology first proposed by the psychiatrist John Bowlby. He theorised that children’s early experiences with their parents (or lack thereof, in the case of orphans or those taken into foster care) are formative, and govern how children will tend to form emotional attachments with others in the future. The three canonical “attachment styles” are:
- Securely attached: Securely attached people feel comfortable in platonic and romantic relationships, expect their romantic partner to meet their emotional needs, and are more than happy to meet their romantic partner’s emotional needs.
- Insecurely attached – anxious: Anxiously attached people often suffer from low self-esteem, require regular reassurance that their romantic partners still like them, and tend to act out and engage in “protest behaviour” if they feel their needs aren’t being met. This is the classic “needy” or “clingy” woman who complains that her boyfriend doesn’t pay enough attention to her.
- Insecurely attached – avoidant: Avoidant people are put off by emotional intimacy and use detachment strategies to distance themselves from their friends and romantic partners. They often have unrealistic ideas about love and romance, fantasize about an “ideal” partner with whom they will feel no qualms about becoming intimate with, and idealize past romantic partners as a means of maintaining distance between themselves and their current partner. When women complain about men being “commitment-phobic” or “emotionally unavailable”, this is who they’re complaining about.
Amir Levine and Rachel Heller’s book Attached is a fascinating introduction to the concept. A major limitation is that some of the terms are defined in a rather slippery fashion. Levine and Heller start by assuming, as Bowlby did, that one’s attachment style is largely determined by formative childhood experiences. But elsewhere in the book, they do seem to begrudgingly acknowledge that nurture isn’t the only game in town and that people might be genetically prone to one attachment style over another, and that traits such as sex might influence this. (It isn’t hard to imagine how deliberately keeping one’s sexual partners at an emotional remove might be an evolutionarily beneficial strategy – at least, for the sex which does the impregnating. Genghis Khan certainly didn’t spend much time writing sonnets dedicated to the mothers of his children.) They also recognise that one’s attachment style is not set in stone and that a securely attached person can “rub off” on their insecurely attached partner (or vice versa).
Perhaps attachment style is the wrong term. What I’m really driving at is not so much attachment styles (in the sense of one’s “natural” tendencies for how to act in an intimate relationship) but attachment strategies.
As we saw above, even a naturally friendly and gregarious doctor who thinks fondly of his patients nonetheless knows the importance of maintaining a certain emotional distance from them. If he were to react to a patient’s death in the same way he would if a close friend of his died, he would spend half the year on compassionate leave, rendering him unable to help his surviving patients. Any doctor who doesn’t learn this lesson will eventually be selected out of the talent pool, no longer able to shoulder the emotional burden of coping with the deaths of dozens or hundreds of loved ones. Logically, this implies that emotionally avoidant doctors have a major advantage over their securely attached peers: the latter must learn to suppress their natural predisposition to forming emotional bonds with those around them, while the former do that by default.3
Now think about this concept, not in terms of “survival” in the sense of career progression, but actual, life-or-death survival.
Imagine that you were the parent of several small children, and one of them unexpectedly died before the age of five. In all likelihood, you would be emotionally devastated. You would spend many long hours curled up in bed; your friends and family would likely have to chip in to help caring for your other children; you would probably not work for several months. Such an emotional response would be perfectly appropriate in our modern society, when a small child dying before the age of five is exceptionally rare.
But in a more primitive society like that in which William Shakespeare lived, such a reaction would be completely untenable. The concept of taking compassionate leave to process your grief simply didn’t exist (except for the exceptionally wealthy, who didn’t have to work anyway). Your friends and family likely won’t be in a position to look after your children for you: they’re already working twelve-hour days just to put food on the table for their own children, and two or three additional mouths to feed was no small ask. Like it or not, someone has to till the fields and milk those cows, and that someone will have to be you. A parent who responded to the death of their young child by curling up in bed for months would likely starve.
In light of this, parents had little choice but to maintain an emotional distance with their children, so that they could remain relatively functional if the worst were to befall them. Just as with our doctor example above, this is a situation in which the emotionally avoidant have a competitive advantage: unlike their securely attached peers, avoiding forming emotional bonds with others comes naturally to them. A securely attached parent with a close emotional bond to their young child would likely be so devastated by the loss of that child as to be completely unable to function, thereby selecting themselves out of the gene pool. If attachment styles are innate and subject to genetic predisposition, it’s conceivable that emotional avoidance might even have achieved fixation. When one in four (or even one in two) children die before the age of five, a parent forming emotional bonds with their young children simply isn’t a viable strategy.
In our era, in which infant mortality is rare, the selective pressure on parents to be emotionally avoidant is essentially non-existent, and parents are expected to form strong emotional bonds with their children from a very young age (indeed, the state can even take children into care if their parents are deemed emotionally neglectful: imagine how bizarre that statement would sound to someone in the sixteenth century). Given this, one would logically expect emotionally avoidant behaviour to be rare. After all, there is no society in human history in which the risk of being emotionally devastated by the death of a loved one (including a child) has been lower.
But if anything, the opposite seems to be true. Millennials and Gen Z are having far less sex and far fewer romantic relationships than previous generations. Gen Z are the most sexless generation in human history, with 44% of Gen Z men reporting no dating experience at all during their teen years. Derisive jokes about the “male loneliness crisis” hide the fact that what’s really going on is a human loneliness crisis, with 27% of Gen Z reporting having no close friends at all.
In a society in which death is an omnipresent fact of life, emotionally insulating oneself from those around you is a sound strategy. I truly don’t know what to make of people applying the same strategy in a society in which premature death is practically unheard of.
1Shakespeare’s wife was actually named Anne Hathaway, but the film renames her Agnes to avoid confusion with the actress of the same name (who was herself named after the historical Anne Hathaway).
2This has got me thinking about the concept of psychological trauma, which was traditionally defined as the emotional responses exhibited by people after experiencing distressing events outside the realm of normal human experience (examples including rape, bodily injury, natural disasters etc.). This implies that which events are “traumatic” and which aren’t is a fundamentally statistical matter: an event which might be “outside of the realm of normal human experience” in one society might be common in another. The idea that the death of a minor child would qualify as “traumatic” for a modern married couple, but would not for a married couple in the sixteenth century, sounds a bit weird. But it makes a certain amount of intuitive sense. To a greater or lesser extent, all of our emotional responses are shaped by the culture in which we are raised. It’s reasonable to assume that modern parents would feel more emotionally devastated by the death of their child than would parents who grew up in an environment in which children dying was fairly common.
3As entertaining as it was to read, this was one of many major bugbears I had with Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink. In one chapter, he points out that the single most important factor determining whether a patient files a medical malpractice suit against their doctor is not whether they believe he is medically culpable for poor patient outcomes (or even criminally negligent), but simply how much they like him: as a rule, patients don’t sue people they like. I don’t doubt that this is true: my disagreement with Gladwell is that he seems to think this is a point in support of his thesis (namely, the importance of relying on intuition and snap judgement), when to me it could not be a greater indictment thereof. My goal in going to the hospital is to get better: I’m not here to make friends, and certainly not to make friends with my doctor. A competent doctor who does everything in his power to help his patient should not get sued just because of his substandard bedside manner. Conversely, an idiotic doctor who kills patients by the boatload should not get off scot-free just because of his winning smile. I’ll take Dr. House over Patch Adams any day, thank you.
On this day five years ago, Scott made a list of graded predictions for how the next five years would pan out. How did he do?
He correctly predicted that Democrats would win the presidency in 2020. He correctly predicted that the UK would leave the EU and that no other country would vote to leave. He seemed under the impression that Ted Cruz would rise up to take Trump's mantle, but to my mind the only person in the Republican party who has a meaningful chance of opposing Trump is DeSantis. I think a lot of the technological predictions were too optimistic (specifically the bits about space travel and self-driving vehicles) but I don't work in tech and amn't really qualified to comment.
Near the end of the article, in a self-deprecating moment, he predicts with 80% confidence that "Whatever the most important trend of the next five years is, I totally miss it". To my mind, the most significant "trend" (or "event") of the last five years was Covid, and I think he actually did okay on this front: the second-last section of the article is a section on global existential risks:
Global existential risks will hopefully not be a big part of the 2018-2023 period. If they are, it will be because somebody did something incredibly stupid or awful with infectious diseases. Even a small scare with this will provoke a massive response, which will be implemented in a panic and with all the finesse of post-9/11 America determining airport security.
- Bioengineering project kills at least five people: 20%
- …at least five thousand people: 5%
Whether you think those two predictions cames to pass naturally depends where you sit on the lab leak hypothesis.
