ABSTRACT
No one wants to be cheated on, but most folks eagerly listen to gossip about infidelity within the relationships of other people. Our ideas of what “counts” as cheating varies greatly, and we rarely have conversations with our partners about what constitutes infidelity. Gender and sexual orientation play a role in what kinds of infidelity upset us more. Like so much in our world, we gender our own understandings of infidelity in an effort to make sense of the behavior. As a result, much of our commonsense understandings of cheating revolve around the idea that “men are dogs” and women cheat for attention and love. Current research challenges those stereotypes and reveals a much more nuanced framing of infidelity motivations.
