Are women genetically programmed to have affairs

Whether women have affairs for very different reasons than men is a subject that has been long debated over the years. And now researchers are now suggesting that women have naturally evolved to pursue affairs in case they decide to leave their partners.

Scientists at the University of Texas put forward a “mate-switching-hypothesis”, which claims that rather than settling for a happily ever after, women have been programmed to keep testing their relationships and look out for better long-term options.

The study into infidelity challenges the traditional notion that humans are designed for long-term monogamy, and suggests that this evolutionary strategy particularly applies to childless women whose partner can affect their ability to raise offspring.
The senior author of the research, Dr David Buss, told the Sunday Times: "Lifelong monogamy does not characterise the primary mating patterns of humans.

"Breaking up with one partner and mating with another may more accurately characterise the common, perhaps the primary, mating strategy of humans."

For our distant ancestors - few of whom lived past the age of 30 - experimenting to find the most suitable partner to bear children was key to survival, researchers assert.
The study argues that while break-ups have long been characterised as 'failures', in fact, cheating is a mechanism to acquire a new 'evolutionarily advantageous’ partner.
However, despite in depth research on the subject, no study has shown that humans are more likely to live a monogamous or non-monogamous life.

A recent study carried out by a team of researchers at Oxford University claimed to find a link between the length of a person’s ring finger and the likelihood that they would cheat.

However, Professor Robin Dunbar of Oxford University said the differences were “subtle” and “only visible when we look at large groups of people”."Human behaviour is influenced by many factors, such as the environment and life experience, and what happens in the womb might only have a modest effect on something as complex as sexual relationships," he said