New study on cheating says men and women are different. Who knew?

The Science of cheating: It turns out men and women are different (who knew?).

By Nicole Weaver of YourTango.

What’s worse, emotional cheating or physical cheating? My initial reaction is that they are both terrible and my boyfriend better never do it, but then I have to admit that I do have a preference.

If the cheating was physical then I know what his mentality was while doing it. But if it’s an emotional affair there are so many more questions. Do you love her? Do you still love me? Did you want to end things for a while now and have just been looking for a way out?

In my opinion, emotional cheating is the worst of the two evils because so many people’s feelings are involved. Scientists decided to get to the bottom of cheating and it turns out women agree with my opinion while men take the opposite point of view.

According to a new study published in Archives of Sexual Behavior, women are more hurt by emotional cheating while men are more hurt when the cheating is sexual.

The study asked 64,000 people whether they would be more upset by their partner having sex with someone else without falling in love with them, or falling in love with someone else but not having sex with them.

The results shows 54 percent of heterosexual men would rather have their girlfriend fall in love with someone instead of having sex with them, while only 35 percent of women felt the same way.

It looks like one gender has a lot more ego tied up and sex, which isn’t particularly shocking. You may assume that this is a strictly heterosexual thing, but the study found homosexuals of each gender didn’t really differ from heterosexuals.

So what gives? Is this all about men’s pride being tied up into their sexual performance? According to the study, not exactly.

If you look through an evolutionary lens the reason men get much more wound up about sex is because if the woman got pregnant the paternity would be uncertain.Women don’t face this problem so they differ on feelings about physically infidelity. This is the reason for the results, according to the researchers.

Of course, this would makes sense, except for the fact that we can do DNA testing now. I guess still having to go through the process of figuring out paternity is still daunting.

Which do you think is worse? Tell us in the comments below.

This article appears on YourTango.com, and has been republished here with full permission.

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