infidelity

Benjamin Franklin once quipped, "Where there's marriage without love there will be love without marriage." His affairs are well known in American history, however this founding father may have been stating a truth extending to evolutionary history as well. Christopher Ryan (author of the forthcoming Sex at Dawn) offers some thoughts on the role of novelty in the sex lives of our favorite primate. He suggests that men are drawn to variety in sexual partners while women are drawn to variety in technique: When researchers decided to look at this issue to develop a Sexual Boredom Scale, they…

Tom Rees has a blog post, Religion and marital infidelity, which shows that religious attendance, but not belief, correlate with a tendency to not have affairs. I think the critical point here is that religion is a complex phenomenon, and we condense many separate dimensions or parameters into one term. For example, there seems to be a tendency with higher socioeconomic status to be positively associated with religious attendance and affiliation, but negatively associated with religious beliefs.