Sexual or Emotional Infidelity: Which Hurts Worse?

A popular myth in our culture maintains that, in matters of intimacy, women tend to grow attached, men tend to be aloof, but both are prone to jealousy. Another stereotypical distinction says that a man feels more threatened and hurt by sexual infidelity, while emotional infidelity is the greater source of pain and threat to a woman.

Evolutionary psychology has sought to explain this phenomenon by interpreting sexual jealousy in terms of the differing pressures that men and women faced in our ancestral past. It pinpoints the division of sex roles as occurring during the Pleistocene era, when Homo sapiens began to organize themselves into hunter-gatherer groups.

This, then, was the stage upon which sexual politics was born - according to Evolutionary psychology. Each sex adopted a mating strategy based upon their biological roles in these primitive organizations. Women began to think of mating as a long-term arrangement, because they had more of a biological connection with their offspring as a result of being directly involved with reproduction (they also knew that any child they carried was theirs, any way you looked at it). Men would be more successful in passing on their genes through progeny (purportedly the great male drive) if they were promiscuous and didn't show too much discrimination in their choice of partners.

Also, men could never be entirely certain that they were the fathers of their mates' children. This, as the theory goes, was the origin of their sexual jealousy - they had to develop means of controlling their "territory", to combat this perpetual sense of unease and disempowerment. Thus it follows that sexual infidelity must be what threatens males in their relationships today. Women, on the other hand, better know their connection with their offspring and are more concerned about being taken care of. They are thus more threatened by anything that might draw their mates' time, attention, and resources - i.e., emotional infidelity.

One problem with this model - and the conclusions drawn from it - is that it doesn't reflect our social situation today. Many women have entered and are continuing to enter the workforce: record numbers, if you compare to previous centuries or even decades. Men don't always perform anything akin to a hunter-gatherer role, either. Some are househusbands, taking care of children while wives work. In either case, there are ways for them to settle questions of their paternity. Interpretations based upon sex-roles in ancient times, then, really don't hold water in the world today. And the opinions expressed by a lot of men and women nowadays don't confirm the stereotypes, either.

Perhaps there's really only one thing that threatens men and women both, when they're involved in relationships: the sense that they've lost, or could stand to lose, what they once had with their partners. Both sexual and emotional infidelities have equal power to trigger this reaction for either sex. One might feel more adverse to one form of betrayal over the other but, in the end, pain is pain.