‘Thrill of Romance’ Lures Some Wives to Cheat, Study Discloses

Women are more likely to cheat on their husbands for the “thrill of romance” than because they are in love with their paramours, according to a survey of 2,000 women released Friday.

At the same time, 44% of single women who are cheating with other women’s husbands say they would “absolutely not” want to marry their married lovers and only 15% had asked the men in question to leave their wives.

About 41% of the married women who responded to the survey said they had cheated on their husbands, according to results published in New Woman magazine.

Of those, 10% said they cheated for love, 10% said it was for lust and 21% said it was for the “thrill of romance.” The remainder had varying reasons or did not know why they sought sex outside of marriage. Only 4% said they had affairs to spite a husbands who were having affairs of their own.

The majority of the married women in the survey were convinced that their husbands remained faithful even while the women were not. Only 19% knew that their husbands had strayed and 65% said their husbands were definitely true to them.

About 34,000 women from across the country filled out a magazine questionnaire on sex, according to the publishers. The survey research firm Thor Data, of New York City, chose and analyzed 2,000 of the questionnaires that were geographically representational.

The majority of respondents were 25 to 49, college educated and employed. About 36% were married, 37% separated or divorced and 25% were single.

According to Catherine Johnson, a psychologist in California who analyzed the survey results for the magazine, women cheat on their husbands because “day-to-day life is hard, and affairs are wonderful stolen moments, sex and passion, time passed in a hidden world.”